Most seven-year-old basketball players are not likely to offer strategic hoops advice to their coaches.
But most basketball players aren’t like Michael Ganson.
“He would go home and think about the games, and what we did and what we could do, and he would create little plays that we could try to execute in games,” says Dan Wood, recalling the days he coached Ganson in Guelph when Ganson was about seven years old.
“We would look at them and go over them. He had them all drawn up – pen and paper.”
Some seven or eight years later, what Ganson is drawing is loads of eyes and attention to the basketball court with his play.
The Grade 10 student is scoring a bucket-load of points for the Bishop Macdonell Celtics in the District 10 junior boys basketball league.
The 5-foot-10ish guard is averaging an almost unheard of 29.5 points a game for the Celtics.
(That’s 29.5 points in 32-minute games – high school tilts are made up of eight-minute quarters.)
Ganson, who plays club ball for the Etobicoke Thunder Elite U16 team, already has some U.S. prep schools looking at him.
He is back in town and playing local high school hoops after spending his Grade 9 school year in Vaughan and playing ball at Vaughan Secondary School.
Growing up, Ganson’s home had a full-sized, 10-foot-high indoor basketball net. Eighteen-foot-high ceilings allowed him to shoot hoops year-round at home.
Eventually, things started to get pretty serious for him.
“I’d just practice every day – put shots up,” says Ganson.
Today, he figures he takes about 500 shots a day. And it never gets boring.
“No, I love playing basketball,” he says.
Ganson wears Michael Jordan’s No. 23 for the Celtics, who are 5-7 on the season. He’s scored 40-plus points three times in his 11 games for Bishop Mac this season.
“He’s aggressive, he gets to the hoop, he follows his shots and is a great rebounder,” says Dennis Morris, Bishop Mac coach. “He’s a good shooter and dribbler. And he wants the ball.”
Asked to describe his game, Ganson says: “I just like to attack the basket, I see an open shot and I take it. I like my mid-range game.”
The Thunder Elite web page says Ganson is “at the top of the heap when discussing the best point guards in the province.”
Because he spent his Grade 9 year at Vaughan, Ganson didn’t necessarily know all of his new Bishop Mac teammates when he returned to town. But he was still a slam dunk when it came time for the team to pick a captain.
“The boys picked the captain. I said, ‘Boys, give me your secret ballot.’ It wasn’t close, they knew,” says Morris, who describes Ganson as a quiet, highly coachable talent who makes great attempts to get everyone involved in the game.
Given his point-scoring prowess, Ganson is jokingly asked if he ever passes the ball.
“Yeah,” he says with a laugh. “I do. My teammates just find me when I’m open, so I just finish it.”
For now, Ganson’s hoops hope is to land with an NCAA team down the road. He admits that being looked at by prep schools is “kind of scary, but I’ve adapted.”
Wood thinks back to those early years, of Ganson being a gaffer and drawing up plays for the coach.
“I loved it,” says Wood, who says playmaking is Ganson’s most natural skill.
“Basketball is obviously a highly skilled game. But when you can add what we call basketball intelligence . . . when you have someone, a kid like Michael, who has a high basketball intelligence and can combine that with a skill set, then you get the best of both worlds.”
Asked what he thinks the future might hold for Ganson, Wood says: “If he continues to grow and to blossom as he has previously, he’ll have all sorts of opportunities.”
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