Serra’s Mahasin named top player
High school football: Junior running back led Padres to 5-0 season.
Two highlights bookended Hassan Mahasin’s season and proved why the Serra High School junior all-purpose back is the Bay Area News Group player of the year for the spring 2021 football season.
Mahasin hauled in a torquing touchdown catch on Serra’s first play of the season from scrimmage against Valley Christian, then capped off the Padres’ final win of a 5-0 campaign with an over-the-shoulder, fingertip grab for a 70-yard touchdown. He lived up to the nickname.
With 10 touchdowns and 745 total yards in five games, “The Missile” was the most explosive player on the field in the Bay Area this spring. As a junior, Mahasin will have a chance in the fall at the first repeat crown since Najee Harris — a first-round pick in last week’s NFL draft — was named East Bay player of the year in his junior and senior seasons at Antioch.
“Hassan is, like, the No. 1 guy we’ve ever had at leading by example,” Serra coach Patrick Walsh said. “It shouldn’t surprise anyone when he’s scoring multiple touchdowns in a game. He earns it and deserves it. It’s scary to believe he could be even stronger and faster as a senior.”
The weekly routine between Hassan and his father, Jihad, that began when he was 5 years old paid off when the COVID-19 pandemic took away competitive football for 15 months.
Every Sunday for the past decade, Jihad has driven them to a local park, where, at first, Jihad would teach his son the basics of football: How to take a handoff, to catch, to tackle. Over the past summer though, Serra quarterback Dominique Lampkin and often other teammates began to join and Hassan would run up to 100 routes each workout, Jihad said.
“I tell him if you want to play on Sundays, you have to practice on Sundays,” Jihad said. “That was our little routine; after the games on Saturday, I’d tell him everything he was doing wrong on Sunday. By the time the next year came, he just took off.”
That, in his second year of playing football, is when Mahasin earned “The Missile” nickname, Jihad said, and it’s stuck ever since.
He can still remember the play. “We were at a game and Hassan took the ball up the middle,” Jihad said. “It was like somebody had been shot out of a cannon or a slingshot. It was like all the players were running in slow motion and he was on fast forward. I was like, ‘That’s a 65-pound missile right there’ and ever since then all the coaches started calling him ‘The Missile.’”
With Mahasin, everybody has those plays in their mind. The plays like the one, as a sophomore in the 2019 state championship game that made Walsh say, “Whoa, we’ve got something really special here.”
“Obviously they were a great team and little Hassan the sophomore took a short bubble route and turned it into about a 15-yard gain when about six or seven Corona del Mar guys bounced off of him,” Walsh said. “I was like, ‘Damn, this guy’s strong!’ Because you don’t look at him and think he’s powerful. But he is strong and powerful.”
Mahasin said he added another 20 pounds of muscle in his offseason workouts.
The uncertainty of the pandemic took a toll on Mahasin, Jihad said, but he kept working through it, nonetheless. Hassan said his goal was an undefeated season and a state championship.
“We got to go undefeated but we didn’t get the state championship because of COVID,” Hassan said. “Not being able to play for 15 months straight, it really makes you think about how much you love football.”
Add Bay Area News Group player of the year to the impressive junior’s consolation prize.
Players of the Year, past decade
2019 — Shamarr Garrett, De La Salle 2018 — Henry To’oto’o, De La Salle
2017 — TaRiq Bracy, Milpitas 2016 — Najee Harris, Antioch (East Bay) / Leki Nunn, Serra (South Bay/Peninsula)
2015 — Najee Harris, Antioch (East Bay) / Rashaan Fontenette, Oak Grove (South Bay/Peninsula)
2014 — Antoine Custer, De La Salle (East Bay) / Ben Burr-Kirven, Sacred Heart Prep (South Bay/Peninsula)
2013 — Adarius Pickett, El Cerrito (East Bay) / Ben Burr-Kirven, Sacred Heart Prep (South Bay/ Peninsula)
2012 — Warren Miles Long, James Logan (East Bay) / Kenneth Olugbode, Bellarmine (South Bay/Peninsula)
2011 — Olito Thompson, Concord (East Bay) / Travis McHugh, Bellarmine (South Bay/Peninsula)
2010 — Dylan Wynn, De La Salle (East Bay) / Christoph Bono, Palo Alto (South Bay/Peninsula)