Sonny Escalante
Sonny Escalante could serve as mascot for the National Hockey League’s Philadelphia Flyers.
He’s just that Gritty — a regular sandpaper scrapbook.
A four-year member of the Imperial varsity boys’ basketball squad, Escalante is no stranger to adversity, but there apparently hasn’t been a pothole made that can jar him off his chosen path.
He’s been an integral member of an extensive retooling effort for Tiger basketball, which went 2-21 the season before he arrived and finally graduated into the land of the winning with a 19-10 record this year.
And while the 2018-19 season and Escalante’s high school hoops career ended on a slightly down note in Tuesday’s loss to one-seed Southwest San Diego in the semifinal round of the CIF-SDS Division IV playoffs, he seems to have few regrets, instead taking pride in his team’s accomplishments, hoping that perhaps they signal the start of a new era for the program.
“It feels good to set the tone for the younger kids coming up,” he says, “Maybe they’ll be able to continue what we started.”
This year’s Tigers had an “everybody eats” mentality, prizing unselfish ball-movement and dedicated defense, eschewing isolation play and running on the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Escalante did his best to ensure that everybody was on board, feeling that in “the last three years, with all that losing … we had the talent we needed to win,” but that the team wasn’t cohering. He embraced a leadership role.
“Being there the longest, I know how everything goes and Coach knows that he can … go off on me and I won’t get down on myself. I take what he says and listen to it and filter it out to the team,” he said. “[This year], we finally bought in to what coach was saying and started playing as a team, and that’s when we started winning.”
But even with the team humming like never before, it wasn’t all gravy for Escalante.
Early on in the season he suffered a double-dislocation and possible fracture in the pinky of his right (shooting) hand, an injury which lingered throughout the season.
It wasn’t Escalante’s first brush with injury — he had previously messed up his MCL twice playing football, necessitating physical therapy, and he displays a somewhat macabre sense humor about it offering to show a picture of it “bent the wrong way.”
When given treatment options, he had only one concern
“Can I go back to playing?”
He did, without missing much time at all, playing with his “whole hand taped up” for a while before discarding the support in a mid-season game against O’Farrell Charter after having trouble with his dribble.
He wasn’t pain-free, feeling a “tingle or a shock when I catch the ball or do anything,” but he willed himself through it, saying, “It’s my senior year, I had to play.”
The Tigers lost that game against O’Farrell but won the rematch in the Division IV quarterfinals last week.
Escalante was Imperial’s leading scorer with 15 points.
It was a vindication of the toughness he displayed throughout the season and the high-point of a playoff run he’ll never forget.