TWO BLACKWELLS HOW MARKUS AND MOSES BECAME LINCOLN LEGENDS
Mosii Blackwell took his twin sons to the now-defunct Joe Dumars Fieldhouse every day to practice basketball starting when they were five years old. The boys, Markus and Moses Blackwell, didn’t always like it.
“Every day my dad used to pick us up from school, go to the gym,” Moses said. “To be honest, at first I didn’t really want to play basketball because, to be honest, he was like, real hard on us. He kind of forced it on me.”
Fast forward 12 years, several NCAA Division I offers and one state championship later, and their tune has changed.
“In the long run it helped — I didn’t really want to play — but in the long run, this is where it got us,” Moses said. “I’m happy I stayed the course, and I’m happy I stayed.”
On Friday, March 22, the twins had just finished signing autographs for young boys and girls in the Van Dyke Public Schools district. The session came after a parade through the snowy streets of Warren to celebrate their recent MHSAA Division 2 state championship win. Markus and Moses were the two leaders for the team in the title game, in which they defeated Grand Rapids Christian 53-39 to get Lincoln’s first-ever boys basketball state championship.
In fact, if it weren’t for Mosii, the Abes might still be ringless.
“When they were coming out of middle school, they were sought out by a lot of schools,” said Wydell Henry, Lincoln’s head coach.
“I went to the dad and said, look, just give me a chance to coach them. They got an opportunity to play here. There’s no one in front of them. I was graduating two seniors, good guards, and I said they could come in right now. If you just give me the chance to coach them, I think we can get something done. Their mom and dad, they believed in me, they
sent them over here, and it’s working out so far.”
Said Markus: “I didn’t really know the school (Lincoln) to be honest. My dad told me what it was. I came here a few times before I was enrolled in the school. I came and (saw) the school. I thought it was a pretty nice school. My dad, he thought it would be a pretty nice fit for me and my brother. That’s what we did.”
The twins have been starting ever since they were freshmen. In his junior year, the 6-foot-2 Markus averaged 22 points, four assists and three rebounds per game.
Moses, standing at a much smaller 5-foot-9, scored 11 points per game and dished out an average of 10 assists on a nightly basis.
That, along with his tendency to speak his mind, has helped earn the smaller Blackwell a big responsibility.
“This year, man, he (Moses) was my coach on the floor,” Henry said. “He was my floor general. He really took care of the ball and did what it took to win.”
It wasn’t always that way — Moses had what Henry called a “little man complex” that had him talking back and being combative. It took a heart-crushing loss to Michigan Collegiate in the 2023 postseason for Moses to truly lock in. Now, he still has his feistiness, but he can channel that against the other team.
“I was young,” Moses said. “I thought I’d learned everything. But I figured out at the end, we lost the district to Michigan Collegiate, I figured out I just got to listen. I sat down, I told myself I’m going to start listening. I’m going to be more coachable, I’m going to be a leader on the court. My grades got good — well, I always got good grades — I kept my grades up. It helped me in the long run.”
Markus is much more of a silent killer type. He’s quiet off the floor — a man of few words compared to his twin — but his game is deafening when he starts to get in the zone. In the last four games of the season, he scored 24 points in
Markus and Moses were the two leaders for the team in the title game, in which they defeated Grand Rapids Christian 53-39 to get Lincoln’s first-ever boys basketball state championship.