Mar 31, 2018 5 min read

CANONSBURG – There were two meetings Jason Fowlkes sat through when his junior season at Canon-McMillan ended.

One was a individual “debriefing” with Big Macs boys basketball coach Rick Bell to discuss what Fowlkes did well and what parts of his game needed improvement. The other was with the six other Canon-McMillan players inside the classroom at Canon-McMillan where Bell teaches psychology. The latter was a meeting that determined whether Bell returned for his 30th season as a head basketball coach.

“I didn’t want to be bitter, coaching a group of kids that weren’t fully committed and missing on of my son’s games,” Bell said, referring to his son R.J., now a freshman at Geneva College. “After what (my players) said to me, and I could tell they meant it, I knew I was coming back. I’m an all-in guy. I told the guys if they’re all in, then I’m going to be all in with you.”

Fowlkes was all in and then some.

After spending his junior season as the Big Macs’ sixth man, coming off the bench to provide quality minutes and spell those in the starting lineup, Fowlkes moved from the sixth man to the go-to man. He led Canon-McMillan to the most wins in a single season in program history (21) and has been named the Observer-Reporter Boys Basketball Player of the Year.

“I told Jason that he had the potential to be one of the best players that we’ve ever coached,” Bell said of their one-to-one meeting.

Fowlkes took that message to heart.

Devoting his days and nights to working in the gym and improving his game, in a program ran by C-M assistant coach Robert Baker, Fowlkes was determined to turn his limitless athleticism into an all-around basketball player.

“(Coach Bell) doesn’t say those things often, so I knew that he meant i,” Fowlkes said. “It was a lot, but I think that I knew I wanted to be really good. Once you get to that point it doesn’t feel like work anymore. It doesn’t feel like it’s tiring.”

Baker, a former player at South Carolina State who has specialized in player development while on Bell’s coaching staff, drilled Fowlkes while the sounds of Southern Baptist church music echoed inside the Canon-McMillan gymnasium.

Fowlkes didn’t miss the workouts. And when the gym at C-M was locked, Fowlkes practiced the drills Baker taught him wherever he could.

“He was one of the kids that let me use them as a guinea pig,” Baker said about Fowlkes. “Jason is a prime example of a kid who put in the work. He was here every day. The times he couldn’t get in (to the gym), I remember him sending me snaps (on Snapchat) of him outside shooting in the near-dark. He would be outside in the cold just shooting away. That kind of dedication – there aren’t a lot of guys who have that.”

The work started paying off for Fowlkes as he made a game-winning shot in a summer-league game at the Brownson House. It really clicked when when he matched up with Quaker Valley’s Coletrain Washington, a Drexel recruit, in a fall-league game at Montour High School. It was the first time Fowlkes had an in-game dunk.

Fowlkes’ big-play ability came through in the most important games for the Big Macs. In their 12 Section 2-6A games, Fowlkes scored in double figures in all of them. In nine of those games, he was the leading scorer.

“The thing that changed the most was my confidence level,” Fowlkes said. “The hours that I was putting in, it gave me the confidence to transfer it to games. I started to see myself getting better (over the summer). That just drove me. It wasn’t hard for me to wake up, go to camp, go to a summer league, lift weights and play in a game at night. It started to become fun.”

So much fun that he averaged 17.3 points per game and helped the Big Macs to their most successful regular season in decades. Canon-McMillan defeated Seneca Valley in the first round of the WPIAL Class 6A playoffs before losing to Woodland Hills in the quarterfinals despite 18 points and 10 rebounds by Fowlkes. The Canon-McMillan boys were the the only 20-win team in the WPIAL, boys or girls, that didn’t qualify for the state tournament.

“I haven’t told too many kids what I told Jason about being the best,” Bell said of his 30-year coaching career. “And I don’t say things like that if I don’t mean it. If you give the kid an unrealistic expectation, then you are setting them up to fail. I also thought I got to know Jason well enough that he needed a push.

“I don’t know a lot about a lot. But I do know when I can look at a kid and see potential. I remember plays he made during the season that would me turn to the coaches and say, ‘we didn’t teach him that.’ He has some of the things that you just can’t teach.”