By: Deantae Smith
SQUAAAD competes in the Men’s A league division. This season, the team is off to a 2-0 start and currently leading their Wednesday night division and is in good shape to for playoff seeding. The team came together last year as part of the super team Overall 99. Overall 99 is much like a brand and competes in the campus cup, which awards the best team in all of the intramural sports.
The team is a well balanced offensive team. “They just asked me to play ball with them,” Darnelle Jones, a sophomore from New Orleans said. “I would just play basketball in the Payne with these dudes.” Jones is no stranger to organized basketball. While in high school, he was a four-year letterman at Rummel High School. Jones’ past has helped the team score more points per game than in other team in the league. At 57.7 points per game, the team allows nearly as many at 47.5 points per game, which ranks 10th out of 12 teams.
Team captain Ashanti Gray, a sophomore from Carmel, Indiana, and Jones are like night and day. Jones’ aggressive play is something that Gray says is common with players on campus. “I’ve noticed that the guys here, drive more than I do,” Gray added. “I like to shoot, I like to compare my style to Steph Curry.” While Gray has often decided to sit back and let the rest of the team make something. He knows when to intervene when the team is struggling to score.
The intramural playoffs start in the final week of February and will run through the first week of March. SQUAAAD looks to repeat and with them defeating everyone so far this season, they are the obvious target of every other team in the league.