Syracuse, N.Y. ― Messiah Holliman took off his shoes and stomped out of the gym in the middle of practice.
He was tired of teammates who skipped practice and showed up late. He was tired of bad passes and lazy running. He was tired of lectures from coaches and the daily hurdles that piled up and stopped the OnTech boys basketball team from improving.
“Man, ya’ll play too much,” Holliman said, storming into the hallway in his socks.
He doesn’t like this about himself, the urge to walk away when things go bad. But he’s learned that leaving is a better way to handle life’s obstacles than blowing up.
His favorite sentence, he said, is “Man, I’m done with this.”
Life has given him plenty of reasons to quit: medical problems, homelessness, academic struggles, depression.
Holliman and his mom, who have taken care of each other through it all, hoped this basketball team would be something positive.
She hoped her son would experience joy. That he would grow. And that he would show he could finish what he started.
A lot of the Gray Wolves had that goal — and faced similar obstacles — in the first full season of high school basketball for OnTech Charter, a Syracuse school opened in 2018 that promises individual attention for some of the city’s poorest students.
OnTech gave Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard extensive access to chronicle the school’s first full year of basketball and its effort to teach life lessons through sports.
Members of the team grappled with depression, anxiety, a lack of confidence and emotional control. Some struggled to find consistent food and transportation. Most came from families where money was tight. Their head coach, a former Syracuse men’s basketball player, was removed in the middle of the year. A classmate was killed during the season.
All of that stress was packed into a tight, combustible unit.
Holliman, a junior, was the team’s top scorer and a tone-setter during an up-and-down experience.
During good times, his happiness radiates. He is quick to dance on bony legs, fast to flash a braces-filled smile that practically covers his face. When he is playing well, he bounces up the floor. Even his steps seem joyous.
Holliman has three tattoos. He has his mother’s name on his forearm, a flock of bats on his wrist and Japanese writing running down the side of his neck.
He says it reads “Self Love.”
It is a reminder that many of the struggles that threaten to hold him back are not his creation.
“You get so used to just losing and losing and losing,” Holliman said. “You don’t expect nothing good to happen. And once you get that positive thing going, you don’t know how to deal with it. You just think it’s going to last for a day or 30 seconds. And then you’re going to go right back to losing.”
Could this year at OnTech be different? Could Holliman and his teammates find a way to break that cycle? Could they finish what they started?
Starting from the bottom
OnTech is housed in the former St. Brigid’s church and school on Tipp Hill. The building has been repurposed into a small high school where founder Ellen Eagen and the OnTech staff have covered the walls with colorful messages that remind students “mistakes are proof you are trying” and “don’t let failure be an ending, make it a beginning.”
The school’s gymnasium, though, was not built for high school bodies.
The ceiling is so low some players can’t practice 3-point shots. Metal lockers line the court so tightly that hustle is punished with an inevitable crash.
The school opened a weight room late in the season. It consists of a handful of machines and free weights in an old storage closet.
Because of those limitations, OnTech usually practiced at the Tipp Hill Community Center, buying two-hour blocks of time in a facility that hosts the Bryant & Stratton basketball teams, club field hockey practices and adult pickleball leagues.
The community center’s heat was broken for much of the winter. Space heaters were placed in the corners.
Head coach Mookie Jones, a former Syracuse University player, occasionally swept the courts before practice. The floor was so slippery some days that OnTech players went skidding if they tried to play at full speed.
The team had no locker room or showers. Players changed in a small, bare meeting room.
Despite that, 20 students joined the boys basketball team for its first week of practice. The athletes were from different parts of the city. The largest number came from the Southside, where economic segregation and generational poverty shape everyday life.
Some were pulled from the school’s hallways by Jones. Some were recruited because the team badly needed their size. Others were encouraged to play because school leaders knew they needed something positive to fill their free time.
Some could barely make a layup when the season began. Most had never played organized sports before OnTech.
Searching for stability
Tyrisa Durham, 47, grew up on Syracuse’s Southside. She had her first child at 15. She graduated high school a year later and earned a degree from Onondaga Community College at 18 years old.
Still, she found herself in need of a fresh start.
Years before he stormed out of the Tipp Hill gym, she took Holliman, the youngest of three children, and moved to Clarksville, Tennessee. He was 5 years old.
After arriving in Tennessee, Durham’s plan to share housing with a friend fell through. A fire forced her out of another home. Without family to fall back on, she struggled to find a consistent place for her and Holliman to live.
They were homeless, relying on six-month stints in Salvation Army shelter housing. They had to leave the shelter each morning by 6. They could return at 6 p.m. For 12 hours each day, they had no place of their own.
Durham tried to make the best of it. They lived miles away from Holliman’s elementary school. On walks to school they sang songs and played games like “red light, green light.” Holliman said she made it feel like they were on an adventure.
In the afternoons they played lengthy games of air hockey at a bowling alley across the street from the shelter. In between, Durham looked for work.
Holliman doesn’t remember their life in Tennessee being bad. The hardest part, he said, was seeing how sad it made his mom.
A season with the OnTech boys basketball team in Syracuse
Finding a place to live has remained a constant stress. Since returning to Central New York nine years ago, they have lived in at least six different places.
They have been forced out of two apartments because of bed bugs.
Four years ago, Holliman was in the Jamesville-DeWitt district, in the middle of his best academic experience. But the family had a chance to move into Durham’s childhood home on the Southside. To take it, he’d have to leave J-D. She gave him a voice in the decision.
Every family, he said, deserves to have a home.
“It felt like every time we were at a good place, when he started doing well in school, having good support around him and good peer relationships, everything in our world would fall apart,” Durham said.
“He’s had it hard.”
Early optimism
The team earned the first varsity win in school history on Dec. 7 in its second game — beating Otselic Valley, a rural school with about 100 high school students.
Jones, who hoped to use examples from his own turbulent college basketball career to educate the players, called the win a milestone to cherish. The next day, two starters skipped practice.
Many players had little experience playing organized sports. They didn’t want to burden their parents, most said. They never had the chance to experience the dedication required to be part of a team or the communication skills needed to be a good teammate.
They wanted to learn, though.
The team ended most practices by huddling and chanting “1-2-3 family” and “4-5-6 brotherhood.”
The Gray Wolves remained optimistic after their third game, a three-point loss to Madison in which they squandered a fourth-quarter lead.
Holliman was visibly frustrated in the locker room afterward. Messiah Miller, a senior, plopped next to him on a bench and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He tried to comfort him enough so that Holliman and the rest of the team could focus on what the coaches were saying.
Jones and RJ Garcea, his first-year assistant and JV coach, were optimistic.
Jones noted that Madison had championship banners on its walls, symbols of an established program with a veteran coach and a history of success.
“We haven’t even put in any plays yet,” Garcea told them.
More than basketball
There was a reason OnTech was behind. Nearly every day, it seemed, at least one member of the team showed up late or skipped practice. Jones responded with lectures, telling them about the struggles they would face as adults if those habits continued.
Jones often spent the first 10 minutes of practice talking about the importance of reversing bad attitudes, listening to instructions, being on time and letting the coaching staff know if they were going to be absent.
He said some players carried the anger of their personal lives into practice. He related.
Others were moody or lacked energy because they’d gone hungry. He couldn’t blame them.
He worried that if members of the team weren’t in the gym for practice they’d be “running the streets.” As long as they were with him, he reasoned, they were safe for a couple of hours and had an opportunity to grow.
This was not a hypothetical concern.
Two players who played part of the season with OnTech wound up being arrested. Neither attended practice regularly.
On Dec. 12, just five days after the team’s first win, an OnTech student named Karon Works was shot and killed in Onondaga Park.
The school closed for a day to allow students time to process the death. When the team returned to practice, Jones huddled the group and asked how many of them were grieving.
They were silent. One player reluctantly raised his hand. The rest looked at the floor, shuffled their feet or stared straight ahead.
Weeks later, in private conversations, they acknowledged the killing had hurt them.
Works’ name had been the last one on a list of students who had expressed interest in playing on the team.
He never attended a practice. Works died at 15 years old.
Change in direction
By early January, something needed to change. Jones and Garcea decided to merge their two 10-player teams into one. They focused their energy on the players who showed they wanted to be there.
An argument between teammates boiled over, prompting angry family members to show up at practice. Tempers cooled before anything serious happened, but the school began sending a security guard.
The roster dwindled to 10.
Those leaving had their reasons: Works’ death made basketball feel trivial. Without a JV team, some wouldn’t play much. Some didn’t think the team could win. Jones kicked one player off the team. At least one parent complained to school officials about the coach.
With morale dropping and issues accumulating, school leaders replaced Jones with Garcea on Jan. 13, saying they wanted to see if new leadership could change the direction of the team.
The Gray Wolves were called into a meeting that morning hosted by Rick Linzy, who had just been hired as the school’s new director of community and culture.
The reaction was mixed. Some were relieved to have a new voice and a fresh start. The player who had been thrown off the team returned.
Others were wounded by the departure of a trusted mentor.
On the night Jones was replaced, senior Jahsir Alston declined to play, choosing to sit at the scorer’s table in a display of loyalty to Jones.
Another player, Kzar Greene, regularly the first to arrive and the team’s most dependable member, showed up late. He was in tears in the locker room before tipoff.
Neither player quit.
In the midst of that turmoil, the Gray Wolves won their final game under Jones. They won their first two games under Garcea. Their record improved to 4-5.
‘I’m so tired of adversity’
Garcea, a pizza delivery driver with experience coaching as an assistant at Corcoran High School and at the AAU level, took on the task of trying to shift the season’s trajectory while still building trust with players.
Before one game, he listed a starting lineup on the team’s whiteboard that made no strategic sense.
He told the players why: “It’s the five who were here (on time).”
When the players left candy and food wrappers on the floor of its makeshift locker room, he praised their performance but made them run sprints.
He wrote down a motivational quote before each game, leaning on the wisdom of Vince Lombardi and John Wooden. He rewarded players who attended film sessions with pizza and wings.
They visited Green Lakes State Park, where he talked about the importance of respecting the Earth and why having a peaceful space is critical for mental health.
Many players had never been to the park 15 minutes outside of the city.
Hours after spending the day at Green Lakes, OnTech lost to LaFayette, falling to 4-7. It was the team’s second-straight loss. It wouldn’t win again for nearly a month.
Garcea insisted success waited on the other side. If the team could just field a full squad, could just hold a two-hour practice without distractions, could just stay focused, the season would eventually turn.
OnTech struggled to see through the losses.
“Please don’t give us another pity speech,” one player instructed after a loss.
“Adversity, adversity,” another shouted on a different night. “I’m so fucking tired of adversity.”
‘Brothers fight’
Chris White grew up attending Southside Academy, another charter school in the city. He performed well in small classes and liked that OnTech offered a similar environment.
White, a junior, didn’t play organized sports until high school. Jones recruited him in the school hallways.
Finding reliable transportation home from practices and games was a challenge. His mother, he said, often works evenings at a dollar store.
White was reluctant to ask anyone for help. Jones recognized it and ordered Ubers to get White home after practice. Garcea took up the duty and drove him himself.
They were rewarded with a diligent player.
White looked after other teammates and often responded to instructions by repeating, “Yes, coach,” a habit he picked up from high school football. He did thankless work setting screens and rebounding.
In late January, about halfway through OnTech’s losing streak, the Gray Wolves had a chance to pull out a win in a tight game against LaFayette.
The Gray Wolves had a habit of falling apart. They had no experience to fall back on when games got tight. They struggled to run set plays and to support each other in stressful moments.
Garcea put the ball in Holliman’s hands. White was supposed to set a screen. He set it incorrectly, and OnTech was forced to call a timeout. The same thing happened after the break.
Holliman launched a contested 3-pointer. It missed badly. Another loss. Four straight.
In the locker room, Holliman snapped at White for making him look like a ball hog.
White barked back. White, despite a season of evidence saying he was a committed teammate, said he didn’t care about any of it. Not about the loss. Or what Holliman had to say. Or about the team. He said he was ready for football season.
White said he was standing up for himself and the team’s other two centers. They felt like they were always blamed for losses.
Holliman told his teammate that if he didn’t care about the team, then he should quit.
Most of the team had considered it at some point. Half of the group that started the season already had.
But 10 of them carried on, including the two who left the locker room angry that night.
Holliman got over the fight quickly. He’d snapped. He didn’t mean it. He moved on.
White stewed. He texted Holliman, then spoke to him the next day at school. They talked through it. They buried their resentment.
“Brothers fight,” White said.
‘I could just be a statistic’
The basketball court is a space where things come easy for Holliman. It’s one of the reasons his mother loves watching him play.
“He gets to be a kid,” she said.
Work in the classroom doesn’t come as easily.
Holliman suffered severe seizures from childhood epilepsy. The disease frequently makes school more challenging.
He’s been diagnosed with combined-type ADHD. He tapped his pencil during class. He fidgeted with school supplies and dropped them on the floor. He struggled to sit still and focus, and sometimes blurted out answers and acted impulsively.
Even now, he begins to dance and shift his weight when conversations start to drag.
Before coming to OnTech, Holliman said, teachers treated him like he was a troublemaker. They doubted whether he could handle normal academic work. They wanted to put him on an independent education plan, his mother said.
Holliman knew he was smart enough to do the work. He wanted to be treated like a normal student.
Four years ago, Holliman said, it became even harder for him to focus.
His paternal grandmother, who he would visit in Syracuse as a refuge during the difficult summers in Tennessee, died. He had enjoyed attending church with her. He still wears her picture in a chain around his neck.
Shortly after her death, he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
His mother said she has been diagnosed with PTSD following their struggles to find housing. She wonders if Holliman’s diagnoses are the result of having a childhood full of sadness and stress.
Holliman said his family has experienced so many hard times that he often wonders if good ones will ever come.
When he thinks this way, he becomes quiet and withdrawn. People ask him why he’s moody or angry. He said he feels misunderstood.
“Sometimes I just don’t have a lot to say,” Holliman said. “I think about where I will be in the next few years. I don’t know where I will be. I don’t know if I could be in school. I could just be a statistic. ... I just don’t know.”
Late in the season, Holliman, struggling with depression, fell behind in classes. He wasn’t the only one.
School officials held a team meeting Jan. 29. Too many of the Gray Wolves weren’t making the grade academically. If they didn’t make up late work, school administrators threatened to cancel the rest of the season.
Players were given a deadline to finish their work by the end of the week. The team was scheduled to play that Friday.
Basketball gave Holliman a reason to try to catch up. White tried to help him with his schoolwork.
When he arrived at the gym for the game, Holliman believed he had taken care of his obligations. Then he was told one of his teachers hadn’t updated his grade.
The school offered a compromise.
Holliman had to sit out the first half since his grade issues hadn’t actually been resolved by the deadline. But the school offered to let him play in the second half because it respected his effort.
For Holliman, this was another moment when it felt like the world was against him, another sign he’d never get a fair shake.
He dapped up his teammates. He did what he often does. He walked out.
He went home and blocked Garcea’s phone number.
Without him, OnTech delivered one of its best halves of the season. But as pressure built in the fourth quarter, the Gray Wolves collapsed again. Holliman might have made the difference.
Instead, OnTech’s losing streak grew to six.
“When I left, I was thinking I won’t be no help in a bad mood,” Holliman said. “I didn’t want to bring that bad mood, so I figured I might as well go. I kind of regret it, but at the same time, I don’t. I’d like to say I wouldn’t do it again.”
Holliman considered calling it a season. He’d had some fun. The team was losing. There wasn’t much time left.
Garcea and Eagan urged him to come back.
The biggest influence, Holliman said, was his teammate. White told Holliman the team needed him.
He told him brothers stick together.
Lessons and consequences
With three players considering leaving the team during the final weeks of the season, the adults in the OnTech community delivered a refrain they say is common at the school.
If the players quit the team, they’d be quitting on themselves.
Security guards provided pep talks at halftime. Jones, despite no longer being the coach, reached out to the three and urged them not to quit.
“We are STRUG-GLE-ING,” Garcea acknowledged in a meeting with the team.
On Feb. 6, following the team’s seventh-consecutive loss, Eagen, the school’s founder, asked one of the team’s parents, Claude Greene, to speak to the group.
Greene, who lives on the Southside, performs street ministry for families in crisis in Syracuse. He is on the board of directors of 100 Black Men of Syracuse, where he leads a workforce training program and serves as a mentor.
After home-schooling his son, Kzar, for most of his youth, the family tried OnTech because they shared Jones’ belief that sports can be used to teach bigger lessons.
Kzar loves basketball. His dad is happy about this, in part because Kzar is required to keep his grades above a 90 if he wants to stay on the team.
Claude hoped basketball would teach OnTech athletes how to resolve conflict, to support each other, to handle their emotions when things went wrong and to never quit.
Those are important lessons for all teenagers.
The consequences for failing to learn them come faster — and can be more dire — depending on where you grow up.
“They have the opportunity to learn these lessons (on the basketball court),” Greene said. “If they don’t learn them here, they are going to end up in prison or shot.”
After asking the team to join him in prayer, Greene asked each player to say something positive about the group.
Some shook their heads and remained silent.
His son pointed out he hated when players on the team called each other trash. The biggest complaint was the team’s penchant for finger-pointing.
“It shows up on the court,” Greene said. “How can you expect to win? How can you complain about losing if you’re not going to encourage your teammates?”
The Gray Wolves stayed in their locker room for 45 minutes until every player spoke.
Holliman, known for being quiet in school, began to lead. He was the first to say something positive.
He pointed out how he and White had talked through their beef. He urged the rest of the team to do the same.
“We really came a long way for real,” Holliman said. “Last year we didn’t win no games.”
The little wins
OnTech lost the next four, finishing the regular season at 4-16.
One loss was the team’s worst performance of the year. OnTech lost 46-43 to Mater Dei Academy, a school it had previously beaten by 23 points.
Holliman missed two free throws that would have won the game in regulation. OnTech lost in overtime.
With just one game left in the regular season, half the players skipped either school or practice the next day.
Holliman, though, showed up.
When some players started to blame the officiating for the loss, he reminded his teammates that they put themselves in a position to lose on a questionable call. When they talked about how they could improve, Holliman pointed out it started with supporting each other.
Every team in Section III has the option to play in the postseason. Given the drama of the season, Garcea gave his team a choice.
Its decision was unanimous: OnTech would play.
In the locker room before the first sectional tournament game in school history, Garcea reflected on their tumultuous months together.
“The pressure is on them,” he said. “We already won. We made it through the whole season. We’re still here. Ten strong.”
A lot had happened over the past four months.
Kzar Greene, in tears after Jones’ departure, had shown maturity and kindness. He’d checked in on Jones shortly after the head coach was replaced. He messaged his new coach, too, telling him he was going to handle the change like an adult.
Jahsir Alston, who struggles to trust people and sat at the scorer’s table for Garcea’s first game, had difficulty handling Garcea’s direct coaching. They sat in a room and talked through it.
Mo Williams-Johnson developed more confidence. When the season began, he’d asked coaches not to put him in the starting lineup because it made him nervous. By the end, he was part of the team’s first unit.
Messiah Miller showed empathy, consoling teammates after losses and supporting them even in his own bad moments.
White displayed loyalty. He said the biggest reason he stayed on the team was that he didn’t want to abandon his friends when things were hard.
Holliman began to recognize the power his emotions have on others. He made plans on how to harness them moving forward. He began to consider the possibility of attending college after high school, or maybe learning a trade or becoming a firefighter.
Garcea called these growth points “the little wins.”
“I want you to remember the little wins we had over the year,” he told the team. “Someday in your life all the little wins are going to add up to the big one.”
Just one week after OnTech’s worst game of the year, during the first playoff game in school history, they finally did.
OnTech won by 22 points over LaFayette, a team that had beaten the Gray Wolves twice during the season.
It was another milestone, the school’s first postseason win.
“You guys earned this,” Garcea told them. “You deserved it. Day in and day out you committed, and you kept coming back. ... You will never forget this moment. Ever. Ever.”
Garcea teared up. Miller steadied him with an arm around a shoulder. The Gray Wolves raced back onto the court to celebrate with a team photo. Some beamed. Some tried to look tough. In the middle of it all was Holliman, a peaceful expression on his face.
They were 10 strong. Ten who were given every reason to quit. Ten who made the choice to finish what they started.
Contact Chris Carlson anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-382-7932
