Matchup with Georgia Tech means plenty for Morehouse

Morehouse guard Robert Andrews puts down a dunk in the Maroon Tigers' 67-62 win over Clark Atlanta January 25, 2020 at Morehouse. (Oscar Daniel)

Morehouse guard Robert Andrews puts down a dunk in the Maroon Tigers' 67-62 win over Clark Atlanta January 25, 2020 at Morehouse. (Oscar Daniel)

Georgia Tech’s Tuesday night game against Morehouse might not have been a reality if not for a Yellow Jackets fan living under the roof of Morehouse coach Grady Brewer.

“He’s always asking me why we never play Georgia Tech,” Brewer told the AJC, speaking of his youngest son Jordan, a sophomore at Sandy Creek High. “He’s a big Georgia Tech fan, so I said, ‘We’ll ask the coach, will he give me a game?’”

Tech coach Josh Pastner was amenable, and the Jackets and Maroon Tigers will play each other for the first time in the regular season Tuesday night at McCamish Pavilion. For Morehouse, a Division II team laboring far from the limelight that Tech enjoys in the ACC, it’s a grand stage.

“Every athlete dreams of coming out of high school and playing Division I basketball, Division I football,” Morehouse guard Tremell Gooden said. “That’s not reality for everybody. I feel like playing against a big Division I team in a Division I basketball powerhouse conference in the ACC, that’s big. That’s real big.”

Tech played (and defeated) Kennesaw State in Dec. 2018. But it hasn’t played a regular-season game against an opponent from inside I-285 since beating Georgia State in Dec. 2008.

For Tech, it’s a game to fill in one of their two open dates in the league schedule and give Jordan Usher another game to play after he became eligible in December following his transfer from USC in January 2019.

Pastner’s preference was to play a power-conference opponent in the slot to bolster the non-conference schedule. However, teams are in the midst of conference play and Pastner and his staff were unsuccessful in finding one that had a corresponding opening and also was willing to give it up to play Tech. Pastner’s next step was to find a game that would “benefit the community,” in his words, which meant making the game with Morehouse work.

Brewer and Pastner, introduced by a mutual friend, had sought to play previously, but it didn’t work out until this year. Brewer was so eager to bring his team to McCamish to face the Jackets that he had to rearrange the Maroon Tigers’ league schedule in order to make it happen.

“They’re excited about it, because it puts them on a stage where most of them always wanted to be,” Brewer said.

It’s a big enough occasion, Brewer said, that Morehouse might break out new uniforms for the game.

Morehouse takes care of business in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. In his 20th season, Brewer has led the Maroon Tigers to the SIAC regular-season championship seven times and been to the NCAA tournament three times, most recently in 2018.

An Atlanta native who attended Douglass High and played in two state championship games held at Alexander Memorial Coliseum, Brewer could reasonably be described as an institution in Atlanta basketball circles. Morehouse is 9-9 this season, off the 20-win standard of last year, but beat rival Clark Atlanta Saturday in the “Battle of the AUC,” keeping the Panthers out of first place in the SIAC’s East division.

“We have great respect for Morehouse and coach Brewer and his staff,” Pastner said. “They press, they play multiple guys, they play hard, they run some good actions offensively and they can shoot it, so we’ll need to play at a high level.”

Tech and Morehouse share a dual-degree program, in which a student can attend Morehouse for three years and then Tech for two to earn bachelor’s degrees from both schools, the Tech degree in engineering.

Brewer said he actually uses the program as part of his sales pitch to recruits interested in studying engineering.

“So we can have a dual-degree program and now we’ll duel it out on the basketball court,” Brewer said. “I think it’s good for the city of Atlanta and in the end, I would like to have Georgia Tech visit our arena for a game at some point in time before I get out of coaching. I think that would be really nice.”

Separated by less than five miles, Tech and Morehouse are close enough that players on both teams venture to the others’ campuses for summer pickup games. That familiarity and Morehouse’s past visits to Division I arenas (they’ve played exhibitions at UAB the past three years) should prepare the Maroon Tigers for McCamish.

“I think we’ve got a good chance of winning if we come in and play the kind of basketball we’ve been coached to play,” Gooden said.