By Craig Juer -- Daily Staff Writer

WINCHESTER — Twelve measly points. Five-of-14 shooting, and exactly nada from behind the arc. He spent halftime unloading the contents of his stomach because of a flu bug, then couldn't buy himself a field goal in the third or fourth quarters.

"That's probably the flat-out best basketball game I've seen him play," said his coach, Millbrook's Scott Mankins. "And I've been privileged to see him play quite a few."

Erick Green, too, considered the 73-60 win over Charlottesville in the Region II finals among his best games of the season, which is an example of why he's The Northern Virginia Daily's Boys Basketball Player of the Year.

"My shots weren't falling in the second half of the Charlottesville game," said Green who added eight assists, six steals and a block to go with his 12 points. "And I really didn't put my head down like I did my freshman and sophomore years."

The Virginia Tech-bound point guard, who averaged three assists a game this season to go with his 18.5 points, got help from various members of his team as he matured from a pure scorer into an all-around player this season.

It was senior captain Jordan Sugars who helped Green get his priorities on the floor straight.

"He told me at the beginning of the year that not everything's about scoring," Green said. "That was a big thing with me growing up — I thought you had to score to be the man."

Suddenly, Mankins was finding himself greeted on the bus after away games by a point guard who wanted to find out how many assists, rebounds and steals he'd registered in the statbook, rather than how many points.

Swingman Levon Williams fostered in Green an enthusiasm for playing good defense.

"He's helped me so much at the defensive end, pushing me," Green said. "He's like, 'Offense sells tickets, and defense wins games.'"

For the first time, Green began pleading with Mankins to let him guard the other team's best player.

"He finally started playing defense," Mankins said. "He realized that his best offensive nights usually come on his best defensive nights."

Mankins himself got Green to care more about team success than individual success — an important quality in a point guard, to say the least.

"That's the thing that really changed in him this year," Mankins said. "Winning became the most important thing; he hated to lose. He realized how important everybody around him was, and how if he could help make people better it was going to make the team better."

Green's commitment to making himself a better all-around player not only resulted in an ACC scholarship offer, but contributed to his team's one-loss season and eventual Group AA title. No team could win a state championship with just one good player, but Green meant as much to the Pioneers' success as any of them.

"He has that spark," Sugars said. "At any moment of the game when we're kind of down, he just kind of finds a way to get the team going, whether it's making a shot or whatever it is. He just knows what to do on the floor at the right time."

On March 2 against Charlottesville, Green knew his teammates didn't need him to score — they needed him to be their point guard.

"He was sick, he was coming down with the flu. And I told him, I said, 'We need to sit you out. You're more important than this game is,'" Mankins recalled. "And he said, no, we came here together. We're going to get through this.

"He made up his mind that we were going to win that game."

* Contact Craig Juer at cjuer@nvdaily.com

The scoop on Erick Green

• Led the Pioneers with 18.5 points, 3.0 steals and 2.9 assists per game.
• A junior, Green has already verbally committed to play basketball at Virginia Tech.

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