This Vancleave senior sets sight on his last basketball ride. ‘Oscar is our trailblazer.’
Vancleave still has at least five games left on its season but already has more wins that it did all of last year. The Bulldogs are 17-5 and are fueled with unwavering confidence heading into the final stretch.
At the center of Vancleave’s rise to prominence is senior forward Oscar Hampton, or as his coaches and teammates call him, “Big O.”
Hampton is a 6-foot-3 forward who plays above his size with athleticism and a nose for the basketball. He’s a double-double machine and nearly averages as much with 16.7 points and 9.3 rebounds per game.
The school has benefited from Hampton’s range as an athlete this year as Hampton took home All-Region 4-5A honors in football before bringing his talents to the hardwood.
All-State runningback Dayan Bilbo is among the group of players who Hampton says had to ease back onto the floor.
“(The transition) was kind of hard the first game because we weren’t used to running back and forth that first game,” Hampton said. “After the first few games the football players got back into it pretty quick.”
Once Hampton fully returned to his basketball form, the Bulldogs rattled off seven straight wins and had a 9-2 record in December.
Hampton was a big part of that hot start with outbursts of 27 points against Satsuma and 22 against West Harrison.
“Oscar is our trailblazer,” Vancleave head coach Liam Openshaw said. “You see it in practice, in games, if he brings the juice then everybody else follows. He’s a competitor, he’s a leader, the kids like to be around him. In my career I’ve coached maybe one other kid like that.”
Openshaw has been at Vancleave for six years with time split between between the boys and girls team. He’s witnessed the Hampton journey since before the star even arrived on campus.
“When I was the girl’s coach I watched him in middle school,” Openshaw said. “It’s been great to see how he’s not just physically matured but matured as a person... I’ve seen him grow leaps and bounds and he’s done that before my eyes. It’s been great.”
In Hampton’s final chapter in the Blue and White, the Bulldogs are battling a success rarely seen in the program. Many on the Coast haven’t bought into the wins just yet.
Hampton’s team has heard the ‘overrated’ chants from the crowds and listened to the opinions of fans who don’t believe Vancleave is on the same level with some of the top teams on the Coast.
That doesn’t bother Hampton, though, who welcomes the noise.
“They think it makes us mad but that’s like a compliment,” Hampton said. “All the good players that you see on YouTube that get called overrated, it’s a compliment to us.”
Vancleave has endured a bit of adversity lately with back-to-back losses to Gautier, locking the Bulldogs into a 2-seed in the approaching region tournament.
Despite that, Hampton has hopes and sees big potential for his team.
“I think we can go all the way,” Hampton said. “We just got to keep our head in it and don’t let games like (the Gautier loss) get the best of us. We got to come back and get better.”
The Bulldogs have a pair of regional games left on the schedule before finishing out the season against Christian Collegiate Academy.
This story was originally published January 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
