Edgecomb teen’s team takes basketball title

Sun, 07/20/2014 - 2:30pm

When Brandon Sprague of Edgecomb and the Maine Elite Basketball Club played in the Amateur Athletic Union’s Super Showcase in Florida last year, the team was knocked out in one game. On Sunday, July 20, Sprague, 17, and his teammates won the championship for their age division.

“Feeling awesome right now. This is a huge accomplishment,” Sprague said in a telephone interview from Tavares, Fla., about an hour after the win.

In a 64-49 win over the Boston Warriors, Sprague’s team won this year’s 16-year-olds division, for players who were high school sophomores in the last school year, Sprague’s mother Anita Sprague said. “Super exciting,” she wrote in a text message minutes after the victory at The Big House in Tavares, outside Orlando.

Her husband, Brandon’s father Gregory Sprague, was at the game watching it all. On a pride scale of 1 to 10, he said afterward, “I’m about a 15.”

Father and son said the whole team worked well together. In fact, Brandon Sprague said getting to be at the tournament with his team was the best part of the competition that started on Wednesday, July 16.

“We were like a family down there,” he said Sunday.

Sprague, who was homeschooled as a sophomore, played varsity basketball for Wiscasset High School in 2013 and plans to again this year, his mother said. He currently plays on the school’s summer league.

Maine Elite Basketball owner and coach Chris Binette called Sprague a smart player, who follows Binette’s directions and does well up against larger players. Throughout the tournament that opened July 16, Sprague and the rest of the team surprised audiences and the opposing teams, Binette said. People weren’t expecting such a strong team from Maine, he said.

“We’re the little engine that could,” Binette said.