KANSAS CITY — Regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s game between Baylor and Kansas State, Texas Tech basketball head coach Grant McCasland would once again be on the opposite sideline as a former colleague.
Thanks to beating Jerome Tang’s Kansas State squad in the second round of the Big 12 Conference tournament, it’ll be his old boss, Scott Drew, who will be the one trying to top McCasland’s Red Raiders in Thursday’s quarterfinals.
But the familial ties between the two teams don’t end there. Texas Tech and Baylor also have similar setups in their backcourts with veterans — Elijah Hawkins for Texas Tech, Jeremy Roach for Baylor — being the guiding voice for talented freshmen in the Red Raiders’ Christian Anderson and the Bears‘ Robert Wright.
Hawkins and Roach are equipped to handle those duties, producing themselves and being a leading voice from their days growing up in the Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia (DMV) basketball scene. Hawkins, a native of Washington, D.C., attended high school at DeMatha, while Roach grew up an hour northwest of the nation’s capital in Leesburg, Virginia.
Roach, a year older than Hawkins, has known the Texas Tech (24-7) point guard since he was in elementary school. While Hawkins was at DeMatha, Roach — and Kansas State’s Dug McDaniel — went to Saint Paul VI. The point men saw plenty of each other in that time with their schools both competing in the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference.
“That’s my guy,” Roach said. “I don’t talk to him on a day-to-day basis, but when we see each other, we dapping each other up.”
Roach came off the bench Wednesday and finished with nine points and a team-high five assists in Baylor’s win over Kansas State. Back on Feb. 4 when the Bears (19-13) visited the Red Raiders during the regular season, Roach was returning from his second concussion of the season.
Texas Tech wound up with a 73-59 win in Lubbock, prompting Drew to call the Red Raiders a Final Four-caliber team.
“I feel like we hung in there,” Roach said of the first matchup with Texas Tech, “but just made some key mistakes in big time moments and we can’t do that, especially in March.”
Like Hawkins, Roach takes pride in his roots and expects their to be a bit more juice to Thursday’s matchup because of it.
“We take a lot of pride in our game,” Roach said, “especially guys from the DMV with me. We just had a kind of edge, that swagger to us, so definitely gonna be a fun matchup tomorrow.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Like their coaches, Texas Tech basketball, Baylor guards go way back
