Christ Chapel's Mason emerging from the shadow

dutnik@potomacnews.com
It wasn’t the left-handed jump shot that caught Quinton Mason’s attention. He’s seen his 12-year-old daughter pull up near the 3-point line and loft thousands of those through the hoop.
Scoring baskets is what she does — sometimes even when he’s guarding her in a game of one-on-one.
So the rhythmic roll of a basketball off Breyana Mason’s fingertips, and the sound of squeaking sneakers as she hustles to retrieve it, is a familiar routine.

But, occasionally, she still amazes him — though that is becoming increasingly more difficult to do considering that as an eighth grade point guard she averaged 30 points per game for the first girls varsity basketball team in Christ Chapel Academy history.
He’s watched her make one-handed bounce passes between two defenders, steal the ball at mid-court and race the other direction for a layup and lead the nationally ranked Lions to the Northern Virginia Independent Athletic Conference Tournament championship.

But the one thing Quinton had never seen his daughter do is palm a basketball — at least until she casually wrapped her long fingers around a Wilson Evolution one recent afternoon and held it straight out in front of her.
“I did not even know you could do that,” her father marveled. “Let’s see that again.”

Christ Chapel’s entire season was filled with wondrous discoveries as the Lions introduced themselves in record-setting fashion. Playing in a remodeled gymnasium that once served as a fellowship hall, they went 19-2 overall and were ranked No. 2 in the nation among National Chris-tian School Athletic Association Division III schools.

“It was exciting to win a championship game in our first year,” Christ Chapel athletic director Jane Ann Boros said. “We’re going to get a big banner like the other schools have. We’re trying to make a big deal out of it because it’s something special and unique.”
Most of what the Lions accomplished was Mason’s doing.

A year after leading the middle school team to a second-place finish in the conference tourna-ment, she scored 629 points — the most of any Christian school player in the nation — and made sure this season ended with a victory over Trinity in the NVICA finals.
“She wanted that trophy more than I did,” Lions coach Jason Christensen said. “Before the game she told me, ‘We’re not getting a second place trophy. We’re winning.’”

And Mason backed up that promise with a 21-point performance that highlighted Christ Chapel’s 41-31 victory.
“I just like to play — and win,” she said. “I’ve always been a competitor. I always like to win.”
Even her jersey number suggests that. After wearing No. 11 as a seventh-grader, Mason had first choice this season.
She now wears No. 1.

“When I first got here I didn’t know how good she was,” Christensen said. “The first couple of games it took me a while to adjust to her style of play, but once we adjusted we kept putting points on the board.”
The wins started piling up, too. The Lions did not lose over their final 19 games and Mason wound up setting a Prince William County single game scoring record along the way with a 45-point outing on Jan. 25.

“You don’t really have to run a play for her,” Christensen said. “She can create things on her own. She can see the floor very well and has a very good all-around game.
“She’s a scorer, so we had to come up with some type of offense to get the ball in her hands as much as possible. We just let her go a little bit and she’s able to make good decisions.”

When Mason is doing her thing on the court, it usually means the Lions are pressing full court or running a fast break in transition. That is the style she prefers.
So it’s not all that surprising that, in 21 games, Mason led the county in scoring, had 144 steals — tops in the nation — and averaged 7.81 rebounds.
“I like making things happen,” she said.

Mason recalls feeling that way for the first time when her family still lived in Texas. She was in-troduced to organized basketball by making a church league team named “Upward” and she’s been playing ever since.

“I started when I was little. I’d always pick up a basketball and start dribbling it,” Mason said. “For some reason I like to play it all the time, as much as I can. Whenever I have free time, I like to shoot.”
On school day mornings and afternoons, Mason can always be found in the Christ Chapel gym and on weekends she will often coax her dad into a game of one-on-one at a court on the Ft. Belvoir army base.

“He says he lets me beat him, but I don’t think so because I do some surprising things against him,” she said.
It’s helped, too, that Mason has grown several inches — to 5-foot-5 — since last season and that she starts for three different AAU teams.
Two months shy of her 13th birthday, she is already being compared to the area’s most prolific player, Forest Park graduate Monica Wright, who is now at the University of Virginia.

“Her demeanor is a lot like Monica’s,” said Christensen, who coached at Lake Ridge Middle School when Wright played there.
“Monica is a little bit bigger and stronger and can jump better, but Breyana’s almost there and being 12 years old it’s like one followed the other. They have the same type of charisma.”

Another thing the two star players have in common is the ability to lead.
The Lions are a young team with a sixth-grader, three eighth graders and a sophomore in the starting lineup. The school won’t even have a senior class until next fall, but Mason has already established herself as the type of athlete who brings out the best in the players round her.
Wright did the same thing at Forest Park while leading the Bruins to a pair of Group AAA state championships.

“With the kids, she is a leader,” Christensen said of Mason, who is also an A-student. “She started calling things out, getting more confident and pulling her teammates closer to her. The way she does it is kind of caring. It’s not yelling, it’s just talking with them.”
And, before long, Christ Chapel, with an enrollment of about 400 students from kindergarten through 11th grade, was ranked right alongside Riverdale Baptist in the northeast region.

Sophomore Dani Lobo hit 50 3-pointers, sixth-grader Amber Mixon earned a reputation for tough defense, eighth-grader Macy Wento led the team in rebounds and eighth-grader Sierra Darville was the top free-throw shooter.
But it was Mason, who scored 30 or more points 11 times this season and had at least 40 on four occasions, that cradled them like a basketball in the palm of her hand and made the Lions a cham-pionship team.

“The thing that makes her so valuable to us is that she’s very skilled and willing to help others,” Christensen said. “She’s kind of like a coach on the court because she’s been in tough situations in AAU games.
“She kind of put the team on her back and carried us.”