It takes more than being an exceptional high school basketball player to score over 1,000 career points.
Longevity playing at the varsity level, qualifying for the state tournament most years, remaining healthy every season — there are a host of other factors that can keep great players from achieving the feat.
Thus, approximately 20 years had passed since a Juneau-Douglas High School boys player last reached the milestone when senior Erik Kelly hit quadruple-digits on Saturday, Feb. 3.
Due to incomplete records, it isn’t exactly clear how many points former NBA all-star Carlos Boozer wound up with in high school. It’s likely he scored his 1,000th point as a junior.
According to former JDHS coach George Houston, Boozer scored 455 points in his sophomore year and was at 276 midway through his junior year. As a senior, Boozer averaged 28 points per game.
Entering his senior campaign with 674 career points, it took Kelly just 17 games this season to hit 1,000 points. As of press time on Saturday afternoon, Kelly has scored 1,059 points in his career. He was also just 40 points away from matching his junior year point total — 425 points.
The team website, which is updated after every weekend with a bevy of statistics ranging from turnovers to offensive rebounds to points, made it easy for Kelly to chart his progress toward 1,000 points.
“I was looking into it the week before it happened — I wasn’t sure (the coaches) knew — but I didn’t want to tell them so I tried to keep it secret,” Kelly said after practice on Thursday. “I was excited because I knew I was going to get it, but I wasn’t wanting to get it to brag, I just wanted to get it and have it be a milestone that I can tell my kids.”
JDHS head coach Robert Casperson awarded Kelly with a commemorative white basketball before his team’s game against Dimond on Feb. 9.
“We don’t typically give awards for points in our program because we don’t want to encourage guys to chase points in that fashion,” Casperson said.
Instead, Casperson said, the team gives out “The Marksman” award at the annual end-of-season banquet. “The Marksman” is awarded to the player with the highest 2-point shooting percentage with a minimum of 50 attempts.
Kelly made 59 percent of his two-point attempts last season to win the award.
Despite his recent accolades, teammates of Kelly say the soft-spoken forward prefers talking about team matters over individual ones.
“The one thing I like about Erik is he doesn’t care about the stats things,” JDHS senior guard Kolby Hoover said. “Obviously, he’s probably excited about hitting a 1,000 points, but he cares about winning and that’s something I really appreciate as a teammate.”
Kelly, Hoover and the rest of the seniors will be honored this week in the final Crimson Bears home games of the season.
JDHS plays Ketchikan on Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m. at JDHS.
• Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nolin.ainsworth@juneauempire.com.
