With his back against the white painted cinder-block wall, Quentin Twyman sat sapped outside an office door around over a dozen schoolmates, agonizingly waiting for an answer he’s been anticipating since he first picked up a basketball.
One by one, the junior varsity basketball coaching staff announced each name through the crevice of the office doorway, then shutting it behind them.
After 10 minutes, the hallway emptied all but a handful of hopeful players — with Twyman among them, he feverishly eluded negative thoughts that weaved through his mind.
“I felt like I didn’t do that bad,” Twyman said on his tryout for the JV basketball team as a freshman. Then, he got his call. “They called me into the office and told me I got cut. I was surprised. … It just hurt.”
The coaching staff then uttered the cliché line “keep working hard” and “don’t give up”, but the words before that suppressed Twyman’s aspirations so much the thought of other alternatives had already begun. Packing up his gym bag and sneakers, the then-5-foot-8 190-pound Twyman walked out of the room in a sulky manner, with dreams crushed and a detoured future.
“It hurt because I didn’t know where I could go from there,” he said. “I thought I would never grow into something bigger than that.”
Up to that moment, as a pudgy freshman, it wasn’t the first time Twyman faced rejection in a challenging moment. In 2007, at the age of nine years old, he suffered a gruesome brain injury in a car accident. It prevented Twyman of playing contact sports for the rest of his life, with football at the head of the list, his desired passion.
“When my neurologist said I couldn’t play football anymore, it hurt,” he said. “It was my main passion.”
Other than football, sports never clicked with Twyman, recalling he was always one of the pudgiest kids in the neighborhood as a child. Instead he’d sit inside, crush potato chips and play video games, preferably NBA 2K — a game he claims he’s never lost in.
It wasn’t until the seventh grade he was encouraged by a group of friends to try basketball. Discouraged that failure in sports had always come back around to get the best of him, Twyman gave it a go.
He eventually made his middle school team both as a seventh and eighth grader, but didn’t see a lot of playing time due to his ability.
“I was always one of the chubbier kids around,” Twyman said. “I wasn’t quick enough to play out on the perimeter and I wasn’t physically strong enough to post people up … I was just a big body.”
That’s when going into his freshman year, he was cut from the JV team, reverting him back to his video game ways and poor eating habits.
Then, going into his sophomore year, the unexpected occurred.
Head football coach, Fred Kim, picked out Twyman in the hallway, requesting him to tryout as an offensive lineman. Twyman, who had been told he could never play football again, went back to a neurologist that summer to get a reevaluation.
He received some uplifting news.
“They cleared me,” Twyman said “I was so happy.”
As a sophomore, he got a taste of the gridiron sport he missed out on as a child — as well as taking part in grueling workouts that improved his health, which translated to spot on the JV basketball team. He also grew from 5-foot-8 to 6-foot-2.
Like in middle school, Twyman received little playing time on a 16-0 JV team that featured Brandon Simpson and Kareem Matthew, both starters at the present varsity level. His role was to “clean up the garbage” or in other terms, get on the floor for loose balls and grab an offensive board or two.
As a junior, Twyman made the varsity unit, but sat the bench for the first four games, all that ended in losses. The fifth game ended had a different and memorable result. Twyman, who came off the bench, led Seneca Valley to their first win of the year and second win the past 46 games with 17 points.
“I will forever remember that game,” Twyman said. “That jump started it all.”
Since then, Twyman started every game on a team that wound up coming short in the region championship, 58-52 to Linganore. It was an improbable run that was described as “unexpected”.
Over the summer of 2015, Twyman grew from 6-foot-4 as a junior to now 6-foot-5, but more notably, dropped his weight from 240 pounds to 210 by drinking tons of water and making healthier diet choices.
Seneca Valley head coach Brian Humphrey has praised Twyman for persevering through the growing pains to get where he is now — one of the most versatile and dynamic forwards in Montgomery County.
“His growth has been exponential,” Humphrey said. “He’s improved his footwork and has developed post moves with a counter. … He also has a fluid outside shot which makes him versatile.”
Coming off a 61-59 region championship victory over Tuscarora, Seneca Valley now rides a 12-game win streak and a 21-4 record into Maryland high school basketball’s version of the Final-Four. More importantly, they haven’t lost since January 30th, a humiliating loss to Quince Orchard just 36 hours after the death of Jimmy Humphrey, father of Brian Humphrey.
Jimmy Humphrey ran the scorers book since Brian took over the head coaching job in 2014. All of the Seneca Valley players referred to him as “Mr. Jimmy” and one of them.
“We’re doing this for Mr. Jimmy,” Twyman said. “He was apart of us.”
That moment triggered the special run that will resume Thursday night as the Screamin’ Eagles hit the Xfinity Center in College Park to take on Stephen Decatur in the Class 3A semifinals.
“The Quince Orchard game showed what Seneca Valley basketball is all about, going through adversity,” Twyman said, who averages just over 13 points and six rebounds per game this year. “Coach (Humphrey) broke down so hard in the locker room after that humiliating loss. We didn’t like that … we’ve come together and said, ‘We have to do this for coach’.”
Perseverance and willingness to weather growing pains through the years has transformed not only Twyman, but a basketball team that once went 1-41 to now 36-10 with two regional finals appearances over the last two years.
If Twyman went back in a time machine now, just as Doc Brown and Marty McFly did in “Back to the Future”, to tell his shorter, younger, pudgier self that’d he be a captain on a state championship contending high school basketball team, he’d probably ignore every word that was said, laugh, pop a few chips in his mouth and carry on with a competitive game of NBA 2K.
“If I told my freshman self we’d be two games away from winning a state championship, I would’ve laughed in your face,” Twyman said. “I flashback to those times and think, this right now, is a dream come true. … I’m just happy to be apart of it.”
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