The Quiet Assassin

The Quiet Assassin

By BRENDAN BURNETT-KURIE

Daniel Hancock is freshly showered, wearing a pair of red basketball shorts, a 2008 East Regional Tournament t-shirt and his ever-present gold cross.

It’s exactly a week – down to the hour – after Daniel and the rest of his Bearcats teammates’ season ended with a third place finish at state. Still, Daniel appears ready to head to practice, suited up to shoot another set of free throws and run the three-man weave one more time.

As Daniel sits at his dining room table, with the NCAA tournament pattering on the television in the background, he is already contemplative. As always, he’s polite, but reserved. Even when he does start talking, his hand dances in front of his mouth, as if trying to capture the words and not let them escape.

“He’s a quiet-type person,” Douglas football coach Jay Rhoades said. “He would do anything you would ask him to do, which is good. But, man, he’s so quiet it’s hard to get his thoughts on things. I just remember the athleticism and what a nice kid he is.”

When Daniel talks about his football state championship his eyes light up, glistening with excitement. But when his mind wanders to the week before, when his ridiculous 24-straight point performance wasn’t enough to take down Kemmerer, he is still emotional.

The wounds of that semi-final loss are still fresh, but they struggle to diminish the incredible season the senior put up, which followed an equally impressive year on the gridiron.

In football, Daniel tied for the conference lead with five touchdown catches and was in the top five with 30 catches and 380 yards.

“We felt like he was one of the best receivers in the state,” Rhoades said. “I feel like he was as good as any receiver that we played against, for sure.”

On defense, he intercepted three passes, including two in the state championship game.

“I think I got a lot better than I used to be,” Daniel said. “Cornerback isn’t really my passion, but I like it. I just didn’t like covering as much as I’d like hitting. But it was fun.”

The 6’1” slasher scored 16.4 points per game this basketball season as the Bearcats leading scorer, good for third in the conference and fourth in all of 3A. His 1.8 steals were seventh in the conference as he added 5.8 rebounds and an assist per game. His unbelievable quickness and athleticism allowed him to lead the Bearcats in offensive rebounds. He tied a career-high with 29 points in a 71-56 win over Rawlins.

There’s probably a seventh grade coach outside Dallas that would shudder to hear those numbers. Daniel, amazingly, didn’t make the seventh grade basketball team in his last year before moving to Wyoming. Even his first year in Douglas, as an eighth grader, was spent on the ‘B’ team.

It’s possibly the most familiar tale in all of basketball. Like George Washington and his cherry tree, there was Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore. While Washington went on to help free a nation and and Jordan reached the peak of sports super-stardom, they share at least one characteristic with Daniel: Persistence.

Instead of steering his attention solely to football – which he had always excelled at – Daniel put his head down and started working to improve his game on the parquet.

Daniel was born and raised in Tyler, Texas, a city of just over 100,000 about 100 miles east of Dallas on Interstate 20. He later moved to Garland, a suburb of Dallas, which is where his freakish athleticism wasn’t enough to overcome his lack of basketball IQ. The following year he moved to Douglas.

“It was definitely different, going from a big city to a small town, but I’d been coming up here every summer since I was in kindergarten,” Daniel said. His grandparents were building a house in Esterbrook. “I was happy here. It was fun, but I didn’t really know anyone.”

When Douglas basketball coach Ron Erickson first saw Daniel as a freshman power forward, he noticed an extremely talented athlete who was still learning how to play the game.

“He was very athletic, he had a lot of potential,” Erickson recalled. “He was relatively new to the game, as far as playing organized basketball. We looked at the upside, there was a lot of athleticism.”

As a sophomore, Daniel got his chance to play in the state tournament after a late-season injury to Cody Bohlander. In limited minutes, Daniel played tough defense and displayed a knack for getting big rebounds.

“We’d been trying to get Daniel some more time here and there,” Erickson said. “He brought quickness and defensive potential. We kind of used him like we did Cody, as a defensive stopper.”

Daniel and Cody were linked on the football field as well, as both starred on the 2005-06 undefeated freshman team. That squad had the same nucleus as this year’s state championship team, and it was the bonding done as youngsters learning the game that provided the trust and confidence to bring home Douglas’ first football title in 30 years.

“I think freshman year we all accomplished that undefeated season as a team,” Daniel said. “Once we hit our senior year, we were going to get a state championship. I remember we always talked about it. We’d say ‘Wait until our senior year.’”

During his sophomore football season, Daniel shared third receiver duties with Jake Vogel, waiting his turn to take over for Blake Richendifer and Jake Jackson. As a junior, Daniel started across from Vogel, with Bohlander in the slot.

After that season ended with a semifinal loss to Jackson, Daniel and his fellow juniors re-dedicated themselves to accomplishing their long-term goal of a state championship.

“We came in our junior year summer and lifted every day, whenever we could make it,” Daniel said.  “This was our year and we had to give it all we had every practice,”

But before football could kick off again there was another basketball season ahead. Daniel averaged 12 points per game as a junior, but the team struggled, eventually finishing seventh in the conference and failing to make state for the first time in nine years.

So before his senior year, Daniel hit the gym for two sports, lifting weights and working on agility for football while fine-tuning his jump shot for basketball.

“Whenever we’d have a late practice and open gym after practice, he’d be one of the last guys there,” Erickson said.

“It just seemed like he was always good at what he does,” Rhoades said. “A lot of it was due to his hard work in the offseason. He did great in our speed and agility work in the summer. He was always coming to our weight training.”

But the road to glory certainly wasn’t smoothly paved, as the Bearcats hit some potholes early in the season, starting 1-2 with losses to Glenrock and Chadron.

“We always started off slow with the offense that we ran,” Daniel said. “Against Glenrock, we had to come out and ground-and-pound and we hadn’t had time to get our passing game going. If we’d played them at our peak we could have done some real damage. After we beat Buffalo (at the end of the regular season) I think that decided we were the team to beat.”

According to his coach, Daniel’s main improvement his senior year was learning to adjust his routes to the defense. Always a perfectionist who focused on the details, Daniel would always run his routes as they were drawn up. Eventually, he learned to read what the defense was doing and make adjustments on the fly.

“What maybe frustrated Daniel with me is when you run pass routes as a receiver, you can’t always just run them like they’re drawn up on paper,” Rhoades said. “He’s so meticulous, he wants to do the best that he can. There’s times when he would want to run the route more like it’s drawn on paper. He started understanding what the defense was doing.”

But the Bearcats got on a roll and crushed Buffalo 34-21 in the state title game, thanks in part to two picks and 58 receiving yards from Daniel.

“It was great, it was the best feeling ever,” he said. “We were in the locker room screaming and dancing. There were tears of joy, it was very emotional.”

But there was no rest for the weary, with less than a week off, Daniel turned his attention to putting another ring on his finger.

“We had always talked that we were going to get two rings, football and basketball,” Daniel said. “That’s what we wanted.”

Like the football team, the basketball team got off to a sluggish start, but not because of Daniel, who was leading the team with more than 16 points per game. As the season went on, the team improved, eventually going on a nine-game winning streak and winning the regular season conference crown. Down the stretch, Daniel became the team’s go-to guy.

“That’s just a natural evolvement,” Erickson said. “He’s extremely quick. As the season went along, we went to different sets. If it was a situation where we needed a basket, we thought Daniel could get it.”

That was never more evident than in the state championship semifinals when a red-hot Daniel scored Douglas’ first 24 points – spanning almost three quarters – while leading the squad with eight rebounds. But despite his heroic effort, the rest of the team didn’t have quite enough to pull out a win and was relegated to the third-place game with Lovell.

“Individually, it’s a good thing we had him,” Erickson said. “He kept us in the game.”

After the game, the normally reserved Daniel became even more withdrawn. With tears in his eyes, he sat alone on the bus ride home, alone with his thoughts.

“I had a couple tears,” he said. “I was more mad than anything.”

Daniel is an introspective young man. During the course of an hour-long interview, you can literally see him thinking, see him critiquing himself as he looks back. You can see he always wants to be better, to do better. You just know it pains him not to win.

“It’s not that he’s shy, I think he was always very thoughtful on what he was doing,” Rhoades said. “He was always examining what he could do better.”

Just as he learned to play the game of pick and roll and how to disguise an out-route, Daniel will continue to get better as his career progresses to the next level.

Next year, Daniel will rejoin his sophomore-year quarterback, Drew Hodgs, at Black Hills State University. It was the only school that wanted him as a receiver – several schools saw him as a cornerback – and he jumped at the chance to play with several former teammates, including Scott Boner and Cale DeMinck.

“I think it was a good fit, plus there was a bunch of guys already going there,” Daniel said. “It helped knowing Drew would be my quarterback.”

“I think Daniel has all the tools to be a very good college receiver,” Rhoades said. “He’s just going to have to continue that training and education of being able to run routes against the defense. He has to take what the defense gives him.”

But Daniel isn’t ready to close the book on his basketball career. While many college students struggle to find the time for one sport, Daniel dreams of playing two, plus getting his degree.

“I would like to play both,” he said. “That would be very fun. It would be very time-consuming, but it would be great. I don’t want to put basketball out of the picture.”

Erickson agreed that Daniel has the requisite skills to bring his game to the college ranks.

“As far as what he could give to a college team, there’s a lot of potential there,” he said.

And if there’s anything Daniel is good at, it’s turning raw potential into tangible skill.

Remember, this is the kid who didn’t even make his seventh grade basketball team. Maybe he does have a bit of MJ in him.