Mr. Basketball State Player of the Year Jason Crowe Jr. of Inglewood is shown during game in which he broke the all-time state career scoring record, including the plaque that his mother, Irene, is holding created by Cal-Hi Sports for the occasion. Photos: Nick Koza.
There was plenty of competition, but because of his individual dominance and career-shattering numbers, it’s not hard to tab Jason Crowe Jr. of Inglewood as the 2025-26 choice for Mr. Basketball in California. In addition to his state record accolades, his overall play as one of the nation’s best players helped the Missouri-bound guard earn national acclaim. Today, he’s awarded California’s most prestigious, long-running individual honor. He’s only the third all-time winner from Inglewood, with the last one being Hall of Famer Paul Pierce in 1995.
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As the ink set on Tounde Yessoufou’s state career scoring mark at the conclusion of the 2024-25 season, it wasn’t hard to look ahead early into the 2025-26 season to see that Yessoufou’s record, a hallowed mark that had stood for 21 years when he broke it in Feb. 2025, would likely fall to a left-handed guard from Inglewood High School who’d been scoring at a dizzying pace for his first three seasons. California’s state scoring record falling 10 months after it was set wasn’t a surprise, but how far out this special player from the City of Champions put the mark made fans and media scribes really take notice.
When a player as talented as 6-foot-4 Jason Crowe Jr. produces that level of individual production for a winning Sentinels’ team, it’s nearly impossible to ignore when it comes to individual accolades. There are some other talented players in California, including two who played for the same team that won the CIF’s biggest prize, the CIF open state title, but how Crowe rose to his level of production and how Sierra Canyon emerged to play at the level necessary to dominate the open division needs to be analyzed when it comes to awarding the state’s biggest individual prize, which Cal-Hi Sports has been doing at the end of each season since 1980 and has honorees listed back more than 120 years based on research.
For the 2025-26 season, California Mr. Basketball basically came down to the Missouri-bound Crowe and two Sierra Canyon teammates — North Carolina-bound Maximo Adams and Michigan-bound Brandon McCoy Jr. – all three worthy candidates who received various forms of All-American acclaim. When it came down to each candidate, Crowe did enough from a team standpoint to accompany his record-shattering totals to earn the state’s most prestigious individual honor. Today, California’s all-time leading scorer by a wide margin has been honored as California Mr. Basketball State Player of the Year by Cal-Hi Sports.
Jason Crowe Jr. had high games of 56 and 54 points (twice) after he broke the state career scoring record. Photo: BallisLife.com.
“When I got the news I was on the way to Nike Hoop Summit practice and I was very excited,” Crowe Jr. told Cal-Hi Sports. “It is a great honor to be amongst the great names before me. The work I have done has paid off so far. I am motivated to work harder to improve my craft.”
Crowe put together one of the most statistically dominant seasons, and careers, in state history and still it was not an easy choice. Sierra Canyon, led by its two-headed monster, was far and away the state’s most dominant team and that factored into the decision similar to last season. Then the honoree from the state’s top team, Eastvale Roosevelt’s Brayden Burries,) was by far his team’s leading player and Burries was chosen over Yessoufou, the standout from Santa Maria St. Joseph who finished with 3,659 career points, then some 300 points more than Crowe’s total entering his senior season. The difference was Burries was clearly Roosevelt’s leading player whereas this year McCoy and Adams were fairly close. Both played extremely well and at times McCoy was more spectacular. If we were choosing between those two for the state’s top honor, we’d give the edge to McCoy, who was better in the major statistical categories between the two. Adams, however, was chosen L.A. Times Player of the Year and all-CIF Southern Section Open Division Player of the Year.
Crowe’s team didn’t make it to the CIFSS D1 final, and he wasn’t chosen all-CIFSS D1 Player of the Year, but it’s way too easy to go against local consensus this time around because of his obvious talents and individual dominance. Besides, when Sierra Canyon made it to the CIF Open final, they lost Adams early in the game to injury and still rolled to victory over NorCal’s best team, Salesion of Richmond, 78-70. Sierra Canyon’s complementary pieces were that good the entire season for a team that didn’t lose in-state.
“Every year brings a new challenge but every year the goal was to win a championship for the school I was at,” said Crowe Jr., who played his first two seasons at Lynwood. “It was never the plan to average the crazy amount of points that I averaged. I was always the type of player to do what it takes to win.”
It’s hard to imagine where Inglewood would have finished without “J2.” With him, the Sentinels started No. 18 in the state and finished No. 19 at 28-7, with a 82-69 victory over state No. 33 Anaheim Fairmont Prep qualifying Inglewood for the regional playoffs. Crowe, who played for his father and former Inglewood player Jason Crowe Sr. all four seasons, scored 45 points in the victory. He went above that total 17 times during his senior season and finished his career with a 34-point outing (on 11-of-22 shooting, 11-of 12 free throws) while scoring 15 points in the third quarter to try to help keep his team close in a 84-65 loss to eventual D1 state champ Damien of La Verne in the SoCal D1 playoffs. Damien held CIFSS D1 Player of the Year Chadrack Mpoyi to 12 points and the only other viable Mr. Basketball candidate, Christian Collins of Bellflower St. John Bosco, to zero points in the first half of the SoCal D1 final.
That 34-point outing gave J2 a total of 1,387 points for his senior season, the No. 2 single-season total in state history. For the season, he averaged 43.3 ppg (one of the best totals in the nation), 4.4 rpg, 5.8 apg and 3.5 spg while missing three games. But those were not really the most impressive numbers of his career. You have to take a deeper dive to truly appreciate what he did better than anyone who’s ever laced em’ up in the annals of California high school hoops, and that is put the ball in the hole. When Crowe passed Yessoufou as the state’s all-time leading scorer on a memorable December night last year in a win over Beverly Hills, it was his 100th career game. It took Yessoufou, a future NBA player, 127 games to set the mark and it took 2004 Mr. Basketball DeMarcus Nelson of Sacramento Sheldon 130 games to set the state scoring mark 21 years earlier.
Jason Crowe Sr. & Jason Crowe Jr. greet each other after a fall league game before Jason Jr.’s junior season at Inglewood. Photo: @crowezone5 / X.com.
Another factor that put J2 over the top is the 3,000 point club of the exclusive Cal-Hi Sports State Record Book. If it wasn’t such a hallowed mark in the country’s largest state or if the 3k club was full of a bunch of small-school standouts that racked up points against inferior competition, the mark wouldn’t carry so much weight. That’s clearly not the case. Both Yessoufou (who shared complimentary words about J2 via a social media message Cal-Hi Sports just as Nelson did months earlier) and Nelson were both McDonald’s All-Americans. Of the 14 players who entered the 2025-26 season with 3,000 or more points, all but one were big-time college recruits and four played in the NBA.
And with his monster season, Crowe not only became the first member of the 4,000-point club, he shattered the old mark by over 1,000 points, finishing with 4,718 career points in 124 career games. It’s a mark that could last quite a long time and that’s not the only career mark J2 set.
“I was still trying to win a basketball game because I broke the record pretty early,” J2 recalled about the Beverly Hills game. “It’s a blessing to have my name with those guys. It just shows the work I put into my craft and there’s more work to be done. I feel as senior I improved a little bit of everything. I felt stronger, faster, and my IQ grew.”
“We didn’t take it for granted because health has altered so many careers,” Crowe Sr. said of the special, record-breaking moment. “It meant a great deal to our family; to have your family name in the record books; even when someone breaks it, they have to mention your name.
“He shows up everyday with a positive spirit with great humility and has never had any issues with his teammates. On the flip side of that, he is a fearless competitor.”
Not only has Crowe Jr. scored more points than any other player in state history by a wide margin, J2 averaged more points per game than any player in state history. Future NBA player and Olympian Leon Wood of Santa Monica St. Monica averaged 33.7 ppg between 1977-1979 and even before his senior season J2 had a higher mark. His big senior year (in which his scoring average is the No. 4 reported all-time highest single-season mark) upped his scoring average to 38.1 ppg for his career to go along with 4.0 rpg, 5.8 apg and 3.5 spg. Ironically, the three-time all-state selection and three-time CIF Division State Player of the Year’s 952 points as a junior was his lowest single-season output of his four-year career. When he was the D3 State Player of the Year as a sophomore at Lynwood, Crowe put up 1,084 points and when he was the D5 State Player of the Year as a freshman when he led Lynwood to the 2023 D5 state crown, he put up 1,295 points, still the fourth highest total in state history.
Crowe was able to accumulate those incredible numbers because of his stamina, one of the real strengths of his game, and the ability to get the defender just off balance to the right or left at the point of his shot release. It’s an uncanny ability that even some of the state’s best players we’ve seen over the years cannot do. In fact, Crowe’s stamina might be among the best we’ve seen since two-time Mr. Basketball Jason Kidd of Alameda St. Joseph in the early 1990s. Nobody has been a four-time all-state choice in the CIF State Championship era and it only happened twice in our retroactive selections before 1980. Kidd and Crowe came the closest, just missing as freshmen. Crowe was remarkably consistent with his scoring just as J-Kidd was with his passing, defense and play-making.
Some of J2’s innate ability came to life at the recent McDonald’s All-American Game in Phoenix. J2 lit up a practice session with his ability to score from various angles and get defenders off-balance at the release point. Unfortunately, Adams re-injured himself in practice and Crowe also had an injury scare. Adams wasn’t able to play in the game, and while Collins and McCoy had their shining moments, Crowe was clearly a major catalyst for the West club in its 102-86 victory over the East with a game-high 16 points and five assists while earning co-MVP honors.
“Paul Pierce taught him how to score in a box or a tight window,” said Crowe Sr. “Some instincts he has developed naturally. During training, I always put him in disadvantage situations when he was young. One thing is we always train with the clock. PACE has always been a focus of our workouts.”
With his selection, Crowe is the eleventh consecutive choice from a CIF Southern Section program. The last player from another section to earn California’s top individual honor was Ivan Rabb of Oakland Bishop O’Dowd in 2015, the only NorCal team to win a CIF state open crown. The last honoree from an inner-city L.A. program was 2010 pick Allen Crabbe of Los Angeles Price, which is now closed. Crowe is also the Sentinels’ third Mr. Basketball selection joining 1980 honoree Ralph Jackson and 1995 choice Pierce, a teammate of Crowe’s father at Inglewood and a surrogate uncle who has known J2 his whole life.
“I am very blessed that I was able to be there to see so many games in J2’s career,” Pierce told Cal-Hi Sports. “I watched him grow of the course of these four seasons. J2 definitely surpassed expectations and that is due to his hard work.”
Here is future NBA legend Paul Pierce standing with Inglewood High teammate Jason Crowe Sr. during the 1993-94 season. Photo: Cal-Hi Sports archives.
Crowe has had terrific mentors and to be able to get insight from a player who was also in his shoes as the state’s top player and a top 3-5 national recruit is priceless. Similar to Pierce, Crowe is headed to the Midwest for college. “The Truth” went to Kansas for three years while J2 is headed to Missouri, where he is part of a star-studded recruiting class.
With his scoring exploits, J2’s overall game can get somewhat over-shadowed. Crowe grew up emulating and looked to De’Aaron Fox and Jalen Brunson to add new wrinkles in his game, and now seeks advice from Jayson Tatum. He has good instincts and can hurt defenses equally well as a hit-head passer or by dumping it off to a teammate at the last moment. J2 can split double teams and can see where they are coming from pretty well. Obviously, he’ll be adjust his game for the next level, but the stamina and uncanny ability to draw fouls will carry over.
“J2 is always listening so that is a great thing,” Pierce added. “As far as long-term advice I’ve given him, the two most important things are maintaining your love of the game as you become deeper involved in the business aspect and continue to develop your habits. At each level, you have to grow more discipline and adapt your training. J2 will do just fine.”
There is another category J2 sits atop on the all-time state list: free throws and free throw attempts. Crowe made 1,196 free throws in 1,386 attempts, a 86.3 percent clip, which also makes the state record book for percentage. The old mark of 1,098 free throws was held by Jarod Lucas of Hacienda Heights Los Altos, who was at one time the CIFSS all-time leading scorer. We don’t have a category for field goals and field goal attempts, but Crowe’s 1,595 made field goals and 3,092 attempts are good starting points.
Displaying his all-around game, Crowe’s total in other categories are also good enough to crack all-time state lists: 332 career 3-point field goals, 718 assists and 435 steals (to go along with 489 rebounds).
In many of the big games we’ve seen over four years, the most memorable moment wasn’t the buckets or scoring totals, but often when defenders look spent or gave their coach that beweildered look like, “what can we do now?” That was often a turning point in the game and the moment when J2’s uncanny ability allowed him to take over. Just when some defenders are about finished, J2 was ready to heat up and the “CroweZone” was a place on the court very few in our state’s history have ever experienced.
Even though Crowe Jr. has accomplished so much already, we have a feeling this year’s Mr. Basketball is just getting started.
MR. BASKETBALL STATE PLAYERS OF THE YEAR
ALL-TIME LIST
Note: All selections by Cal-Hi Sports; All-time list before 1978 compiled by our founder, the late Nelson Tennis, based on research.
Brayden Burries scored 44 points for Roosevelt of Eastvale in the 2025 CIF Open Division state final. Photo: Mark Tennis.
2026 – Jason Crowe Jr., Inglewood, 6-4 Sr.
2025 – Brayden Burries, Eastvale Roosevelt, 6-5 Sr.
2024 – Trent Perry,
Studio City Harvard-Westlake, 6-4 Sr.
2023 – Jared McCain, Corona Centennial, 6-3 Sr.
2022 – Donovan Dent, Corona Centennial, 6-3 Sr.
2021 – Amari Bailey, Chatsworth Sierra Canyon, 6-5 Jr.
2020 – Brandon Boston Jr.,
Chatsworth Sierra Canyon, 6-8
2019 – Onyeka Okongwu, Chino Hills, 6-9
2018 – Onyeka Okongwu, Chino Hills, 6-9 Jr.
2017 – Ethan Thompson,
Torrance Bishop Montgomery, 6-4
2016 – Lonzo Ball, Chino Hills, 6-6
2015 – Ivan Rabb, Oakland Bishop O’Dowd, 6-10
2014 – Stanley Johnson, Santa Ana Mater Dei, 6-6
2013 – Aaron Gordon, San Jose Archbishop Mitty, 6-8
2012 – Aaron Gordon, San Jose Archbishop Mitty, 6-8
2011 – Ryan Anderson, Long Beach Poly, 6-8
2010 – Allen Crabbe, Los Angeles Price, 6-6
2009 – Kawhi Leonard, Riverside Martin Luther King, 6-7
2008 – Jrue Holiday, North Hollywood Campbell Hall, 6-3
2007 – Taylor King, Santa Ana Mater Dei, 6-8
2006 – Chase Budinger, Carlsbad La Costa Canyon, 6-8
2005 – Amir Johnson, L.A. Westchester, 6-10
2004 – DeMarcus Nelson, Sacramento Sheldon, 6-3
2003 – Trevor Ariza, L.A. Westchester, 6-8
2002 – Hassan Adams, L.A. Westchester, 6-4
2001 – Tyson Chandler, Compton Dominguez, 7-1
2000 – Tyson Chandler, Compton Dominguez, 7-0 Jr.
1999 – Casey Jacobsen, Glendora, 6-6
1998 – Tayshaun Prince, Compton Dominguez, 6-8
1997 – Baron Davis, Santa Monica Crossroads, 6-2
1996 – Corey Benjamin, Fontana, 6-6
1995 – Paul Pierce, Inglewood, 6-7
1994 – Jelani Gardner, Bellflower St. John Bosco, 6-6
1993 – Charles O’Bannon, Lakewood Artesia, 6-7
1992 – Jason Kidd, Alameda St. Joseph, 6-4
1991 – Jason Kidd, Alameda St. Joseph, 6-4 Jr.
1990 – Ed O’Bannon, Lakewood Artesia, 6-9
1989 – Tracy Murray, Glendora, 6-8
1988 – Chris Mills, L.A. Fairfax, 6-7
1987 – LeRon Ellis, Santa Ana Mater Dei, 6-11
1986 – Scott Williams, Hacienda Heights Wilson, 6-10
1985 – Tom Lewis, Santa Ana Mater Dei, 6-7
1984 – John Williams, L.A. Crenshaw, 6-8
1983 – John Williams, L.A. Crenshaw, 6-7 Jr.
1982 – Tony Jackson, Oakland Bishop O’Dowd, 6-4
1981 – Dwayne Polee, L.A. Manual Arts, 6-5
1980 – Ralph Jackson, Inglewood, 6-3
1979 – Darren Daye, Granada Hills Kennedy, 6-7
1978 – Greg Goorjian, Crescenta Valley, 6-2
1977 – Cliff Robinson, Oakland Castlemont, 6-7
1976 – Rich Branning, Huntington Beach Marina, 6-2
1975 – Bill Cartwright, Elk Grove, 7-1
1974 – Bill Cartwright, Elk Grove, 7-0 Jr.
1973 – Marques Johnson, L.A. Crenshaw, 6-5
1972 – Cliff Pondexter, Fresno San Joaquin Memorial, 6-7 Jr.
1971 – Roscoe Pondexter, Fresno San Joaquin Memorial, 6-6
1970 – Bill Walton, La Mesa Helix, 6-10
1969 – Keith Wilkes, Ventura, 6-5 Jr.
1968 – Paul Westphal, Redondo Beach Aviation, 6-2
1967 – Curtis Rowe, L.A. Fremont, 6-6
1966 – Dennis Awtrey, San Jose Blackford, 6-9
1965 – Bob Portman, S.F. St. Ignatius, 6-5
1964 – Russ Critchfield, Salinas, 5-10
1963 – Edgar Lacey, L.A. Jefferson, 6-6
1962 – Joe Ellis, Oakland McClymonds, 6-5
1961 – Gail Goodrich, L.A. Poly, 5-11
1960 – Paul Silas, Oakland McClymonds, 6-6
1959 – Steve Gray, S.F. Washington, 6-4
1958 – Billy McGill, L.A. Jefferson, 6-9
1957 – Tom Meschery, S.F. Lowell, 6-5
1956 – Fred LaCour, S.F. St. Ignatius, 6-4
1955 – Fred LaCour, S.F. St. Ignatius, 6-4 Jr.
1954 – Willie Davis, Alameda, 5-11
1953 – Bill Bond, Long Beach St. Anthony, 6-1
1952 – Willie Naulls, San Pedro, 6-5
1951 – Ken Sears, Watsonville, 6-7
1950 – Don Bragg, S.F. Galileo, 6-3
Note: List extends back to 1905 in the Cal-Hi Sports State Record Book and Almanac.
Ronnie Flores is the managing editor of CalHiSports.com. He can be reached at ronlocc1977@yahoo.com. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter: @RonMFlores
