At the time his senior season was starting, life threw Marquis Barnett yet another curveball.
Because of mold and flooding, his family was forced to move out of their Far Rockaway apartment and into a Lower East Side shelter, the third shelter in three years.
This hardship was just the latest one Barnett has been forced to deal with.
Last February, Tavon Turpin, his autistic 11-year-old half-brother was killed in a fire he set when he was left unsupervised in their grandmother’s Coney Island home. He’s also had to help his mother, Francine Baker, get out of a physically abusive relationship that went on for several years.
Through it all, Barnett never changes.
“I ask him what’s wrong and he says everything is good,” senior guard Shelton Mickell said. “He keeps smiling, keeps joking. I give him a lot of credit because I don’t think I could do it.”
Indeed, this latest off-speed pitch Barnett stayed back and swatted to the opposite field, and he’s still running.
Barnett is enjoying a breakout senior year, the linchpin to the Judges’ stifling defense. As big a reason as any to the Queens school’s 12-0 start, he is averaging six points and 12 rebounds per game in nine league contests for Cardozo, which is ranked fifth in New York City by The Post. He’s routinely picking up double digits in blocks, and that doesn’t even include all the shots the 6-foot-7 forward changes.
“Maybe he’s not the top defensive big guy in the city, but he’s top three or four,” Cardozo coach Ron Naclerio said. “He takes away so much. We can overplay and when we get beat, he’s there for a block or he’s there for a charge.”
Mickell said: “When we mess up, here’s there to clean it up. We really value him.”
But Barnett’s greatest value is his toughness. He’s always smiling, Naclerio said, when most kids might let the situation they are in drag them down. Not only is he turning in an all-city caliber season, but his grades have dramatically improved, up to an 86 average.
“He’s one of the nicest kids I’ve coached,” Naclerio said. “You want to see a kid do well who so many people tried to drag down. He’s never given up. He wants a better life.”
When asked how he not only maintained, but somehow seems to be progressing, he grins.
“My mindset is to stay positive, stay humble,” Barnett said.
A college scholarship – or at least its possibility – is pushing him forward. A few mid-major programs have inquired, though he has yet to receive an offer. Basketball, he thinks, can be a way out, for himself and his family. Or if it can get him to college, he can be in a position to change their current plight – and his own — eventually.
“That would mean a lot; my mother wouldn’t have to pay anything. We’re struggling now,” he said. “That would be big – real big. Every day, from when I wake up until I go to sleep, [I think about that].”