DYNAMIC DUO: Trevonn Martin, son of Dwayne “Tiny” Morton has helped Lincoln get to the PSAL Class AA final today against rival Thomas Jefferson. (Denis Gostev; AP (inset))
Lincoln head coach Dwayne “Tiny” Morton is synonymous with success. The lightning rod of a coach, known for his combative personality, producing championships and NBA players, has won seven city titles and is the only coach in PSAL history to win four consecutive titles.
He won’t make history this afternoon if his Railsplitters can take down borough rival Thomas Jefferson in the PSAL Class AA boys basketball city championship at the Garden, but a victory would outweigh the previous seven combined because his son, senior guard Trevonn, will be in the starting lineup.
“It would mean everything,” Morton told The Post in a phone interview. “It would be more important than the first time I won a championship.”
“Not only because he’s my son,” added Morton, who helped mold Lance Stephenson and Sebastian Telfair into pros. “He wasn’t supposed to be a starter at Lincoln, according to everybody else. Everybody thought he was just Coach’s son, a great student. He wasn’t supposed to help us win championships.”
Yet the soft-spoken and mature 6-foot-2 Trevonn emerged as one of Lincoln’s most important players this year as its starting shooting guard, averaging 11 points, three assists and two rebounds. He’s the Railsplitters’ coach on the floor, athletic director Renan Ebeid said, often calling out plays and doing the little things, such as drawing charges, diving for loose balls and making deflections.
“I can see him taking over and being the coach at Lincoln one day,” said Jefferson coach Lawrence Pollard, a longtime friend of the Mortons. “A lot of the kids respect him. He’s smart and his heart is in the right place. He doesn’t do anything he can’t do. He’s been a big part of their team. I watched him beat South Shore single-handedly. He killed us two out of three games.”
The two couldn’t be any more different. Trevonn is rarely heard, while Dwayne’s booming voice and outsized personality has made him a household name in high school basketball circles.
Dwayne Morton has rarely had to lecture his son the way he does other players.
“I think he hears me say some things to other people so he doesn’t have to hear me say it,” the coach said. “He’s a great observer. He watched people make mistakes, and I think he learns from it.”
Dwayne Morton can sometimes exhibit an icy exterior, but that melts whenever Trevonn is mentioned.
“He gets all mushy,” Ebeid said with a laugh.
Trevonn’s big year has drawn the attention of Ivy League programs Columbia and Penn, though his college plans are uncertain at the moment. He wants to major in sports management, with hopes of becoming a sports agent one day.
The journey hasn’t been easy, for father or son. At the start, Ebeid said they both had to learn to separate their father and son relationship from that of a coach and player. They quickly resolved not to talk basketball away from Lincoln.
Dwayne Morton used to hear he was only playing Trevonn because he was his son, and there were expectations heaped upon Trevonn because his father was a championship-winning coach and a great player in his own day.
“Everybody pressured me to be great, everybody was expecting me to be great,” Trevonn said. “It was frustrating. You heard it all the time, everywhere [I went], everywhere I played.”
Trevonn never publicly showed his frustration, Ebeid said, and worked to make himself into a better player. He knew the comparisons were coming before he even enrolled at Lincoln, but he never considered going to high school anywhere else.
“It’s tradition,” Trevonn said. “If you live in Coney Island, you go to Lincoln.”
Father and son are one win away from another Coney Island tradition — a PSAL title. Only for them, this championship would hold extra meaning than the accompanying hardware.