Hofstra has a good one . . . a real good one . . . in Preston Edmead

John Edmead was dribbling in the kitchen of his home in Deer Park one evening, teaching his teenage son a move. That wasn’t unusual at all. This was a basketball house filled with young basketball players and Edmead, who had played at Dowling in the early 1990s, was its basketball patriarch.

This particular lesson was about an in-and-out fake crossover, a way for a guard to create space in a one-on-one situation. It requires some fairly advanced choreography between handling the ball and the proper footwork, so he was doing the steps over and over to demonstrate. Bounce-bounce-bounce, step-shift-step. Arthur Murray meets Steph Curry.

The 13-year-old was starting to get the hang of it.

That’s when the strange, memorable moment that would set this particular evening apart took place, the one that would allow Edmead to recall it in a conversation with Newsday this week, 16 years after it occurred.

Another of Edmead’s sons, his 3-year-old, had been watching. And just as naturally as a baby lion learns to hunt from mimicking its parents, he started to copy the movements. Not in a cute, just-past-toddler way all full of giggles and chaos, but with remarkably clean grace and precision.

“The way he did it, that’s when I thought: Wow, maybe he might play ball,” Edmead said.

A few years later, Speedy Claxton, the former Hofstra star and NBA player who had just started to get into coaching, was running a camp at his alma mater in Hempstead. He remembers giving a lecture to a high school team and seeking a volunteer, and before he had finished the request, the hand of the smallest kid on the court had shot up.

No matter what Claxton asked for, the same tiny eighth-grader in the headband always wanted to be first. Claxton never forgot that.

“You know what, that’s why this kid is going to be special,” he remembers thinking.

And not long after that, with Claxton now the head coach at Hofstra, his top assistant, Mike DePaoli, was out on the AAU circuit looking for potential players. At each event he attended, it seemed there was this same fearless firecracker who kept catching his eye.

Hofstra tries to find recruits who fill what they call “The Three C’s” — character, competitiveness and commitment — but this particular point guard had added a fourth one.

“He’s not just committed, he’s compelled,” DePaoli said. “He was a lot smaller then, but he had great fight to him. Every game you were at, he picked up 94 feet. It just said so much about who he was as a competitor. That was what we fell in love with first.”

They all remember those earliest encounters with Preston Edmead, the flashpoints in which they realized he was just different from all the others.

Now the rest of the country may be about to experience the same thunderclap of clarity.

Rookie of the Year . . . and MVP

Edmead is the 19-year-old freshman point guard for Hofstra, which is heading to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 25 years. He was the Rookie of the Year in the CAA. He already has hit one of the program’s biggest shots in decades, too, an off-balance banked-in three-pointer with three-tenths of a second remaining in overtime that beat Towson in a CAA Tournament semifinal on Monday night in Washington. He was named MVP of that tournament.

In the regular season, he averaged 15.4 points and 4.6 rebounds per game, one of only 11 freshmen in the country with at least 15.0 and 4.0 in those categories. In the three conference tournament games, he averaged 20.3 points per game. He had only four total turnovers in the tournament, none while playing 45 minutes in the semifinal against Towson, and scored 26 points in the final win over Monmouth. The bigger the game, the better he has been.

Beyond his play, there is his smile, his soft-spoken nature and his soak-it-all-in naivete that combine to make him a budding star. March Madness loves Cinderellas, and it’s easy to see that Edmead is about to be given the fairy godmother treatment.

Yet while he always dreamed about playing at Hofstra and having the chance to take his place in the program’s long line of standout guards, and while others saw that potential in him when he was very young, not even he could have imagined being in this position now: a Long Island kid leading the Long Island school back to the national stage just the way Claxton, his idol and coach, did more than a quarter-century ago.

“I didn’t expect this, to be honest,” Edmead told Newsday of the suddenness with which it all has occurred. “When I first came here, I just wanted to do anything I could to be on the court. I mean, I always had the utmost confidence in myself, but I didn’t know I would be here.”

Hofstra a special place

Edmead had other options besides Hofstra. A lot of Division I programs wanted him. And while he grew up here and played for Deer Park High School for a few years — he was All-League in eighth grade, made Newsday’s All-Long Island second team as a freshman and was an All-Long Island first-teamer as a sophomore — he left the region to attend The Williston Northampton School in Massachusetts for his junior and senior seasons.

“I love my hometown,” he said, “but I knew I had to go away to make me better, and it did make me better.”

The minute he came back and visited Hofstra as a recruit, though, he realized he wasn’t going to want to play anywhere else.

“It was always a special place because I always knew the greats who were here before me: Justin Wright-Foreman, Aaron Estrada, Jaquan Carlos, Tyler Thomas,” Edmead said. “A bunch of great players. And once they started recruiting me, on my official visit, I knew this was the place I wanted to be as soon as I stepped on campus . . . When I got the chance to come back to Hofstra, I took it.”

It didn’t require much selling, but Claxton gave Edmead his pitch anyway. While all those other guards had come to Hofstra from elsewhere, Edmead was a local player. Claxton, who is from Hempstead but played high school ball for Christ the King, understood more than anyone else what that meant.

“I told him this might be the last time that his family gets to see him play close up and personal,” Claxton said. “Once you get to be a professional, who knows where you are going to be? Let them continue to follow you closely on this journey.”

At each home game this season, there have been a dozen to two dozen friends and family members in Section 100 at the Mack Sports Complex right across from the Hofstra bench  rooting for the Pride and Edmead. John is always there. So is Preston's mother, Kristina Edmead, and whichever of his four busy siblings are around. Grandparents, too. Aunts, uncles and cousins.

John’s coworkers on the Long Island Rail Road  often will show up before or after their shifts. A few of Preston’s elementary school teachers have dropped by. Even his former Deer Park teammates, some of whom were a bit rankled when he left the program after his sophomore year, have come back to cheer him on and participate in this ride.

“It means so much,” Edmead said. “It just makes me feel at home. It’s special.”

Just as Claxton predicted, it means a lot to everyone else, too.

“What a year,” John Edmead said. “That’s all I have to say. What a year. I mean, the team has been great, and Preston is having a great season. But I’m talking about the nuances.”

He would have gone to most of the games no matter where Preston played. “This,” he said, “made life a lot easier.”

And now, getting to follow Preston and Hofstra to the NCAA Tournament? Well, it’s hard to imagine anything making his basketball life much better.

His brothers prepared him

When he thinks back to his own earliest basketball memories, Preston Edmead recalls shooting hoops with his two older brothers in their driveway in Deer Park. Each would go on to play Division I ball. Aaren, 30  (the one John was teaching that in-and-out move to in the kitchen way back when) played for Wagner and North Carolina A&T. Malik, 23, just finished his final season at Merrimack and also played a season for Albany.

“They did not take it easy on me,” Preston said. “They were always beating up on me, but that just made me better.”

“They would torture him,” their father said, laughing. “But it was almost like that’s the way Preston wanted it. He always wanted to be in the mix. He just idolized those guys and followed in their path.”

When his brothers would leave the driveway and go over to the gym in nearby North Babylon to be coached  by Jerry Powell, a well-known local trainer, Preston would try to tag along. Sometimes, though, he was just too young. Powell was known for his gruffness and directness, a style much better suited to high school players looking to develop their skills than kids who were Preston’s age just starting out in the sport. Powell had reduced plenty of younger players to tears. Preston, though, would cry when he wasn’t allowed to join in.

And there were times when John would drive Preston home from a game or practice in calm silence. Preston could remember those kinds of trips with his older brothers and how their father, then much more intense, would be loudly coaching and going through what had happened on the court. By the time Preston got to that point, though, John had mellowed a bit.

“I was a little bit of an over-the-top father with my older son in terms of basketball,” John said. “Very in-your-face, very forceful. But not so much with Preston. I mean, there is a 10-year difference. I wasn’t really like that at all. And Preston would look at me and say: ‘Cmon, you’re not going to yell at me?’ 

“What my oldest son probably couldn’t stand about me, Preston wanted all of that. He just loved what he saw and he wanted all of it, even the stuff you would think kids wouldn’t want. It was almost strange.”

He’s still like that. He wants to be coached. He wants to be criticized. He wants to work and be better.

When DePaoli wanted to congratulate Edmead  on being named the CAA Rookie of the Year and second-team All-CAA about an hour before one of the team’s practices last week, he knew exactly where to find him — in an otherwise empty gym shooting by himself.

“I told him, ‘This is why you are the rookie of the year, because you are the first one in the gym every single day,’ ” DePaoli said.

Preston used to be the smallest in the family. Now he is 6-1 and his brothers who used to pound him are 5-8 and 5-9. His father also is 5-9.

“He’s still kind of little out there on the court,” John said, “but in our house, he’s the giant.”

He is becoming one outside the house, too.

Claxton is Mr. Hofstra. They call him the Guard-father. He first led the program to prominence during his 1996-2000 tenure, recording 2,015 career points, 660 assists and 280 steals (the last two of which remain  school records) and helping Hofstra earn  NIT and NCAA Tournament appearances in his final two seasons. He then embarked on a 10-year NBA career that included a championship with the Spurs.

Jay Wright, the Hall of Fame coach who recruited him to Hofstra before winning two national championships at Villanova, told Newsday: “Him coming made an immediate impact and it attracted other players. And then him being Player of the Year [in the America East Conference] and taking us to the tournament for the first time was another step in him building Hofstra. It’s hard to imagine one player having more impact on any one program. Maybe Steph Curry at Davidson.”

Now Claxton is back doing it again as Hofstra’s head coach since 2021.

There has been un-ironic chatter of late regarding the building of a statue on campus in his honor. They may want to hurry with that because Claxton is the best player in school history . . .  but only for now. Edmead someday may make that a conversation.

“He’s playing way better than I played as a freshman,” Claxton said at the CAA Tournament.

He’s not the only one to make that comparison. Said Wright:  “He does remind me of Speedy.”

So much so that when Edmead hit the game-winner against Towson on Monday, Wright  sent a text to Claxton before the team cleared the court.

“I said: ‘He’s just like you. He held the ball until the end of the clock so nobody could shoot it except him,’ ” Wright told Newsday. “That’s what Speedy used to do. I would call a play and he would act as if no one was open, so at the end of the clock, he had to go make a play. It really was our best offense. And Speedy texted me back. He said: ‘That’s the best play.’ ”

It worked out well for Wright and Claxton back then. It’s working out pretty well for Claxton and Edmead again now.

“Hell, yeah!” Wright said.

Wright had seen Edmead play in person in November when Hofstra faced Bucknell, Wright’s alma mater. Add him to the list of those who remember with precision when  Edmead entered into their consciousness.

“He was good in that game, but I wouldn’t have thought at that point he’d be where he is now,” Wright said.

Claxton did. That was why after the game, he specifically brought Edmead out to meet Wright.

“He said: ‘I want you to meet this kid. He’s a freshman point guard and he’s going to be really good,’ ” Wright recalled. “Speedy made sure I met him. So I followed his stats and saw him continually grow through the season.”

To even start to approach Claxton’s legacy, of course, Edmead has to keep winning. And he has to keep winning at Hofstra. He is playing in a far different era than Claxton did; players rarely stay at one school for their entire careers these days. The bigger Edmead becomes this March, the more upper-echelon schools will start offering him NIL money and opportunities to play for them.

Hofstra definitely wants him back. Probably even more than it did when he was first recruited.

“I really, really mean this: We wouldn’t trade him for any other freshman in the entire country,” DePaoli said. “Not one. I don’t care who is doing what at Kentucky [Jasper Johnson], the kid [Darius] Acuff at Arkansas, Jermel Thomas [from Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx, who has committed to St. Louis University starting next season], we wouldn’t trade him for any other freshman in the entire country.

“He’s local and it’s such a great story what he is doing here playing for Speedy,” DePaoli added. “What more could you want?”

Edmead said he isn’t thinking about any of that right now, but he does sound as if he wants to stick around as long as he can, and those close to him expect he will.

“I’m staying in the present,” he said. “It’s amazing to be here. I love my coaches, I love my teammates. It definitely feels like the start of something, getting Hofstra back on track and getting to the NCAA Tournament. But we still have more work to do.”

That work will continue with an NCAA Tournament first-round game at some point this week (the site and opponent will be announced on Sunday evening). Perhaps there will be other games to follow this month, too. That would mean an NCAA Tournament win.

Not even Claxton was able to give one of those to Hofstra.

“It’s just been amazing,” Edmead said of this as-yet-unfinished season. “Crazy. A dream come true.”