• PDF: Special Section: 2010 World-Herald Athletes of the Year

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On the biggest stages this past season and in the biggest moments, you saw Deverell Biggs.

A 35-point game in the state basketball semifinals. A 7-foot high jump at the state track meet.

Biggs craves a bigger stage, a Division I basketball arena. To get there, he has to make good in the heart of West Texas. In a town, Snyder, that has a population of barely 10,000. At a junior college, Western Texas College, that has an enrollment of 2,000.

His high school, Omaha Central, has 600 more kids than that.

“He's going to play Division I,'' Central basketball coach Eric Behrens said. “I don't know what level, but I think he could be Big 12 good, and I consider that really good.''

Biggs is aware of the looming culture shock of leaving his Miller Park neighborhood. But he's said it's the best for him personally and athletically.

“I'm going to try to go one year, but two years won't hurt,'' he said.

The 60th World-Herald Nebraska high school boys athlete of the year is the third in four years from the Omaha Public Schools. Omaha North had the previous two, Niles Paul in 2007 and Ron Coleman Jr. in 2009.

Coleman matched his junior-year achievements this past season by making the All-Nebraska football team and winning another Class A wrestling title, his fourth, to be the first from his school to be a four-time champion. He also went out for track and field and qualified for state in the shot put.

Biggs, however, had the golden touch that elevated him past Coleman. Without Biggs, Central would not have won its state titles in basketball and track and field.

Ask Behrens: “The kid has proven to be a winner. You look at the three championship teams he's been on in basketball, the two individual golds he won in the high jump and the team championship this year in track. I think he always performs best in those big moments.''

Ask track coach Elliott Evans: “He saved our bacon. Deverell had a lot of reasons not to come out for track and had he not, we wouldn't have had the points we needed to get the job done.''

After his freshman year, Biggs considered leaving Central to play football at Omaha North, but Central Principal Greg Emmel talked him out of it.

“Mr. Emmel wasn't going to let my transfer papers go through,” Biggs said, smiling. “He said, ‘Forget about it, you're not going anywhere.'”

Biggs comes from a family in which his six uncles and an aunt were athletes at Central. He attended Lothrop and Belvedere grade schools and McMillan Middle School.

“Childhood was very hard,'' he said. “My mom (Cherrese Washington) was a single parent with three kids, so it was kind of hard sometimes. But I thank God for her, because if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be what I am.''

Biggs made Central's varsity basketball team as a freshman, suiting up for the state tourney, although most of his playing time was on the junior varsity.

“I saw a really talented young kid who needed to learn how to play,'' Behrens said. “He hung around with Josh Jones and some of the other older guys and it helped him know what it meant to be a winner in a team game like basketball. He saw that it's a lot of individuals who get attention when on winning teams and he started to buy into the team-first mentality.''

Biggs came full-circle in that regard when he embraced Central's younger players, especially talented freshman forward Akoy Agou.

“He saw he needed the younger guys to come around if he was going to win a championship this year,'' Behrens said. “He figured out that sometimes it's a pat on the back that can go a longer way and he got a lot better with that.''

Central won its fourth Class A title in five years, and Biggs his third in four years, by getting past Lincoln Southeast in the semifinals behind Biggs' 35-point outburst and beating Norfolk 71-58 in the championship game.

By then, Evans knew he was getting the '09 co-gold medalist in the high jump back out for track and field.

Most of Biggs' spring workouts were merely conditioning on the track. Asked how many times he practiced the high jump, his answer was four. It probably was fewer than that in the long jump and certainly in the triple jump, in which Evans said he tried only a couple times before making it out of districts as a state qualifier.

At state, Biggs notched his mark on the all-time chart in the high jump — a tie for seventh at 7-0 — on the first day, then came back in the clutch by improving from seventh to sixth place in the long jump when Central needed every point against perennial state champion Kearney late on the final day of the meet.

“It was crunch time,'' Evans said. “Whatever was left was up to Deverell and he threw his best jump.''

Biggs cleared 7 feet with ample room to spare, suggesting he's a college-caliber high jumper, but track and field is probably behind him. Evans said Biggs returned the school's pair of size 12 jumping shoes, saying “I won't need these anymore. How about bronzing them and putting them in the trophy case?'”

“I might just do that,'' Evans said, “but they've only been worn four or five times and every high jumper has a size-12 foot. So we might need them again.''

Biggs is excited to receive the athlete of the year award, one he said he thought might have been his a year ago.

“Last year, my boy Burger (Coleman) got it and I said, ‘Well, I should have got it for I did a lot of things in basketball and track,'” Biggs said. “This year, it's kind of special for me because everything I've done I actually won.''

Contact the writer:

444-1041, stu.pospisil@owh.com

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