Thomas Taylor ’22, All-Star player for Team Red is known as the “Red Rocket” on the court. According to Taylor, he takes his pre-Cluster Basketball preparations very seriously.
Taylor said, “My Cluster Ball ritual is actually a pretty extensive one. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. every morning, eat some oats, take a shower, shoot around the gym for like three to four hours before I start my day. After school, I go straight to the gym, no business. I drink about six egg whites or so, and then I get ready, shoot around, talk to the team. I get into the zone. I listen to a lot of music, a lot of K-pop. At around 5:00 p.m. when the game starts, I’m ready.”
Unlike many other Cluster Basketball athletes, Taylor has dedicated his life to basketball and looks for basketball-related opportunities in the classroom as well.
“I’ve been balling my whole life. I actually did come out of the womb dribbling a basketball, so I feel like it [is a] huge part of my life every day. If there were classes that pertained to basketball at Andover, I would take them. I actually wrote my History 310 paper about basketball,” Taylor said.
Taylor credits his team’s unmatched chemistry as a major success factor in the league.
Taylor said, “The difference [between other teams and us] is that they don’t have the same kind of grit that we have. They call us the Red Team, a lot of times Andover talks about eating red meat. Well today, me, myself, and the team are the red meat. We’re huge, we’re strong, and we’re ready to punish. I think we just have that over any other team in the league. The team chemistry is unbelievable. That’s how we win games. We see other teams, and they’re not necessarily thriving on the court. We go together like a family of red beings. We know basketball and we know each other. It’s like we’re all a family born from the same mother. It’s crazy, how you think we’ve known each other for 20 plus years and we’ve only met recently. I love it.”
