The air is hot and thick as hundreds pile into the Vista Ridge gym on a mid-November night. It’s McCallum’s first official game of the 2021-22 season, and they’re down several key players, some still playing football and others benched due to injury.

The time rolls around for team introductions, and he hears his name over the loudspeaker: “Five-foot-eight starting sophomore guard, Finn Corrigan!”

Hands sweaty and heart pounding fast, he stands up to high five his teammates and makes his way onto the court. “Wow, this is it,” Corrigan thought. “I’m on the varsity team now, and I’m starting.”

Although the Knights went on to lose that game, the memory will stay in Corrigan’s mind forever as the moment he first stepped onto the court as a varsity player.

Corrigan has several years of memories from playing basketball, but his journey with the sport starts much later than many of his peers.

“I’ve always been playing basketball since I was a kid, just shooting hoops with friends,” Corrigan said. “I started playing organized basketball when I was in sixth grade, which I realize isn’t super common.”

Corrigan goes in for a layup in the home game win against Travis on Jan. 11. The Knights demolished the Rebels, 66-21, at home on that night and then finished the season sweep with a 35-33 road win at Travis on Feb. 4 in a much tighter contest. Photo by Kennedy Weatherby.When Corrigan began playing at his middle school, St. Francis, he realized many of his teammates had been playing on league teams since their elementary days, so he joined a team outside of school.

“Most kids had been playing since third grade, and I was like ‘Wow, this is a bigger deal than I thought,'” Corrigan said. “So I played on a couple AAU teams, my most recent one is ATX Impact, and I’ve been playing that for two years now and I’m now playing at McCallum.”

Corrigan began playing for Mac last year as a freshman in the midst of the pandemic, which shortened the usual 20-game season to seven, meaning when he began his sophomore year on the varsity team, he had little experience playing in high school at all.

“It definitely is a little intimidating being a sophomore on varsity,” Corrigan said. “I mean, I was really nervous in my first varsity game with no experience. Freshman year, it’s obviously a freshman team, and it’s less serious, but at a varsity level it’s much more serious. There are playoff implications to every game and district games matter, so it is a little intimidating.”

Corrigan says that playing on varsity also has its perks.

“You’re playing with a lot more experienced players that can teach you a lot more,” Corrigan said. “I feel my growth and development this year substantially more than last year just because I’m playing at such a high level with such highly skilled players, and they just push me every day.”

At the start of this season, Corrigan was not the only newcomer to the varsity squad. After losing nine seniors, including all five starters, the Knights only had four returners and many crucial spots to fill. With an almost entirely new varsity squad, and several late-comers from football, the boys had some work to do on and off the court to build team chemistry.

“I think having a strong team bond is the most important thing for success on the court,” Corrigan said. “You can have a team full of all-stars that have no chemistry and you can still lose games, and that’s happened a couple times this year. St. Andrews was our first road win. It was a needed win because we dropped some games that we should’ve won. That was the first game where we started to gel with the football players, and we played a great team game.”

Starting last year on the freshman team, Corrigan began playing point guard. But he doesn’t take any credit for his success in the position.

“Coach Adame last year was the one who really put me into my role as a point guard,” Corrigan said. “He taught me that I’m the guard who kind of has to run the team and be the leader on the court. I’m so grateful to him because if he hadn’t done that, I don’t think I would be on varsity, and I definitely wouldn’t be as successful on varsity if it weren’t for him.”

“Finn is the unselfish type,” Adame said. “His willingness to put himself aside and open up the offense by distributing the ball to his teammates has always been something that I admire. He’s always thinking ahead, and he’s always trying to see what the defense is giving him and honestly that’s made him a well-rounded leader as a sophomore.”

Corrigan is not the only sophomore to make the varsity squad straight out of their freshman year. Charleston Rabb, a friend and longtime teammate of Corrigan, also made the team.

“I was always trying to figure out who was gonna be the guy to lead the team,” Adame said. “Finn definitely stepped up in that aspect and the good thing about that is Charleston is his yin to his yang.”

“We’ve been playing together ever since sixth grade,” Rabb said. “He’s a scrappy player and a great leader. We’ve always worked well together, and we feed off each other’s energy.”

Basketball has not only brought new friendships and experiences into Corrigan’s life, it’s also taught him life lessons that will stick with him forever.

“You need to be patient, and you can’t rush things,” Corrigan said. “If you rush things, especially in a game, you’ll make mistakes, so you just need to take things slow. And obviously, mistakes are gonna happen, they happen in every game, they happen every day in life, but it’s more about how you react after mistakes, how you keep getting back up after you fall down.”