One of the biggest issues for this program is the fact that in tiny Prairie View stuck on the East side of Texas it is hard to recruit kids to a town where there is absolutely nothing to do. When there are more students in the HBCU than there are citizens of the town and neither one of them break 6000 you know you might have a problem.  Still, the fans that flood to the William Nicks Building to see the Panthers play are spirited.  Sure, there may only be a few hundred of them for the games (in a five thousand seat arena) but most of them are at least wearing purple and gold.  Prairie is officially a suburb of Houston but as any has ever been there knows it is very much it’s own little Texas flavored small town.   

You cannot blame last year on Beaty.  Big Z is a super post player who does all facets of the game well.  He is a spaceeater who has perfect size for the perils of the post.  He has a nice inside touch with his quick little push hot up to about 17 feet.  Beaty scores effectively down low with his variety of head fakes that allow him easy layups and nice little turnaround though at times he is a bit too unselfish.  Big Z can also run the court and gets his fair share of flushes fast break which for a guy going six nine and 235 is something but nobody gets in his way when he is storming in for two.  He can board with anyone and his low post defense is superb.  He is a true team player who is all about winning but had very little support to even think about doing that here.  At Prairie View basketball is about survival and he survived and even excelled.  Kudos to Beaty for staying all four seasons with the Panthers!  He would not be the product he is to the pros if he would not have worked on and rounded out his game after the freshmen success.  Beaty now knows how to combat triple teams and has the bulk and tenacity to hang with anyone in the world down low.  He also learned how to at least cut back on his fouls as he cut back the amount of disqualifications he received from 11 his sophomore year to only 4 this year.  Of course that might be a bit due to his reputation and the fact the refs don’t want to sit the star attraction (ala Wilt who never fouls out) as he did not foul out in Nicks.  He still did average almost four fouls a game and one by product of his reduction was the amount of shots he blocked as he dropped from over four a game to just under three.  That still was second in the SWAC and he did earn defensive player of the year in the league but that is primarily as he matches up with great big men all of the time down in the blocks and more than holds his own.  The ‘franchise’ still averaged almost 34 minutes a game and as one opposing coach puts it ‘if you are going to go to war against Beaty you better pack a lunch and this kid will bring it all day long and he is not going to hide.’  Reed is not the only gifted big man in the SWAC as players such as Julius Keye (these two gentlemen of the game had some epic battles) and Cornell Warner and Mr. Mean are no picnics in the park either.  Playing this kind of competition every night Beaty easily earned first team All-SWAC and he probably would have been MVP (Reed actually won it and deservedly so) if the Panthers would have been an upper half of the standings team.  They still finished 6th which shows you how good Beaty actually was.  But he sure misses winning as that is all he really wants to do is be part of a good team as the all-around skills he has developed are all about that.  This kid sure has come a long way from tiny Hillister Texas where he led his team to back to back state titles.  How Moore got him to forego the SWC schools and come to Prairie View is a miracle but playing here as the biggest of fish in this small HBSU pond has got Big Z more than ready for the battles in the pros.  The “Big Z” was without question the best player on a bad team in a small conference in the entire country.  And nobody can put a program on such broad shoulders and carry the team to a title quite the way Big Z does when it counts! 

The second best player for the Panthers is also a senior.  Guy Manning also has a chance of maybe sticking with some team at the pro level. Of course, that would have to be if some minor league sprung up out of nowhere and the late to the show Texas team missed the first five rounds of the draft and had to fill in their roster with local talent.  Yea, right like that could happen?  Manning is a physical small forward who can score and board (Manning had some huge games offensively for the Panthers and I mean huge). He runs the court well and is a good athlete.  He is of course nowhere near the athlete that most teams have at small forward and thus had a hard time defensively matching up with the likes of Purvis Short or Harry ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly.  Realistically he is a swing forward but with Beaty and Clarence Ludd around he was pushed down the three.  Manning of course switched back and forth between the two and at six foot six and 195 he was better suited at small forward.  He was one of the best forwards in the SWAC that is not a bulldozing big man and took advantage of this. He may not have the skill set to be a star at the pro level but is good enough to get a look.  And though his college career was not legendary it gave him an education and at least that shot and got him out of tiny Oakwood Texas.  For that Manning will be forever thankful and whoever gives him a shot no matter the circumstances will get a hard-working man. 

So with two senior studs that could and did match up well with anybody in the SWAC how did the Panthers get so bad?  Well let’s take a look at the rest of the roster.  The guard play for the Panthers was not good outside of the shooting heroics of Harold ‘Coffee’ Grimes.  Grimes is one heck of a shooter and kept the team’s honest versus Beaty down low.  Sadly, Grimes got hurt (knee) and missed the last quarter of the season. Grimes has an outside shot of moving on to the next level after he showed he could really light it up from behind the arc.  The ‘perculator’ really heated up a few times hitting over five threes in four different contests and he averaged almost thirty a game before he went down.  Coach Moore started the season with a three guard set James Gamble and Grimes starting and Cornell Lackey rotating in with them.  It soon became obvious that Gamble and Lackey were over matched on the perimeter.  They just couldn’t defend the bigger, quicker players in the out of league games.  Gamble and Lackey are more suited for NAIA basketball and Coach Moore started rotating in players to try and find some Division One athletes.  The biggest hope lay in an undersized point guard who improved as the season progressed and showed some big potential. Two other guards got some playing time with mixed results.  Sophomores Reginald Jones and Lamar Holt got more minutes as the season progressed.  Holt is a passer but not much else and was stuck most of the year on JV.  Jones is green but has a potentially good all-around game.  He can play both guard positions and by the end of the year was getting some serious minutes.  Jones can pass and score and though he might not be a star should be a solid utility player for the next two years for Moore.  Basically like all of the other positions on this team there will be open competition in the back court as no jobs are secured for next season for the Panthers. 

Beaty did have a trio of guys who took some of the pressure off him down low.  Senior Clarence Ludd was a good sidekick for Beaty.  He does not score much but does board and defends very well.  He has a problem staying out of foul trouble (ala Beaty) so his minutes were limited but he is just the type of player who will hang around in the minor leagues working his tail end off and hoping for the chance in the big time.  He does not have that level of talent but I would not give on this kid’s desire as he proved why he was here that he will do what it takes to get the job done.  Ludd is as old school as it gets but did bring toughness to the post though he is vastly limited athletically.  But man can he whistle a good tune and loves his jazz music.  Sophomore Steven “Mony Mony” Stevenson  is a defensive intimidator down low who will put it back in your face if you come in the key.  Stevenson has little game on the offensive end but showed real potential when he got his chance to be a true defensive stopper.  He is the best shot blocker on the team and that includes Big Z but he did not like being stuck on the bench last year.  Junior Lawrence Johnson who has two more years left at Prairie View.  He has been a solid backup who at one point was a complete project like Stevenson was when he got here.  But working with Beaty who is a true tactician of the game and loves mentoring young players helped both of these guys improve dramatically.  Johnson now has a decent inside offensive game and could always rebound though neither one of these guys will obviously ever be able to replace Beaty.  No one will ever come close to the level of player or impact Big Z had on this little town.  Senior Thomas Redmon is a board man who helps out and always come to play but got caught deep down the bench as Moore had to go with underclassmen to see what he has for the future.  Junior Larry Hagan got some minutes though they were a bit inconsistent.  He is a great shooter who had some nights he flat lit it up.  He does not bring much else to the table but Moore will need more scorers next year and he might be the best of the returning lot of being able to put the ball in the hole from outside the key. Juniors Raymond ‘Black List’ Reynolds and Walter McCowan similar to Johnson but have been kind of lost in the shuffle with all of the solid big guys up front.  They were beasts on the JV though and both can play.  Fellow junior Marvin Jackson is another solid combo forward.  Jackson got some minutes as the 3 spot last year and can play. He just needs to become more consistent.as he had some good games and some games he was awful in.  He will be counted on to get many more points this year.

The Prairie View Panthers were not good last year.  AS a matter of fact they have not been good since joining D-1.  This Texas team has become a joke not only in college basketball circles especially playing in the lowly SWAC but also to the rest of the world.  They are becoming synonymous with failure.  Of course some of that reputation carries over from the football program as Talking Heads jump on the easy targets.  Ironically that is with one of the great players in the country manning the post.  You got to wonder how bad things will get after Z leaves for the pros after one more year in the desert.  But for now the Panthers will try to regain there one hit wonder year of NAIA glory.  The SWAC is still the SWAC but this is D-1 basketball now and these kids need to step up.