Bleed Big Red: Cam Perkins and Jay Johnson reflect on their basketball careers as Demons

“Lethal Weapon 3” is officially losing two members this year.

That’s a nickname Warner Robins head basketball coach Jamaal Garman gave to three of his players, who often sat at the top of the box score this season: Cam Perkins, Jay Johnson and Gabe Jacobs.

Perkins and Johnson, though, have played their final game in a Demons jersey after their playoff loss to Winder-Barrow in February.

The story of those two is one that’s a long time in the making. Both kids grew up around Garman and Demons basketball, their first introduction of the sport came at a young age.

Johnson’s first memory of basketball is playing at Sewell Circle park in Warner Robins. He saw the other kids playing, and he wanted to play too. Since it was right down the road from his grandma’s house, he went every day after school.

He didn’t start taking it seriously until he began playing Rec ball, when the people around him noticed his skill and told him should take the sport seriously.

When he became of age, Johnson was zoned for Northside, but his mother took him to Warner Robins. The rest is history.

When Perkins was four, he used to go across the street to Garman’s house every day after school to play, early Saturday mornings too.

Just because the pair had a long history with Garman, doesn’t mean they had it easy when they finally got to the high school.

Unsurprisingly, after dominating middle school, going into high school tryouts was no cakewalk.

“It was really nerve wracking,” Johnson said. “We won back-to-back [championships] in middle school, so everybody [expected a lot out of us]. Then coming to high school and seeing it wasn’t that easy, we had a lot of people in front of us. Coming [to Warner Robins High School], if you good at basketball, that don’t mean you’re going to play varsity off the rip. That’s just how it is, it’s a basketball school. We just had to adjust to it.”

“It was smoother for me than everybody else, because I was playing up,” Perkins said. “Then I got to high school, Keshun Houser left, so they didn’t have a point guard. So I kinda filled right in.”

Though Johnson didn’t play varsity right away, soon he got his chance with a few injuries. It wasn’t anything like he was used to, however.

“My 9th-grade year it was a couple of players that got hurt, and some of them got Covid,” Johnson said. “Then [Garman] texted me one day and said, ‘You’re playing varsity for right now.’ First practice, I about died. It wasn’t like 9th-grade practice at all.”

Perkins was used to the older players being hard on him, from day one the varsity crew treated him like an upperclassmen when it came to expectations.

“It was every day for me, every day,” Perkins said with a laugh. “Our senior captain used to get on me every day, and the coaches too. It wasn’t like, ‘All right he’s a freshman, he can make mistakes.’ It was like, ‘If you mess up, you’re just like them.’ Every day was hard for me.”

The team went 13-12 in their first year, and got bounced in the first round of the playoffs by Locust Grove 59-57.

That type of effort isn’t up to the Demons’ standards, but by the next year they started to see some results.

Warner Robins finished year number two 19-8 and secured a two-seed in the region tournament.

They made it past the first round of the playoffs this go-round, but got knocked out by Hiram 69-63 in the Sweet 16.

Hiram was knocked out in the next round by Eagle’s Landing, who made it all the way to the finals, and who also ended up in the same region as the Demons the next year.

Even with the volatility of high school sports, theoretically Warner Robins should have hit their stride and really made some noise in the state playoffs during Johnson and Perkins’s junior year.

Unfortunately, this became the hardest learning experience during their entire high school basketball career for the two.

The Demons finished the regular season 17-6, but were knocked out by Jones County in the elimination round of the region tournament 66-61. That ended their season, with no chance to play in the state playoffs.

It didn’t hit Johnson or Perkins in the moment, but when they saw other teams from their region still playing, it started to sink in.

“Really when we didn’t have practice, and seeing all the other teams play knowing they wasn’t really better than us,” Johnson said of when it hit him. “Not saying that we was the best, but we was one of the top teams we wasn’t supposed to lose that game [against Jones County]. Seeing everybody else keep going and playing, teams in our region made it to the final four.”

“It really didn’t hit me until around the Elite Eight [and] Final Four,” Perkins said. “We knew we was better than just about every other team in our region, like we could have been there where they was. But that one game that we messed up on cost us.”

But, you can’t have a high without a low. The two seniors share a favorite high in their careers — turning around their senior season.

Warner Robins started out the year strong with a 4-1 record, though the lone loss to Valdosta was a poor effort.

Then, they took their first road trip of the season and hit Jones County, Eagle’s Landing, and Dutchtown in a week. Two of those losses were by double-digits, and in the Screamin’ Demon Christmas Invitational they struggled against St. Anne-Pacelli’s 1-3-1 zone to fall to 5-5 and 1-4 in their last five.

But after that, the Demons only lost three games the rest of the way, including their final playoff loss.

Turning the team around became Johnson and Perkins’s favorite moment of their high school career.

“At the beginning of the season, didn’t nobody think we would have made it [to the Elite Eight],” Johnson said. “Beginning of the season, everybody was down on ourselves. When Heaven [Carson] came in, everything took a turn. Everybody got on the same page, it was real fun.”

Part of the disconnect was a distance between teammates, something that remedied itself throughout the season. Carson, a senior who joined the team mid-season, and his locker room presence was a big reason for that.

“Like they said when Heaven came in. When Heaven came in that first day of practice, in that first day of practice he was talking. Everybody was looking around like, ‘Who is this boy?’” Garman said. “But it was basketball talk. We hadn’t had that on the team. That moment he came to practice, that turned the whole team around. I even talked to Tat [Brooks] and Mike [Martin], my assistant coaches, about how practice was that day and how practice had been from there on out.”

“I would say this season was really big. We grew a lot closer, we were already close, but we grew a lot closer this year by going through those ups and downs at the beginning of the season…To be able to go from being a laughing stock last year, not making the state playoffs, to making the Elite Eight and making a real serious push to be in the Final Four, I would take this season right here.”

On the way, Perkins reached 1000 points against Jones County in January, an achievement you don’t often see in high school.

The thought wasn’t really there for Perkins, he didn’t even know how many points he had until the previous night.

“I really didn’t know how many [points] I was at exactly until the night before I hit 1000,” Perkins said. “But we played Jones County, it was a region game, so I was just, ‘If I hit it against Jones I hit it. If not I’ll just wait to next game.’”

But, he didn’t have to wait until the next game. His 17 points against the Greyounds was enough.

Despite the magnificent turnaround that saw the Demons win 16 out of their last 19 games, the season came to an end in their Elite Eight matchup against Winder-Barrow.

For both Johnson and Perkins, the realization that they’d just played their last game as a Demon came as soon as the buzzer sounded.

“I cried as soon as the buzzer went off, because we knew we had that game,” Perkins said.

“That was on us, though,” Johnson said. “It was some defensive strategies that we should have did that we didn’t do. Some turnovers that cost us.”

“We’d have a great spurt, but before that spurt happened we had a few plays that was costing us. If we just executed on those plays, we would have won the game,” Perkins continued.

The aftermath, once they got off the buses and went home, is when the reality hit even stronger for the two.

Both of them made sure to thank their teammates, and their coaches. To spectators, a coach is just someone who yells on the sidelines or in the huddle, and the end of the bench are just roster spots.

Johnson and Perkins made it very clear that they are not Warner Robins basketball, but the collective of every player and every coach is.

“They see the starting five, or the seven or eight people that play and think ‘Oh this is Warner Robins.’ But all them boys on the bench over there, that’s really what Warner Robins is. We’re all one,” Perkins said.

Though their time on a high school court is over, there’s something they can both take with them into the next phase of their life, as well as leave behind for the next generation of hoopers.

“Everything comes fast, don’t take nothing for granted,” Johnson said of what he took from his four years. “I can’t really pinpoint it, but it’s a lot of things they said when I was younger that really hit me now. I realize, they wasn’t lying.”

“People really don’t care about you. When you winning, everybody love you. But when you lose, don’t nobody really care about you,” Perkins said. “Keep your small circle of people you know that care. Everybody else, just leave it alone.”

For the younger generation coming up, the two have some advice.

“Be disciplined. Don’t worry about how they say it to you, just listen to what they saying,” Johnson said. “Don’t worry about how they saying it to you, because if you worry about how they saying it to you that’s just gonna bring your game down and make you not wanna play.”

“Trust the process. Everybody process is different,” Perkins said. “You might hear your name called your freshman year, you might hear your name called your senior year. Just trust the process.”

Johnson averaged 17 points per game and 6 rebounds per game his senior season. Perkins averaged 15 points, 4 rebounds and 4 assists.

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