Josiah Brown may be final piece to a Malverne championship

The walk down an oft-traveled hallway in Malverne High School. The athletic department door that was left open. The administration officials that looked out of place in AD Michael Pelan’s office.

Football coach Kito Lockwood isn’t certain whether it was the last week of June or the first week of July, but he remembers almost everything else about the moment good fortune struck and sent a shiver through every small school football program across Long Island.

Malverne runs a comprehensive summer program for community youth and Lockwood was in the building because he supervises the physical education portion. Strolling past an office he’d walked by thousands of times, he glimpsed Josiah Brown and his mother, Denise, sitting with the administrators who handle enrollment.

“I had to take a few steps backward for a second look,” Lockwood said. “I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was really happening.”

Brown is a singular talent, one of the best players on Long Island and entering his final high school season before heading to Penn State where he will be a wide receiver and kick returner. He decided to transfer back to his home school district from Holy Trinity, where he’d helped the Titans win consecutive CHSFL AA titles. And his arrival has made already-formidable Malverne team potentially one for the ages.

The Mules last won the Nassau IV crown in 1991 and have never played for a Long Island championship.

“I’ve known most of them my whole life,” Brown said of his Mules teammates. “I grew up playing with them. I liked the idea of playing one more season with them and helping them get the exposure they deserve. . . . Now the goal is to help them finish strong with an LIC.”

Lockwood, now in his 14th season as head coach, first heard the rumor Brown might transfer in a spring phone call from a football parent and he said “For a moment I thought ‘wow – is this really possible?’ but I’ve been around long enough to know rumors are rumors until they are real.”

Watching Brown at Malverne’s first practice? Things got real pretty fast.

“His speed is a game-changer,” Lockwood said of Brown, who was also the Catholic 100-meter and 200-meter champion. “You can’t teach speed. And he knows how to use it.”

Brown had nearly 30 Division I scholarship offers. Coach Kirby Smart of national champion Georgia even arrived for an in-person visit at Holy Trinity by helicopter, touching down on the football field.

In the end, he opted for the Nittany Lions over finalists Georgia and Rutgers “because it was just the right fit,” he said.

Now he joins a Malverne team that already seemed poised for a breakthrough season. In the county’s winter seeding meeting, it was placed No. 2 in Nassau IV behind defending champion North Shore.

The Mules have been on a steady ascent since the end of a one-win 2019 season and now boasts the powerful two-way line play of senior Kevin Estime, Tristan Brunson, Hugh Wilkerson, Oliver Durisile and junior Aaron Munoz. Lockwood said of the Mules’ rise “the development of the line has been the biggest thing . . . they now have the size and the strength to everything we need them to do.”

Behind them are athletic playmakers like senior senior running back/defensive back Roy Brandon McLaughlin Jr., senior wideout/rover William Hartley and versatile quarterback/defensive back Chad Wesley.

And now they add Brown, who caught 21 passes for 425 yards and seven touchdowns in seven games with Holy Trinity.

“We were already a strong team and already thinking we could win the championship,” McLaughlin said. “He makes us that much more dangerous. (Defenses) will have to respect him and spread out the field . . . They’ll have to pick their poison – him or me.”

Asked if one player can truly make a difference on any 11-man unit, Lockwood replied “Football is the ultimate team sport where everyone has to play a role and wants to be the ultimate teammate, but there is always the possibility one player can make a difference. . . . We have a lot of players capable of making a difference. [Brown] is phenomenal. . . . he has every tool a football player could want and adds great experience.”

“Malverne is loaded with smart [and] talented players,” Brown said. “I hope to add something to the culture with my experience winning championships.”

Being dropped into an already-formed team and gaining a leadership role isn’t simple. Brown is doing it with an actions-before-words approach or, as Lockwood said, “the right way – by earning it.”

“Josiah is exciting to watch but gets his place by always being humble and respectful,” Denise Brown said.

It didn’t hurt that he’d formed bonds with the Malverne players in youth football and maintained those relationships even when he moved to parochial school.

“We’d played with him when we were kids, so he fit in naturally,” Hartley said. “And there’s always been something there. We’d all go to his games. He’d come to ours.”

Brown doesn’t exactly call the move to Malverne a homecoming. But he has felt the Mules warm embrace and the way they have reacted to having him at practice.

“Playing with them feels like it did when we played coming up,” Brown said. “The vibe, the energy is still there with us. And they welcomed me back . . . [and] made me feel good about being here.

“Now we’re all looking [ahead] for a championship season.”

By Roger Rubin

roger.rubin@newsday.com@rogrubin

Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.