Deon Mingo is shown on the sideline. (Photo Courtesy of Deon Mingo)
MAPLEWOOD/SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — The Columbia High School boys basketball program has been highly regarded in Essex County for many years.
With Deon Mingo at the helm, Cougar fans have reason to feel optimistic that the team will not only continue its tradition of success, but take things up a notch.
Mingo recently was appointed as the new CHS head coach, replacing Eugene “Bam” Robinson, who stepped down after a successful nine-year tenure shortly after the end of the 19-8 campaign this past winter.
Indeed Mingo is excited to guide the program, recognizing the immense basketball talent in Maplewood and South Orange.
“It’s a great opportunity, walking into a great community,” Mingo said. “Both towns are great. It’s a gold mine. It’s a rich basketball tradition.”
Mingo, a 1999 East Orange High School graduate, has been an assistant coach and head coach on the high school and collegiate level for more than 20 years. For the past five years, he was the head boys basketball coach at Newark Academy in Livingston.
Mingo’s goal is to bring home the program’s first-ever Essex County Tournament title. And to do that, he wants to make sure that the kids in Maplewood and South Orange go to Columbia, instead of other schools. Columbia has played in just one ECT championship game in the 76-year history of the tournament. It came in 2006, when they lost to Bloomfield Tech.
“My goal is to win a county championship,” Mingo said. “I know it seems far-fetched, but I really believe that it can be done. We just have to keep our kids in town and develop a relationship with the parents and the younger kids, at the middle school and the elementary school levels.
“My plan is to develop a relationship with the rec departments, the younger kids and the parents. I have a lot of young kids coming to my practices watching. We do a lot of conditioning and running at Floods Hill in South Orange. A lot of the seventh- and eighth-graders and incoming freshmen are there, they are invited. I just want them to feel like they are a part of this program because, essentially, those kids are the kids who are going to eventually build this thing back up.”
Mingo mentioned that he was able to convince three highly-touted rising freshmen to attend Columbia after they were considering enrolling at basketball powerhouse Seton Hall Prep in West Orange. He met with their parents and told them he wanted the three student-athletes to be a part of the Columbia program from day one. Sure enough, those three kids informed Mingo they will be CHS students. Mingo is now hoping that other standout players from last season will come back to Columbia.
But the players who are already in the program have made a strong impression on Mingo. The Cougars recently went 7-2 in a team camp at Linden and gave a strong effort in a basketball event hosted by Montgomery High School. The Cougars will also take part in the Linden Summer League this month.
“They are so receptive to coaching and this is always a coach’s dream,” said Mingo of his players. “They are respectful, eager to learn. These guys are great. We’re going to be fine; we’re going to be really, really competitive. It’s a different style of play from Coach Robinson; I do some things differently offensively. And defensively, we’re going to go after it; real, real scrappy.”
Notes – Mingo was a team captain and a three-year starter at East Orange High School, playing for head coach Ken Moss. After playing two years at County College of Morris, Mingo continued his career at Division II Bloomfield College for head coach Gerald Holmes. In his senior year, Bloomfield College won the Central Athletic Collegiate Conference title, though the team was ineligible for the NCAA tournament because it was transitioning from NAIA. Mingo, a shooting guard, was one of the top scorers in the conference and led the conference in three-point shooting. He still holds the Bloomfield College record for most three-pointers in a game, which is 10.
After spending a year as a graduate assistant coach at Bloomfield College, Mingo served as an assistant coach at Dwight–Englewood in Englewood for seven years. Mingo was then an assistant coach at Division III Rutgers–Newark for one season before getting his first head coaching job at North 13th St. Tech in Newark. In his first year in the 2015-16 season, North 13th St. Tech reached the quarterfinals of the North 2, Group 2 state tournament and finished with 19 wins. When North 13th St. Tech and Bloomfield Tech merged to form Payne Tech for the 2018-19 school year, Mingo went to East Orange Campus High School and served as an assistant boys basketball coach for then head-coach Billy Lovett. After one season, Mingo took over as the head coach at Newark Academy.
For the past two seasons, Mingo got to coach his son, Deon Mingo Jr., who recently graduated and will play at Rutgers-Newark.
Mingo also coached standout Chase Clarke, a 2022 graduate who is now playing at Division II Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., and 6-foot-6 Brendan Oliver, who transferred to Blair Academy after his sophomore year in 2022.
Photos Courtesy of Deon Mingo
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