By Ethan Ignatovsky
The day after, Adrian Stubbs was honored like a celebrity around the Maryvale High School campus.
As he strolled through the halls, videos and photos captured his every move, and quickly found their way to social media. All anyone could talk about was what he did the previous night, when he became the first Arizona high school basketball player to reach 100 points in a single game.
“Last couple hours: crazy,” Stubbs, a senior guard, said Wednesday afternoon, as the magnitude of his accomplishment began to settle in. “My phone’s blowing up, congratulations from a lot of people. The feeling’s amazing, obviously something that many kids dream of.”
The road to history began inconspicuously enough the night before in Yuma on the state’s southern border, roughly a three-hour drive from Maryvale High in Phoenix’s West Valley.
Maryvale’s boys basketball team arrived in Yuma for its farthest road game of the season against Kofa High School, but had seemingly left its offense back in the Valley through the first 1:29 of game action.
The two teams held each other scoreless, with Stubbs starting the game by shooting 0-for-3 from the field. No one in the gym had any way of knowing it at the time, but despite that start, Stubbs was about to kick off a life-changing night that would garner him national attention.
The 5-foot-10 guard eventually got the scoring started, powering through contact and sinking a layup off the glass. Instantly, he had found his groove.
Stubbs converted his and-one opportunity, split another trip to the line, connected on another layup and splashed one home from beyond the arc. In the blink of an eye, something special was brewing, and his fellow Panthers quickly realized this could be one of those games where Stubbs’s offensive prowess took over.
“You could see a look in his eyes, everything was falling for him,” Maryvale freshman guard Thiago Esquivel said. “I just knew, let him keep going until he can’t no more.”
From that point on, there was never a time when Stubbs couldn’t go anymore, and milestone after milestone flew by.
In lightning-quick fashion, Stubbs surpassed 57 points, breaking the Arizona 6A single-game record for most points in a game. By the end of the first half, he had dropped 70 points, flying past 75 points soon after and breaking the state’s overall record.
Stubbs didn’t stop there, climbing up and up toward triple digits. When the dust finally settled, he had nearly single-handedly beaten Kofa High School 109-25, scoring 100 of his team’s points in just three quarters as the Panthers improved to 8-5 overall.
“It’s good to dream about it,” Stubbs said. “Fantasize about having 100 points in a single game, but just going out there, I was just going with the flow. The game was falling, and I just kept shooting and it just happened.”
A 100-point performance is something that nearly every basketball player has dreamed of before, and Stubbs was no different. Yet, triple digits weren’t the milestone on which he had his eyes set.
A season ago, on Dec. 19, 2024, Stubbs had his first brush with the 6A single-game scoring record. The then-junior was an instrumental piece of Maryvale’s 77-75 victory over the reigning 6A champions, Liberty High School, scoring 56 of his team’s points, putting him just one point shy of Nico Mannion’s record.
Mannion is a legend in the Arizona basketball community. He racked up countless honors and was a consensus five-star recruit while playing for Pinnacle High School in Phoenix. He went on to play a season at the University of Arizona and was drafted by the Golden State Warriors in 2020, appearing in 30 games before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to play professionally in Europe.
Being that close to equalizing a basketball deity drove Stubbs to find a higher gear. He had a defined goal in mind.
“We got the win in that game,” Stubbs said. “But hearing that Nico Mannion has 57, (a) former NBA player as well, just gives me the motivation, all the drive to just go out there and just be the best I could and try to break every record.”
When it became apparent early in Tuesday’s game that Stubbs had a chance to break Mannion’s record, his teammates and coaches gave him the runway to do it.
Stubbs finished the first quarter with 30 points, accounting for every Panthers’ basket. He continued his one-man scoring barrage in the second quarter, and with 2:42 seconds remaining before halftime, he sank a step-back midrange shot from the left-hand side of the free-throw line to accomplish his goal.
The 6A single-game scoring record now belonged to Stubbs.
He didn’t stop there. Stubbs finished the half with 70 points, knocking on the door of the overall state record of 75, set by Fredonia High School’s George McCormick in 1966.
“My coaches were telling me in real time, kind of what some of these records were,” Maryvale coach Jeremy Smith said. “I thought the record was 72 … my assistant coach (Marcello Stone) let me know in no uncertain terms it’s 75.
“Seventy-five just seemed like the right thing, like you can get it, and now how far can you take it?”
Smith, however, wanted to make sure that there were no hard feelings between him and Kofa’s coach, Brandon Lovings. During the halftime break, Smith sought out Lovings, and the two exchanged their points of view.
“I went to him at half and said, ‘Hey, coach, my guy has 70 points,’” Smith said. “‘Just don’t think that this is me trying to run it up, or be unsportsman(like), or anything like that, because that’s not who I am.”
From Loving’s perspective, it was just basketball. Though Kofa dropped to 2-12 (1-6 in the Desert Southwest Conference), Loving’s post-game thoughts were complimentary.
“He had a special night and deserves considerable credit for his performance,” Lovings told Cronkite News in an email. “In my opinion, any time a player reaches a milestone like that, it reflects a combination of talent, preparation, and confidence.
“We tried a variety of defensive looks on him, including double- and triple-teams, and he still found ways to score. It was something special to watch.”
The only thing that seemed to be able to stop Stubbs was his own opportunities from the charity stripe. Stubbs missed a handful of free throws in the first half and stayed on the court during the break, foregoing a trip to the locker room to work on his craft.
The extra practice paid off, as Stubbs swished a free throw through the net at the 6:21 mark in the third quarter, giving him the all-time Arizona high school single-game scoring record. Then the march to 100 points began.
“The plan going into the game was never 100 points,” Smith said. “One hundred didn’t creep in until he had 70 at half, could he get maybe 80? Could he get maybe 90? And then when he got those milestones, it was like ‘He might get 100,’ which is phenomenal, but it was never the intention.”
With 1:06 left in the third quarter, it finally happened. Stubbs floated a layup over his defender and through the basket, becoming the first player in Arizona high school history to score 100 points, and he did it while accounting for 100% of Maryvale’s points through that point of the game.
Stubbs could have gone after one more milestone if Smith had let him: the national record for points scored in a high school basketball game, set by Danny Heater, who scored 135 points on Jan. 26, 1960, as a senior for Burnsville High School in Braxton County, West Virginia.
Stubbs wasn’t aware of Heater’s lofty total. Smith, on the other hand, was, but decided to sit Stubbs for the entirety of the fourth quarter.
“(Stone) said, ‘Hey, 135 is the all-time record,’” Smith said. “And I said, ‘Well, he’s not playing the fourth quarter.’ … We want to respect the game and (the) integrity of it.”
Even without 35 extra points, Stubbs’ accomplishment was about as special as it gets. The team celebrated by taking photos of Stubbs with a piece of paper that had “100” written on it, in reference to Wilt Chamberlain’s famous photo after he became the first – and only – player to score 100 points in an NBA game.
Stubbs and his Panthers teammates took photos with a “56” scrawled across paper after his performance against Liberty a season ago, and they were going to recreate the photo, no matter what. Kofa students made the upcoming photoshoot easier by providing the paper. They wanted to get their own pictures with Stubbs.
The fanfare didn’t end there. By the next day, Stubbs had made his way onto the social media accounts of sports giants like Overtime and SportsCenter, and reporters from The Athletic and TMZ wanted to talk to him.
Stubbs’ single-game achievement will live forever in the history of Maryvale High School and the state of Arizona, but the senior guard doesn’t want one game to overshadow the type of player he truly is.
He has yet to be recruited by any Division I programs and, according to 247, is an unranked recruit in the 2026 class. Stubbs averages 6.5 assists per game, per MaxPreps, ranking him third in the state and No. 71 nationally. He plays the game selflessly, getting his teammates involved, and they rewarded him by helping guide his 100-point masterpiece.
“I was like, ‘Bro, go get that 100,’” Panthers senior guard Abram Moreno Salazar said. “‘I’ll try to break the assist record. I’ll try to get the most steals in the game.’”
The Maryvale community has gone through some tough times recently, but Stubbs’ story is a reminder that great things can come from anyone, anywhere.
“People like to say we’re a Title I School District, we’re low income, low socio-economic thing, and that somehow that makes us less-than,” Smith said. “We’ve always told our kids that they could be anything, they could do anything.”
Breaking Mannion’s record and going on to score 100 points represent Stubbs’ lofty personal goals, but they don’t end there. He and his teammates, whom he describes as a “family,” have dreams of team success.
They’re all enjoying the moment, but they aren’t letting themselves get lost in it. If they do, they won’t be able to accomplish their biggest and most important goal of all: just keep winning.
“From here, I think we just stay in the gym, we stay composed, we stay level-headed,” Stubbs said. “We want to make the open division this year, and not only make the open division, but we want to make it far in the playoffs.”
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