Count the bucket!
A Long Island teacher and coach is the big man on campus after sinking a half-court shot that got a heap of Sachem middle schoolers no homework.
“The kids went nuts,” Jimmy Mellor, a Samoset Middle School teacher and Sachem North girls head varsity basketball coach, told The Post.
“I have parents from girls I coached 15 years ago reaching out to me — players who I haven’t seen in a while reach out. It’s absurd, it’s craziness.”
Mellor became the hometown hero last Friday during a pep rally when school officials announced that if an educator nailed a half-court shot, all students in the grade they teach would be awarded the coveted out from doing homework.
One teacher before him tried but came up short, but then Mellor, who teaches ELA (English Language Arts) to seventh- and eighth-graders — all of whom qualified for the coveted offer — was egged on by his students.
“They’re like, ‘Go, go, go, do it!’ ” he recalled.
The cool-handed coach had a trick up his sleeve — it wasn’t his first half-court bargain heroics.
“We’ll do things like that sometimes with the team,” he said.
“If they owe us sprints or something for missing layups or something like that, I may say, ‘Well, if I hit this half-court shot, then you guys don’t have to run at all.’ ”
He’s hit nothing but net in seasons past, just like at the pep rally, where a trove of middle schoolers rushed the court to cheer the best Friday of the year.
“You need that positivity once in a while,” Mellor said.