Meet St. Joe's Lamont Banks

Lamont Banks only looks like a backstreet brawler.

Tatted-up like Dennis Rodman with arms like a longshoreman’s, a goatee and long hair, the St. Joseph Notre Dame Alameda basketball player appears to be the sort of chap you’d cross the street to get away from -- a teen-age version of a pit bull on the loose.

Wrong. While Banks is tough and dominant under the basket for the defending state champion Pilots, he’s also delightfully diverse -- the man of the house for a single-parent household of three boys and a mom, so accomplished at music that he teaches a class at his private, Catholic high school and so adept at baking that people are already talking Food Network star.

“Oh my God I can’t believe the things he makes,” Banks’ mother, Teresa, said. “He made a pineapple upside down cake and I almost ate the whole thing. I know when he’s ready to bake because he’ll give me a list to go to the store and get 28 Granny Smith apples and 32 ounces of cream cheese, vanilla, graham crackers, lemon and on and on.”

The amazing teen who will play Saturday in the Prep2Prep.com Tip-Off Classic at Newark Memorial High (vs. Berkeley, 3:45 p.m) also has befriended a special needs St. Joe’s student, has written a letter of condolence to a grieving friend of his coach Don Lippi and generally oozes so much character that he’s probably as valuable to his small school in Alameda as a person as he is a player (14 points, seven rebounds in last year’s state title game).

“Lamont Banks is one of the top five kids I have coached in 36 years,” Lippi said. “What a wonderful young man. He is a gentle giant around campus as he helps those who are different.”

Read Banks’ entire story by John Murphy of Prep2Prep.com HERE.