Leland Anderson, 43.

 

Former Attleboro High star Leland Anderson (34) as a PC Friar.

The Attleboro area sports community lost one of its titans this past week with the death of former Attleboro High basketball standout Leland Anderson, 43, of lung cancer.

Full details are still lacking, but a post Sunday on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) by Anderson's former coach and Attleboro's athletic director, Mark Houle, provided sufficient confirmation of Anderson's death. It has since been further confirmed by other sources.

"I am saddened to hear of Leland Anderson's passing," Houle wrote. "My prayers go out to Leland, his family and teammates. He had an amazing personality and passion for basketball. (Attleboro's) all-time leading scorer and leader in our 1998 State Championship season. RIP #34."

Leland Anderson

Anderson, a 6-foot-8 frontcourter with superior shooting range for a big man, finished as, and remains, Attleboro’s all-time leading scorer of either gender with 1,629 career points in 74 games starting in his freshman season (1995-96). Although he played center for most of his high school career, he was even more comfortable playing away from the basket and was projected as a potential 3 or 4 player in college.

A three-time Sun Chronicle all-star (1996, '97, '98), Anderson reached the pinnacle of his high school career in his junior year. He scored 674 points (27.0 per game) that season, and he and fellow junior Derek Swenson (17.8) were the driving forces behind the Bombardiers' 25-1 record, Eastern Athletic Conference championship and eventual victory in the Division 1 state title game against Central/West champion Milford.

In that title game at the then-Worcester Centrum on March 14, 1998, Anderson scored 29 points and had 14 rebounds, Swenson scored 11 of his 16 points during the second half, and Jason Case, a senior co-captain, came off the bench to total seven rebounds and four assists. The Bombardiers used a 15-point run at the start of the second half as the springboard to a 63-58 victory, earning Attleboro its first state title in 55 years.

The victory had added significance because, just 10 days earlier, a horrible natural gas explosion destroyed a house on George Street. Two well-known city workers, Lawrence Poncin and Bernard Hewitt, perished in the explosion. Their deaths cast a pall over the city as the MIAA Tournament began, but Attleboro High's victory in the title game was credited with restoring joy to the city's residents in the wake of the tragedy. A complex of athletic fields off Oak Hill Avenue was named in the memory of Poncin and Hewitt.

Anderson also played AAU basketball for the BABC program led by famed coach Leo Papile, and that drew a lot of national attention to a player that might otherwise would have been overlooked because of the suspect level of his high school competition in the EAC. The result was Anderson being recruited by national power Michigan before his senior year.

The 1998 Attleboro title team.

But that's when Anderson's fortunes started to reverse themselves. Five games into his senior season, he suffered a painful thigh contusion that resulted in the formation of calcium deposits, and he was advised to sit out the remainder of the season. The Bombardiers did their best to overcome the loss of their leading scorer, reaching a sectional final against Bridgewater-Raynham at Taunton High before bowing out of the tournament, three wins shy of a repeat championship.

Injuries continued to plague Anderson when he arrived in Ann Arbor, and he missed a stretch of 10 straight games early in his freshman campaign because of back problems. He played in just 16 games as a Wolverine, averaging 2.1 points and 1.4 rebounds, with a career high of 8 points against Western Michigan on Nov. 27, 1999.

Anderson transferred to Providence College after that. He sat out a year per the NCAA rules of the time, but injuries continued to dog him once he donned the Friars' uniform.

He played just 40 games for the Friars, averaging 2.7 points and 1.6 rebounds in the 2002 and 2003 seasons, hitting a career-high of 14 points against Virginia Tech in 2002. He left the team following the end of the 2003 season despite having one more year of eligibility.

He moved to California and played semipro ball briefly in Long Beach, Calif., for the Hollywood Fame of the American Basketball Association, a developmental league that was sort of a last-chance opportunity for players trying to work their way up to the NBA. He also flirted with professional wrestling in the WWE, but achieved a different level of fame as a documentary filmmaker.

Anderson is listed as one of the three screenwriters (with Chris Bell and T.J. Mahar) of a documentary film called “Trophy Kids,” directed by Bell, that appeared on HBO in 2013 and is currently available on Prime Video. Here is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) synopsis:

“From the director of ‘Bigger Stronger Faster’ comes an intense look at overbearing parents in sports. The film asks the question ‘Do we want what's best for our children? Or do we just want them to be the best?’ Parts of this film were used in the premier of Peter Berg's HBO series State of Play.”

Anderson holds the second-highest single game performance in Attleboro High history, hitting 42 points in a game during his junior year.

Anderson's death is the second to strike deeply at the heart of the Attleboro High basketball community in recent years, following the passing of Rebecca Hardt in August 2022. Hardt, who was 46, finished with 1,221 career points (fourth overall at AHS) from 1990-94. Hardt's death came only a short time after the passing of her father, David, who was a top athlete at AHS in the 1960s and a high draft pick of the New England Patriots as a tight end out of Kentucky. Dave Hardt's career tragically ended in the first game played at Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro, a preseason game against the New York Giants, as he suffered a severe knee injury on a half-opening kickoff.