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Roy High senior forward Elijah Sowards poses for a photo Wednesday, March 29, 2023, at Roy High School. Sowards is the Standard-Examiner's 2023 All-Area Boys Basketball MVP.

BRIAN WOLFER, Special to the Standard-Examiner

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Roy forward Elijah Sowards (22) shoots against a Clearfield defender on Friday, Dec. 9, 2022, in Clearfield.

BRIAN WOLFER, Special to the Standard-Examiner

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Roy High senior forward Elijah Sowards poses for a photo Wednesday, March 29, 2023, at Roy High School. Sowards is the Standard-Examiner's 2023 All-Area Boys Basketball MVP.

BRIAN WOLFER, Special to the Standard-Examiner

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Roy High senior forward Elijah Sowards poses for a photo Wednesday, March 29, 2023, at Roy High School. Sowards is the Standard-Examiner's 2023 All-Area Boys Basketball MVP.

BRIAN WOLFER, Special to the Standard-Examiner

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ROY — Between his junior and senior years on the Roy High School boys basketball team, Elijah Sowards made a lot of improvements.

He improved his general basketball skills: cutting, rebounding, shooting, post moves, finishing at the rim, defense — the sort of things that routinely happen over the course of a 32-minute basketball game on an 84-foot court.

Maybe the biggest offseason evolution happened in the approximately 7-inch space between his ears.

“I was very timid doing post moves. Big guys are in there and I’m thinking, ‘Oh I’m gonna get blocked or I’m just not gonna make the shot,'” Sowards said. “Just gaining confidence, you know, and that’s very important to me and to our team because I feel like they really relied on me.”

Everything came together for Sowards in his senior season with the Royals, from the various offseason improvements he made to him having a central role on the team this year to his teammates getting him the ball inside and letting him go to work.

He went from averaging 8.3 points and 5.9 rebounds per game as a junior to 18.6 points and 9.1 rebounds per game as a senior, helping Roy to its best season in nearly a decade.

Sowards is the 2023 Standard-Examiner All-Area Boys Basketball Most Valuable Player.

He shot 52% from the field, had seven double-doubles and took seven charges. Pretty much every game, he was Roy’s leading scorer and rebounder.

“I didn’t expect to do it every night, but my coaches, they all had high expectations for me. I was just like do what I can, work as hard as possible,” Sowards said.

Sowards was Roy’s only bonafide post player and at 6-foot-5, he defended his fair share of bigger players. It was critical for him to stay out of foul trouble, lest the Royals go without their offensive focal point and main defensive paint protector.

He fouled out once in 24 games played. Four times, he had four fouls. He and the Roy coaches worked a bit in practice on playing smarter defense.

“Honestly, he was a pretty smart player. We didn’t have to emphasize it too much throughout the season, he just kind of stayed out of foul trouble,” Roy coach Scott Hunt said.

As Sowards went, so did the team. The Royals were 13-6 when he scored in double figures and 1-4 when he didn’t.

In the only game he missed, Roy beat Ben Lomond 64-50 but the Scots shot 18 for 28 on two-pointers and outrebounded Roy 34-27.

“We relied on him heavily for a lot of the dirty work stuff that we needed to do. He was our rebounder, he was very reliable,” Hunt said.

Early on in the season, Sowards was a big difference between a win and a loss. He scored 31 points with 14 rebounds and four blocks in a 47-34 win at Bonneville.

Sowards had 30 points and 13 boards in a 63-57 region win over Granger, 22 points in a 12-point win against Hunter, 19 points and 14 rebounds in an 11-point win over Taylorsville, and 20 points in a 10-point win against Kearns.

“Oftentimes you’ve got to motivate players as the season progresses. Kids get tired, you have to kind of stay on them, find ways to motivate them. Some games the kids might not come to play. Elijah, I never had to do that,” Hunt said. “Elijah, when it was game time, was always playing hard. Practice, he’d always practice hard, never had a bad attitude.”

The second half of region play, Sowards was often double-teamed in the post and still had games of 30, 28 and 23 points. Sowards would visualize games beforehand and think hard about how he’d score points, how he’d adjust depending on opposing defenses.

Roy went 5-1 in the final six region games and won by an average of 23.6 points. The Royals got the No. 14 seed in the playoffs and beat Mountain Ridge 46-33 in a home playoff game; Sowards had 15 points and eight boards that night.

“A lot before the games, I’d get really — like try to get really motivated, thinking about like my family, my brothers I’m playing with out there, and thinking how we can take the next step. So I’d just leave it all out there. It’s my last season with these guys — that was kind of my main thought,” he said.

Sowards has been playing basketball since he was a little kid and has hopes to play in college. His love of the sport goes beyond seeing the ball go through the net.

“It’s almost like my escape place, like when you have so much pressure with other things, I could go there and have my happy place. I feel like basketball comes with a lot of things, you learn a lot of stuff and I feel like almost you get a family out of it too, so it’s really nice to have,” he said.

This season’s 15-10 record was Roy’s best since the 2013-14 season and it hosted a playoff game for the first time since 2015. Ultimately, the team fell short of its goal of getting to the state quarterfinals and playing at Weber State, losing to eventual 6A runner-up American Fork 63-29 in the second round.

A Roy resident, Sowards has attended the Northern Utah Academy of Math, Engineering and Science (NUAMES) since his sophomore year but kept playing basketball with Roy High. He went to Sand Ridge Junior High, so he knew the players on the Roy team and team chemistry wasn’t a huge issue.

He also knew what his role on this year’s team was going to be long before the season began. Hunt told Sowards throughout the spring and summer that he was going to have to step up and score, defend, rebound and “carry the weight.”

Sowards ended up accounting for one-third of the Royals’ team rebounds and almost a third of their points.

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.