From Moreno Valley to Riverside

Kawhi was born in Riverside in June 1991 and grew up in Moreno Valley — about 20 miles east of Riverside in the Inland Empire region. He attended Canyon Springs High in Moreno Valley as a freshman and sophomore, where he was a multi-sport athlete (basketball, football, track) and not yet a top regional recruit.

His father Mark Leonard was murdered in January 2008 — shot at the car wash he owned in Compton. Kawhi was 16 and a junior. He played in a state-tournament game the next day, scoring 17 points; he later said in a 2014 interview that he buried the grief in the practice gym and didn’t talk about his father in public for years. His family moved to Riverside that summer to be closer to his maternal aunt’s family, and he transferred to Martin Luther King High.

The 2008-09 senior year

Leonard averaged 22.6 points, 13.1 rebounds, 3.9 assists, and 3.4 steals per game as a King senior. The Wolves went 30-3 and won the CIF Southern Section Division I-AA title with a 71-70 win over Mater Dei in February 2009. Kawhi was named Division I-AA Player of the Year, California Mr. Basketball, and a McDonald’s All-American selection.

He had been recruited by UCLA (Ben Howland), Kansas, USC, Arizona, and Washington. He chose San Diego State (then a mid-tier Mountain West program) because head coach Steve Fisher had been recruiting him since middle school and because of geographic proximity — Kawhi wanted his mother to be able to drive to home games. The decision was widely seen as an upset; SDSU had never had a McDonald’s All-American.

King's basketball legacy after Kawhi

Martin Luther King High has continued to produce Division I prospects in the years since Kawhi — but no NBA stars at his level. The school retired his #15 jersey in 2014, the spring after his Finals MVP performance against the Heat. Kawhi attended the ceremony with his SDSU coach Steve Fisher and shot half-court jumpers with the JV team.

Riverside more broadly has become a basketball production hub: Reggie Miller (Riverside Polytechnic, 1983), Tyler Honeycutt, Larry Nance Jr., DJ Stewart, and Trayvon Reed all came through Riverside or Moreno Valley high schools in the past four decades. Kawhi remains the area’s biggest signature export and bought a 30,000 sq ft mansion in nearby Rancho Mirage in 2020 partly to stay near his hometown community.

Background facts cross-referenced with the Wikipedia article on Kawhi Leonard and Pro-Football-Reference / Basketball-Reference public records. Lead image via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).