He’s a 20-year-old GM. His mother is the coach. Together, they’re trying to win the TBT’s $1 million prize.

This time last year, in the fight to earn a spot in The Basketball Tournament, Lucas Morrison was struggling. Red Rose Thunder’s general manager was suffering from a flare-up of Crohn’s disease.

“I’m not going to miss a game, no matter how bad I feel,” Morrison told The Inquirer.

Morrison made it through the end of that game, but later that evening, he was in the hospital.

Now, Red Rose Thunder has completed a three-year journey to making TBT and taking a shot at the $1 million prize. And Morrison, the youngest GM in TBT history at just 20, did it with his mother, Malin Morrison, the team’s head coach — and one of the first female head coaches in TBT history.

Lucas is autistic and has Crohn’s disease, which prevented him from playing basketball. But he loves the game, and so does Malin, who played growing up in Sweden before getting into coaching.

“Basketball has been in my life since I can’t remember when,” Malin said. “For me, coaching, I wanted the chance to give back and to pay it forward for what coaches have done for me in the past, and doing this with my son has been the greatest experience ever, because Lucas has two disabilities. He is autistic ... and he has Crohn’s disease, so he can’t do a lot of physical activity, but he loves the sport. This way, he can still be very highly involved and be part of the sport and the organization in a big way without actually playing the sport.”

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The Morrisons bought Red Rose Thunder, a pro-am team based in Lancaster, in 2020. The team competed in the East Coast Basketball League and the Brotherly Love Pro-Am league based in Philadelphia. But three years ago, Lucas had his sights set on TBT.

“We went to the West Virginia regional, and we went to the quarterfinals in Dayton [Ohio], and the atmosphere was spectacular, the teams and the level of players was great,” he said. “Watching that and being at that game, I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do whatever it takes to get here next year.’ Unfortunately, we were not able to do that last year, but this year, we were able to get in, so super grateful for that.”

But building a roster good enough to make a splash in the tournament was no easy feat. The Morrisons are an unconventional pair in TBT. About half of the tournament’s teams are comprised of alumni of certain colleges, like Indiana or Dayton, which form to play in the tournament. Other teams are charity-sponsored. The rest are teams from the pro-am circuit, like Red Rose Thunder.

To win in TBT, Lucas said, the team needed a strong point guard and a strong big man, and they could build out from there. Without traditional basketball backgrounds, the Morrisons relied on some of their early stars, like captain Maurice Watson, a Philadelphia native and Boys’ Latin alumnus, and Markus Kennedy, a former Villanova player, to help them make local connections.

But in the lead-up to the 2023 tournament, Lucas was experiencing flare-ups of his Crohn’s disease, which made it difficult for him to be on the sidelines with the team as an assistant coach. Lucas refuses to miss a game, but to make sure he was healthy in 2024, the team pulled out of the ECBL this season.

“We decided to take off from our ECBL regular season to focus on TBT, but to also make sure my health is in a spot where I feel like that now, my health is in probably the best spot it’s been since we started this team, to the point where I feel comfortable that my health won’t be an issue, hopefully, come TBT,” Lucas said. “I’m glad we took that year off and work through, got to see the right doctors, got to see the right people who could help so that I can now focus more on my health and focus on winning basketball games.”

That move paid off — Red Rose Thunder officially are in the TBT. Their management team doesn’t look like most TBT squads, but Malin said that’s their biggest strength.

“I don’t think I can work with anybody better than Lucas,” Malin said. “It’s not just because he’s my son. His disabilities are not really a disability to me, he’s starting to use it as his strength. He’s so organized and so focused and so able to do everything one step at a time. We worked a lot on his social skills, which when he was younger was his hardest part, but because we worked on things, we can step away from our roles of mother and son. When we’re running basketball, he would never refer to me as Mom. It’s always Coach. The lines, they don’t really cross. We work really well, and we are very professional when we’re working with the team. At home, we have the same issues as any other family, but I think we’re very strong because we have that bond, and there’s an understanding that most GMs and coaches wouldn’t have.”

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The energy of a family-owned team extends to the players, whom Malin said they treat like family. As a woman coach in the men’s game, Malin is used to players and coaches overlooking her, and that occasionally manifests in potential players for the Red Rose Thunder.

“It often takes a little while for players and other coaches to truly respect me as a coach,” Malin said. “They tend to overlook, ‘Well, she’s a woman, that’s not going to be a problem,’ but then they realize that I’m probably going to be their biggest problem. We keep on winning games, and then they realize, ‘Oh, she does know what she’s doing with players.’ I treat [the players] differently than many male coaches would, and some of them respond very well to that, and some players, they don’t see it the way we want to do things, and then it doesn’t work out.”

In addition to basketball dreams, Lucas has charitable aspirations, hoping to one day start a foundation to show children with disabilities that there’s a place for them in sports.

“You can still do things in sports, you still can do things in different jobs and have different opportunities, even if you have disabilities,” Lucas said. “It’s not a disability; it’s an ability to do things differently.”

Red Rose Thunder aren’t officially sponsored by a charity, but Lucas dedicated their appearance in TBT to Mekhi Clemons, a former Rosemont College and Red Rose Thunder player who died in September 2022.

“He was actually the first player that I ever told that I wanted to play in TBT and that this was the next step,” Lucas said. “And he always wore 13 no matter what, whether it was with us, when he was in college, high school. So we officially retired the number 13 last season and gave a framed jersey to his family and donated a check to a student, because he was a teacher, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Stetson Academy in Philadelphia. We will have 13 over our hearts on every jersey that we play in TBT this year.”

Red Rose Thunder plays its first game of the tournament on Friday against the Brown Ballers at 3 p.m. in Cincinnati. If it advances out of the region, the semifinal and final will take place at Drexel.