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For the DeMatha High School basketball team, losing is a rarity. And losing in the team's biggest game of the season was not an option.

For the fifth time in the last six seasons under coach Mike Jones, the Stags can call themselves Washington Catholic Athletic Conference champions after beating Gonzaga (D.C.) 71-52, on Monday night at American University's Bender Arena.

Jones takes nothing for granted. On an annual basis, he treats Rock Summer League games with the same amount intensity and seriousness as WCAC playoff games. And with the talent that the Hyattsville school regularly attracts, it's not hard to figure out why the Stags are the most storied prep basketball program in Prince George's County history.

The players are a huge part of the reason DeMatha routinely is among the top teams in the region. Take junior guard Quinn Cook: He perhaps sealed his place as one of the program's all-time greats with his 30-point performance in the WCAC title game Monday. Cook, who connected on five 3-pointers against Gonzaga, has a propensity for taking his game to another level at crunch time. Jones said Cook shot 50 percent from behind the 3-point arc during the season and 60 percent from the field.

But Jones added that the stats only tell part of the story about Cook, whose father, Ted Cook, died of cardiac arrest in 2008.

"He has grown a lot since he came here, and I don't think he had a choice but to grow under the circumstances of losing his father and having to be the man of the house," Jones said. "Last year [as a sophomore] he had to deal with the team not being his. He even had to start a few games his freshman year, which gave him invaluable experience. I don't know what it is. It's nothing that we [as coaches] do. It's all Quinn."

Cook said his experience with the USA Basketball's U-16 National Team in the FIBA Americas Championships in Argentina last summer helped him prepare for this season's WCAC title game.

"I think it was the atmosphere out there," said Cook, who helped lead the U.S. team to the gold medal and will travel to Germany this summer to play for the national team again in the U-17 World Championships. "In that gold medal game against Argentina, it was like it was here [at Bender Arena], just five times bigger. I felt that I would be a leader of this team by this point. In my freshman year, coach told me they would need me and it would be early [in my career]."

But the Stags also have senior leadership like guards Jerian Grant and Victor Oladipo. While they may not be among the top scorers in the county — Oladipo averages 11 points per game and Grant averages 10 — the intangibles they've provided in their careers are a big reason why the Stags won their second consecutive conference crown on Monday.

"Definitely before the season, our goal was to go undefeated, but obviously we didn't do that, but we did accomplish our goal of winning a WCAC championship," Grant said. "We felt we had the talent on this team to be the best in the nation. We learned from our losses that that we could lose if we didn't come out ready to play."

Oladipo said Jones makes everything click for the Stags.

"I think the reason why we're here is definitely our coach," Oladipo said. "I think how he was on us the whole season helped us. He told us to listen to him, and every time we did, we won. We wanted to show everybody why we are the best in this league and win it for coach."

E-mail Terron Hampton at thampton@gazette.net.