Glen Burnie High School basketball coach Mike Rudd often jeered Anthony Hinton III for having the game of a 35-year-old player. Hinton was “old school” and one day, the coach said, his age would catch up with his style.
Hinton, however, died early Wednesday morning after losing control of his vehicle on Ritchie Highway and crashing into a tree, police said. He was 18.
“I love Anthony,” Rudd said of his four-year small forward and friend. “We’re all in a state of shock right now.”
At approximately 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, Northern District officers on patrol with the Anne Arundel County Police Department came across the crash site, according to a news release. The 2011 Infinity G37 Hinton was driving had veered off the road, police said, crossing over a raised median and past the opposing travel lanes before colliding with a tree.
Hinton, known affectionately by friends and family as “Manman,” was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. Paramedics transferred a 17-year-old passenger to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore with life-threatening injuries.
“You just don’t know,” his father Anthony Hinton Jr. said Wednesday. “There was only one Manman.”
This was not the first time Hinton Jr. experienced a tragedy. Last year, his oldest son, Dante Stansbury, was found fatally shot in a car in East Baltimore. The family is focusing on being there for one another before preparing funeral arrangements, Hinton Jr. said.
Hinton’s family described Manman as “the epitome of what you would want in a son” — direct, yet respectful, and a well-loved trendsetter. His coaches described him as the guy you wanted to be friends with, the person others gravitated toward.
“They all loved him,” said Glen Burnie football coach Alec Lemon. He remembered Hinton as being quick with a joke and able to break even the tensest scenario. “He always found a way to be positive.”
Hinton had just finished his first year at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, where the 6-foot-tall teenager played football as a defensive lineman — after playing only one season of high school football at Glen Burnie. Hinton graduated in 2023 as a veteran of the Gophers’ football and basketball teams.
Over the summers, Hinton would work at the coach’s basketball camps for kids, leading players in drills and exercises. When the season was in full swing, Hinton’s knowledge of the game made Rudd feel he had “an extra coach on the floor.”
“I just watched him grow so much as a person over the four years,” Rudd said.
Greg Avent helped coach Hinton on both the football field and the basketball court his senior year. Hinton was a “real light for the community,” Avent said.
At the start of the season, Hinton was the team’s sixth man, or the first bench player to the five-man starting roster. One day, the senior came to Avent and said he was ready to take the floor full-time.
His conviction, Avent said, got him a spot and once given the chance, “he made it hard for us to take him off.”
As a varsity basketball player his junior and senior years, Hinton and the Gophers went a combined 30-17. Though the team did not make it far in the playoffs either season, Rudd remembered Hinton as a clutch performer in tight situations.
The last basketball game of Hinton’s high school career, the Gophers traveled to Howard County to face off against Reservoir.
The contest was close, Rudd remembered, and with less than 30 seconds left in the game, Reservoir had a slight lead.
With 11 seconds on the clock, however, Hinton sank a three-pointer, sending the game into overtime and saving the Gophers’ playoff hopes for the second game in a row; days before, Hinton had made two crucial shots to prevent North County from completing an upset.
“He always had confidence,” the assistant coach said. “He was one of the most confident people I’ve ever seen.”
Glen Burnie would go on to lose to Reservoir in overtime, but Rudd still considered the final moments of regulation an achievement.
“I was so happy for him,” Rudd said.
