Brandon Guyton stands behind five chairs as his teammates take seats on the bench during a timeout. His white headband perched slightly above his brow; his face tightens just a bit. He slaps his palms down on their shoulders as he bellows out words of encouragement.

Although he stopped playing minutes ago, his intensity hasn’t. The team’s captain knows the next seven minutes and thirty seconds are crucial and it is his job to make them understand the importance of extending their current two-point lead.

“He’s the guy on the team everyone listens to,” teammate Chris Lange said. “He has that kind of respect. He tells us what we need to hear to get us focused and ready.”

This time, Guyton, a senior, won’t jog back on to the court when the timeout is over. He’ll sit and wait for head coach Jerome Jenkins’ summons. He has already heard the announcer say “BG for three” two times that night, but more importantly one of the conference’s leading scorers, Montana’s Kevin Criswell, isn’t as effective as usual. Criswell would score 14 points, but turn the ball over five times and its Guyton’s defense, Jenkins said, that has made the biggest impact.

“… He has no problem going over and guarding the team’s best scorer,” Jenkins said. “We have a little saying that (the opponent) needs to be locked up and Brandon is like ‘he is locked up right now coach.’ The night before the game he says he’s locked up.”

When it’s all over, Guyton has spent the most time of all his teammates on the court — playing 32 minutes. Sacramento State is on a two-game win streak and the team captain still doesn’t have a moment to relax — there are still seven games to be played and the Hornets, with a 110-97 win over Northern Arizona on Saturday, are now 4-4 in the Big Sky and have a lot of making up to do.

“He loves to compete,” former teammate and last year’s team captain Derek Lambeth said. “He’ll be up until early in the morning playing video games — anything — cards, dominos — he doesn’t like to lose. He wants to lead the team, be the person who gets Sac State further than last year.”

Guyton was the leading returning scorer from last season’s record breaking squad. The team made it to the postseason for the first time ever, won a postseason game for the first time ever and finished with a program best 12-17 overall record and 5-9 conference record.

“I remember just praying please let us make the playoffs,” Guyton said. “I prayed so many days for that…”

Lange said from the beginning of this season, Guyton has made it known that just the playoffs won’t satisfy him this year.

“Brandon says, ‘Guys I want a ring, I don’t care about you, but I want a ring.'”

A Big Sky Championship ring.

The truth is he really does care about the rest of them. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have nailed 61 3-pointers so far this season. With six games left, he is well on his way to surpassing last season’s 64.

Whether he is two inches, two feet or sometimes even further back from the arc, Guyton has no hesitation. He’ll square up to the basket, rise gently into the air and release the shot with follow through. While some opposing coach is yelling “shooter, shooter,” the damage has already been done.

“There is not a shot Brandon Guyton doesn’t like,” Jenkins said. “If he sees the rim, he feels like he can pretty much make it and to be totally honest, if he sees the rim I’m like, take the shot Brandon.”

What has led to these open 3-pointers often comes from a suffocating defense that Sac State’s offense feeds off of. Whether its chasing the opponent’s leading scorer around screens, shuffling his feet to stay in front of a guard or cutting off a passing lane, Guyton takes his role on defense just as seriously as his shot.

After ending last season in the starting lineup averaging 11 points per game in the Big Sky at the beginning of this season, Jenkins decided to have Guyton coming off the bench.

“I knew there was a possibility I wouldn’t start because there were so many guys,” Guyton said of the return of Joel Jones and Joseth Dawson and the addition of Jameel Pugh and E.J. Harris. “I just tried to keep a positive attitude. Last year, I came out of the starting lineup … I kind of had a bad attitude about it so it affected my play.”

So this season, when Jenkins moved Guyton back into the starting rotation after the Hornets got off to a 3-4 start and were struggling in the first 10 minutes of every game, he also gave him captain responsibilities.

“Even though Derek was leading us last year, Brandon was always throwing his little tidbits in,” Jenkins said. “So obviously it was just natural for him to takeover this year. He really had no other choice; I was going to put him in that spot anyway. The thing I like about it is that he pretty much embraced it and didn’t have any problems with it.”

But being captain has come at an expense of what Guyton is almost as well known for as his shooting touch — his comedy.

“Last year, I had a little bit more comedy,” Guyton said. “This year I had to get a little bit more serious as captain — leave the comedy to the other people. This is a group of comedians.”

So the guy who still has a reputation of randomly yelling in the middle of practices had to turnoff his mic his senior season.

“He really is wild,” Lambeth said. “He’ll just yell. Sometimes people will get all fired up, but other times people don’t know what to think.”

It wasn’t long ago Guyton was playing AAU basketball with Lambeth on a traveling team out of the Bay Area. Lambeth remembers that as 13 and 14-year-olds his team traveled to play a Stockton team in a tournament.

“There was one point guard who was a thorn in our side the whole time,” Lambeth said. “And then one day he just showed up at practice.”

Lambeth’s coach had asked for Guyton — the thorn-in-the-side point guard — to come play with them. There were countless trips in the car with his Dad, Bruce Guyton, to the Bay Area for practices and games. Lambeth and Guyton even won two tournaments in Las Vegas that spring and summer.

“My Dad drove me everywhere. He has done a lot for me. He comes to every game — you can here him, he screams a lot.”

The captain role is one Guyton takes very seriously. He is the third leading scorer on the team, and out of the top four scorers he is the only one who was with the team last season to get a taste of the playoffs.

“Everyday we don’t practice hard — that’s a day we lose. That’s a bucket we give up in a game or a turnover. Every little thing counts, especially in this league because a lot of other teams focus on the smaller things because they aren’t as athletic as us…they’ll set the screens, dive for loose balls so that’s what we are trying to do in practice.”

Working hard at practices is nothing new. As a senior at Tokay High School, he averaged 20 points per game and was named team MVP, as well as league MVP. He led his team to the playoffs, but after they were told they played into too many preseason tournaments, they couldn’t compete.

His high school coach, Mike Klarer remembers how hard-nosed and determined Guyton was as a player. He was a captain his senior year there as well, but what stuck out most in Klarer’s memory was a 20-minute running drill.

“Kids usually dropped out around the 15-minute mark. In my 40 years of coaching, (Guyton) was the only one who ever finished it. If there’s anything that proved he’s determined, that’s it.”

Guyton hasn’t forgotten the drill, either.

“You had to run every minute,” he said. “We had people dropping out and throwing up. I barely made it. I think I dove across the line with one second left. That is probably the toughest drill I have ever done in my life. I’ve never done it since and I am pretty happy about that.”

After high school, he wanted to get away from Stockton and try something new, so he went to the College of Sequoias, a junior college in Visalia, Calif.

“There wasn’t much to do there, so you spend a lot of time in the gym working on your game and your shot,” Guyton said.

His freshman year, coached by George Tarkanian, son of Jerry Tarkanian, the Giants made it to the state finals — beating the state’s No. 1 seeded LA City — before losing to Porterville in the state championship game. His sophomore year, the team made it to the playoffs again before the team was suspended by the school for violations. A private investigation found the team committed no wrongdoing, but they were still not allowed to participate in the postseason.

“He was on a team of guys that were just talented,” Jenkins said of the Giants. “The one thing that I respected about him was that he never said a word. He never forced any shot. But when he got his shot he’d make like two, three, four, 3-pointers in a row. He played hard and never complained. I was like whoever gets him is going to end up with a steal.”

Jenkins didn’t have a scholarship for him and didn’t recruit him that hard. After his sophomore season, Guyton decided to go to Cal State Fullerton despite the fact he wasn’t going to be on scholarship.

But things started to crumble before the season started — he was a business major without a business class, he didn’t like where he was living, he was away from his Dad who was living in Stockton and he wasn’t communicating with the head coach all that well.

“It kind of felt like they showed me a lot of attention and then when I got there, they were like OK we got him — like they didn’t care anymore,” Guyton said.

He called Jenkins who was more than happy to add him to his roster. His first year, he spent as a redshirt and last season he played without a scholarship, although, this season he finally has one.

He has the third highest grade point average on the team and will be graduating in May with a degree in business management. He still plans to stay in sports, just on the business side, as an agent.

“It’s not really about making a lot of money,” he said. “It’s a challenge. Not everyone can do this, not everyone can start a business, not everyone can be successful in the business field.”

“Brandon is helping me implement the structure I want my guys to live by on a daily basis,” Jenkins said. “I don’t want them to just be good basketball players, I want them to be good people and to be able to survive in society because it is a tough world out there.”

Guyton says he is not ready for the season to end. He hears Jenkins and everyone else telling him to cherish these last few weeks because it will be over sooner than he knows.

“I’m counting the days. Every game I’m like damn, I only have so many more left,” Guyton said. “I already feel like I miss it, even though I am still playing … I definitely won’t be ready for that last one, that’s why I hope we can drag it out as long as we can. If the last one is in the NCAA tournament, I’ll be ready for that. I’ll be happy.”