A second chance

Mistakes are part of life, and the bigger the mistake, the bigger the consequences.

A blown defensive assignment or a missed free throw can cost a basketball team a win, but Dalton High senior guard Tristen Harrell knows all about making real mistakes.

Real big mistakes.

He also knows a lot about redemption and making up for those mistakes.

Three weeks ago, Harrell — the Catamounts’ leading scorer for the past two seasons — signed a college scholarship with Auburn-Montgomery, celebrating with friends, family and teammates at Dalton High. It was just another step by those same friends, family, mentors and coaches to turn around the life of a young man who some once considered a lost cause.

And it was a long way from where he was three years ago, sitting in a solitary room at the Whitfield County Youth Detention Center, serving a three-month sentence for robbery.

“I made some big mistakes,” Harrell said. “Trouble follows you. Choose wisely. One little problem can haunt you forever.”

The mistakes of his past haven’t hurt his ability on the basketball court, but they are constantly with him. He holds onto them, looks at them and turns those mistakes over in his head. He thinks of those who were hurt by those mistakes.

He thinks of the day his mother, Brandy Harrell, drove him to the police department so he could turn himself in. He thinks of the look in her eyes. He thinks of his grandmother, Darlene Miller, the one person in the world above all others he doesn’t want to disappoint again.

He thinks of his older brother, Zavion, still fighting his own demons as he sits in Lee State Prison in Southwest Georgia after being arrested for burglary a year ago this month. He thinks of his high school basketball coach, Mike Duffie, who could have cast him aside when his mistakes got bigger and bigger.

He thinks of the people he had to turn his back on, and he thinks of the positive influences in his life he had to embrace.

“The people I was hanging with then ... watch the people you hang out it,” he said. “I eliminated all of the people that I hung out with. I began hanging out with the people I knew was going to ride all the way.”

Hoop dreams deferred

For the past two years, Harrell has been one of the most prolific scorers in the state, tallying nearly 1,000 points in that short time span. He and his teammates were a win away from making the Georgia High School Association’s Class 3A state tournament last year, and the Cats are a No. 1 seed heading into next week’s Region 7-3A tournament at Murray County. They need just one win in the tourney to secure their first appearance in the state playoffs since 2009.

Harrell is easily one of the best basketball players in Northwest Georgia this season, and to those who don’t know his history, he is seemingly a teenager whose life is carefree with a free education and college basketball on his horizon.

But it’s a long way from where he was three years ago.

To call Harrell a juvenile delinquent during his freshman year at Dalton High would be kind, and even after playing on the school’s ninth-grade basketball team and showing talent on the court, he rarely displayed the characteristics that make one others will follow — at least not in a good way.

“I know this sounds crazy, but we always knew he was a leader,” Duffie said. “We could tell that about him. That was something that we knew we had to turn in him, or he would be a leader in the wrong direction.”

But the right direction wasn’t winning with Harrell, and the problem was compounding quickly.

Harrell said he and a friend were in the hallway at school that year when someone told them there was marijuana in the bathroom.

“Being dumb, we ran right in there to see it,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

He said he lifted up the drain in the bathroom, saw the pot, then saw a teacher walk in. He ran back to class, but was called to the office. That was the first official incident, and it resulted in five days of in-school suspension, five days of out-of-school suspension and a new fashion accessory — the electronic monitoring device he had to wear on his ankle while he was on house arrest.

That was just the beginning.

Later in the year, he and some of the guys he was hanging around with wanted some cash, so they called in a big pizza order and gave an address a short way down the street.

“One of the guys jump out with a pellet gun, told the driver to give him the money,” Harrell said. “He dropped the pizzas and left, and we didn’t get any money at all. All we got was a full belly that night.

“We were walking home, and six police cars pull up with their lights flashing. They came to my house at 3 a.m., and I talked to the detectives, told them I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

The next morning at school, he got into a fight and was suspended again. Three days later, he was arrested for his role in the pizza heist.

“When you go to jail, it brings a lot out of you,” Harrell said. “It makes you think about the true meaning of life. All you want is your freedom. You just want to get out and be with the ones that you love.”

He went into the youth detention center in late March 2009. When he got out in June, he knew Dalton’s basketball team would be going to summer camps soon. He never thought he would get the chance to go.

“I thought that my basketball career was over,” he said. “I didn’t think that I would ever touch a basketball on Dalton’s court again. That really scared me.”

Dalton freshman basketball coach J.T. Westfield visited Harrell while he was incarcerated, but Harrell didn’t take that as a sign that all would be right with the team’s head coach.

“I thought coach Duffie was going to wash his hands of me,” Harrell said. “Coach Westfield came and visited me and came and talked with me, so I knew he was still there with me. But Duffie, I was scared that coach Duffie was done with me.”

But Westfield was lobbying, and Duffie was listening. Before the last camp of the summer, Harrell was told he could go with the team, but that there would be higher standards he would have to abide by to re-join the Cats.

“I am sure there were some raised eyebrows, but coach Westfield had a lot of belief in Tristen, and J.T. was mentoring him, and we could see a change,” Duffie said. “We just felt like he needed a second chance. He was just 15 years old, and some might have frowned on that, but that’s OK. We are here to help these kids, not just to be basketball players, but to be men.”

Big changes

Harrell started making the changes that were demanded of him by his coaches and his teammates.

“To a lot of people he doesn’t appear humble on the basketball court, because he plays with such passion and enthusiasm, but we saw a lot of humility in him,” Duffie said. “He was willing to listen, and not just about basketball, but life in general. His game and his personal life grew.”

His personal life may have grown, but the group around him had definitely gotten smaller.

“I’ve cut a lot of people that I used to hang out with,” he said. “Some of them are either locked up or in the ‘Busted’ paper every week. I cut them out. I started hanging with the ones that wanted what I wanted. People that want to go to college and want to succeed.”

Success on the basketball court didn’t come right away, though. As a sophomore, he was stuck on the junior varsity team, in part because Dalton already had a solid roster that would go on to win 19 games that year, and in part because of his past.

He started for the JV Cats, but spent much of the year as an extra body for varsity practices.

“I had 14 points my whole season on varsity, and I wasn’t feeling it,” Harrell said. “I thought I wasn’t going to be in the system. I thought about a change. I thought about moving. Coach Duffie and I sat down and talked, and he just told me straight up, you can’t come out of jail and expect to get a starting spot or a spot on the varsity. Others had earned their position.”

Duffie remembers Harrell’s sophomore year well.

“It was hard to get on the varsity floor with the talent we had, but I got comments from a lot of coaches about ‘that kid on the B team,’” he said. “We also knew we had to challenge and harness that energy and get it going in the right direction.”

Duffie had some ideas about that as well. Dalton’s football program has long had a mentor program for members of the community to help at-risk student athletes. Steve Laird and his wife Betty Sue, who had taught Harrell in middle school, stepped in.

“He has a great mother and a great grandmother, and we were just one more check person in his life,” said Laird, an accountant at Shaw Industries. “It really was just a matter of time and attention. It is a time deal.”

But Harrell needed another male role model in his life. He doesn’t openly talk about his father, and when senior night festivities were held at the school this past Tuesday, Harrell was escorted by his mother, his grandmother and his nephew. For Laird, who lost his father at the age of 10, he understood what not having a strong male influence in Harrell’s life could mean.

“I had coaches and other adults, and you need someone in your life,” Laird said. “The ladies have done a great job, but you need a man to show you how to be a man. I think that is the role of the coaches, a mentor, teachers. Everyone needs a positive role model.”

Duffie said Laird’s influence has been invaluable, helping teach Harrell about work ethic, respect, earning things, accountability and improving his grades.

“Nothing is better than the quote he gave me the other day,” Laird said. “He said when you have done your homework and have studied for the quizzes, it isn’t nearly as stressful. Now, he wants to go to school every day.

“One of the other factors is that people have changed their expectations of Tristen. When you expect him to do better, he responds to those expectations.”

Expectations are a big part of Laird’s hopes and plans for Harrell. But, he also knows that it will come back to Harrell and his decisions.

“The goal isn’t to go to college, it is about graduating from college, and we will keep taking steps,” Laird said. “It’s been a team effort. He still has a long way to go, and we are trying to get him ready to do this all on his own.”

At Auburn-Montgomery, which competes in the NAIA, he will have another male influence in coach Larry Chapman, who is in his 35th season as the Warhawks’ head coach. From the beginning, Chapman made the right impression on Harrell.

“I know I made the right decision. Going down there, it just felt like home,” Harrell said. “Coach loves me and knows who I am and knows my mistakes and what I have been through. I just feel like he is a good coach.”

Pizza box taunts

Still, all of Harrell’s success hasn’t stopped people from bringing up his past.

Starting with the first game against archrival Northwest Whitfield earlier this season, opposing team’s fans have been holding up pizza boxes and chanting, “You stole pizza!”

He takes it in stride, knowing he can’t erase his past.

“The first time they did it, it was pretty funny,” he said. “It made me laugh and (motivated me). I used it. I told them to keep doing it. Now, it isn’t really bothering me. I just block it out and play my game.”

And he even has a sense of humor about it.

“Just to clarify, for all of you fans holding Domino’s and Pizza Hut boxes up,” he said, “it was Papa John’s.”

But all he is concerned about is winning games, advancing to the state tournament and trying to set a better example for both his older brother and his nephew.

Zavion is far away, but Harrell said he hopes his changes will have an impact on his brother.

“People would call him a failure, and the streets got a hold of him,” Harrell said of his brother. “The streets just got him, but it’s never too late to turn around. I feel like what I have done inspires him to want to get out with his family and his son and just do right. He gets out in October, he has gotten his GED, and I think he will get out and make the right decisions.”

Making the right decisions is the key, and Harrell knows it. But learning from wrong decisions is perhaps the bigger lesson and has paid the biggest benefit.

“I felt like if I hadn’t gone through that, I would be locked up now,” he said. “I would be useless. I feel like everything I went through made me who I am today. You have to go through something to actually succeed.

“I know that I don’t want that life — at all. Waking up at 6:30 and rubbing floors, that’s no fun at all.”

But hitting game-winning shots and returning Dalton to the state tournament would be the culmination of all of those right decisions paying off in the biggest way.

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Dalton basketball standout Tristen Harrell overcomes past mistakes

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