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Each summer, Greg Brown gets a break from his work at Northwest Whitfield High’s in-school suspension department. But the 27-year-old Brown, an assistant for girls basketball and freshman football, doesn’t really want a sabbatical from coaching — and for the past two years, he hasn’t really had one.
“That’s my hobby,” Brown said. “Everybody else is fishing and playing golf. I enjoy doing that stuff, but coaching’s just what I love to do. I’d rather do that than anything else.”
Brown recently finished his second summer as an AAU coach with the Georgia Elite’s 15-under girls basketball team, which includes a handful of Chattanooga players but is largely made up of Atlanta-area hoopsters who play a weekend travel schedule from April to July. The Elite’s original squad, which competed in 16U tournaments this year, is coached by Tim Ellis.
Well, Ellis is the stepfather of Baleigh Coley, who’s preparing for her freshman year at Columbus State after a senior season at Northwest in which the point guard was named The Daily Citizen’s All-Area Player of the Year. When Ellis decided to add a second Elite team in 2009, he asked the Northwest assistant to take charge of the younger lineup.
Brown was delighted to have the opportunity.
“It’s been a good experience,” he said. “You get to coach different kids, not the same kids you coach here, and it gives me an opportunity to be a head coach and kind of make decisions and learn a little bit more.”
The Elite were solid in their first summer, qualifying for AAU Nationals in 2009, but really took off this year. They won four tournaments and finished fourth at AAU Nationals the same week they took second at the Sophomore Super Showcase in Orlando, Fla.
When you hear Brown talk about the talent he has at his disposal, that’s not entirely surprising. He estimates there are six to eight future Division I players on his roster, including point guard Chadarryl Clay, who has yet to play her junior season at Chattanooga’s Girls Preparatory School but came home from Orlando with a scholarship offer from the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
On the other hand, those girls aren’t just taking Brown along for the ride. He has been an active part of the past four seasons of girls basketball at Northwest, a highly fruitful era that included a run to the Class 4A state championship game this year.
If you’ve seen the Lady Bruins play during that time, you’ve seen Brown at work. His involvement on game night is far more than charting shots or tracking fouls, and that’s a credit to Lady Bruins coach Margaret Stockburger’s trust as much as Brown’s potential.
“I’m pretty much in charge of the defense,” Brown said. “I implement everything that we do defensively and I pretty much call everything we do defensively. There’s not many head coaches that would do that.”
It’s hard to say where the line ends from a coach’s guidance to a player’s execution, but Brown certainly didn’t hurt Northwest’s defense this season. On their way to a 29-4 record, the Lady Bruins surrendered more than 50 points in a game just seven times and held 11 opponents to 30 or fewer points.
Stockburger, one of the area’s longest tenured high school coaches in any sport, has been a good role model for him, Brown said. He didn’t come to Northwest completely green, having been a boys assistant for three years and head girls coach for one at Tennessee-Temple, where he led the Lady Crusaders to the best record in school history, as well as an unprecedented region title and final 16 appearance in the TSSAA Class A state tournament.
Still, he’s learned a lot under Stockburger’s guidance.
“She doesn’t cut corners when it comes to fundamentals,” Brown said. “She preaches that all the time to the kids, that you’ve got to do the little things the right way because that makes a big difference. She’s been doing this for 30 years, so she’s seen it all.”
Having the chance to coach AAU basketball has added even more polish to Brown’s skills. Its high-level tournaments are a showcase for the country’s most talented players because college coaches, not surprisingly, enjoy the convenience of having a gym full of recruits rather than traveling the byways to watch a single player, the more likely scenario during the high school season.
In AAU basketball, Brown has a lot of talent on his side, but he’s coaching against a lot of it, too. That challenges him, perfects him and works him ever closer to his goal of leading a high school team once again.
But even with drives to Atlanta a couple times a week for practice, not to mention hitting the road for tournaments, Brown’s love of what he’s doing and the accompaniment of family ensure he’s not completely grinding it out during the summer. Joining him on trips are his wife and assistant, Carrie — at one point, the couple were both Lady Bruins assistants — and daughter Rylee.
“She’s 11 months old,” Brown said, “and she’s probably seen close to 100 basketball games.”
She might as well get used to it. If her daddy has his way, he’s going to be coaching basketball for a long time.
Marty Kirkland is Sports Editor of The Daily Citizen. You can write to him at martykirkland@daltoncitizen.com
