‘Pretty amazing, isn’t it?’ 3 AJ alumni coach in Upper State finals, show Kershaw love
About 30 minutes after the Great Falls boys’ basketball team had won the 1A Upper State title and punched its ticket to the 2020 state championship game in Columbia on March 7, head coach Alex Fair made a beeline toward someone in the crowd.
Fair walked toward Danny Wright, head coach of the Andrew Jackson boys’ team, and gave him a hug. Wright and Fair are cousins. They’re longtime friends. They were once teammates, even, when Fair was a senior and Wright was a freshman on the Andrew Jackson High School football team.
And this past weekend, they and Irmo girls’ basketball coach Monica Williams — all of whom are alumni of Andrew Jackson, a school in a town of approximately 2,200 people — coached in the 2020 Upper State finals.
“To have three alumni from Andrew Jackson in it is an awesome thing,” said Wright, whose team lost to Gray Collegiate on Saturday. “It shows what Andrew Jackson creates.”
All three coaches are at different points in their careers: Williams finished her second decade at the helm of the Columbia-based Irmo girls’ basketball program on Saturday. Wright has coached the Andrew Jackson boys’ team since the 2011-12 season. Fair is in his first year at Great Falls.
But the love and support for their alma mater is consistent among the coaches.
“It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Williams, whose team fell to Clover on Saturday, said in a phone interview last week. “From a small community, small town, small high school, all three of us coming out of Andrew Jackson — it’s just pretty phenomenal to me.”
When asked if AJ was a basketball school, Williams laughed: “Oh, no doubt about it,” she said. She then referenced Volunteers teams from “the 70s and 80s,” which included the 1982-83 state championship team on the girls’ side. “We’ve always been strong in basketball.”
Williams is among the best players to play in the Andrew Jackson girls’ basketball program. She’s one of 11 Volunteers to ever score 1,000 points, and she later played at the University of South Carolina.
“When we go back through history, we talk about her on the girls’ side, and we talk about Alex and George Singleton and big names like that (on the boys’ side) when we talk about the legacy of AJ basketball,” Wright said of Williams.
“She’s a legend, so we all know her name.”
Wright and Fair are also among the AJ greats. Wright was named Volunteer Athlete of the Year in 1999-2000 — the first before his three younger siblings, Teresa, Sheila and Daniel, to win the award. And Fair played in the North/South All-Star Basketball Game as a high school senior in 1997. He also played at Newberry College, where he was a two-time first-team All-South Atlantic Conference player, before coaching as an assistant at Northwestern for six years.
He’s now, of course, at Great Falls — a place that somewhat reminds him of his old school in Kershaw, S.C.
“Andrew Jackson has produced tremendous players, people who love the game,” Fair told The Herald after his team’s win on Friday night.
“It’s in a town like Great Falls, where everybody buys into all sports.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2020 at 6:12 AM.
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