The seniors have known him since they were 5. Now he’s coaching Great Falls for a title
The story of how Kelton Talford and Kell Brown got here, standing in the balmy Columbia breeze days before they set out to win Great Falls’ first boys’ basketball state championship since 2012, begins when they were 5 years old.
Here’s the short of it: For 20 years, Great Falls coach Alex Fair ran a community basketball league in Chester County. It was a Pro-Am of sorts, one that hosted NBA, G-League and former college basketball stars. Talford’s and Brown’s fathers played in it.
Talford and Brown grew up around basketball. They’d work out with Fair growing up, knowing him as one of the best players to come out of Andrew Jackson High School in Kershaw, S.C., and who played ball at Newberry College.
They’d later attend Great Falls High School — a school with a special basketball history surrounded by a town that deeply cares about preserving said history. And then, with less than two weeks before their senior season, after previous coach Jimmy Duncan left to take the athletic director job at Northwestern High School, they and the rest of the Red Devils welcomed a man with a 6-foot-4 frame and a booming voice who walked into the Great Falls gym for the first practice of his tenure.
“The crazy thing is that (Fair) would always tell us when we would work out with him, ‘I’m going to coach y’all one day,’” Brown told The Herald, shaking his head with a smile. “But we never knew that our senior year, he’d end up coaching us.”
Everything happened quickly from there.
“Nov. 26 is when I got the call saying I was going to be the new head coach at Great Falls High School,” Fair said at an SCHSL press conference on Monday prior to the state championship game. “The season started that Tuesday. We practiced Wednesday. Off Thursday for Thanksgiving. Practiced Friday. Had Sunday off …
“We knew we had seven seniors, and we knew we’d made a good run the previous year. I told them I’d do more adjusting to them, then they’d do adjusting to me. It worked out a little bit. It got us to this point.”
Great Falls’ basketball group message
It took Fair two weeks to learn his players’ names. He set up a grade-check system in which players would get “passports” filled out by teachers every day during class. He texted in a team-wide group message — sharing motivational quotes and coaching directives — to establish a direct line of communication between a brand new coach and a talented team.
He sent players messages every day this season.
Brown on his messages: “It’ll be motivational. Sometimes it’ll be a Bible verse, or just a quote he finds. He reads a lot. That’s what he says, ‘You’ll never find someone who reads more than me.’ He just finds something out of a book, and if he sees it, he’ll send it to us. Every day is like a different quote. It’ll be like 4 in the morning, and he’ll text it.”
Talford: “Some way it’s going to tie into the game. It might not say it directly in the quote, but it’ll tie into the game. He might send us a quote, one day, about how valuable schoolwork is. He’ll say if you have a good day in the classroom, it’ll lead on the court.”
By using these unique coaching methods, he earned his team’s trust.
“When Kell and DJ Adams and I went with him, they rolled with us, and they went right behind us with Coach Fair,” Talford said.
“And just whatever he says, I mean, it’s gotten us this far.”
Ahead of the 1A state championship
Fair will lead his team out of the Colonial Life Arena tunnel Saturday at noon to take on Scott’s Branch for the 1A state championship.
In his collected yet firm manner, he’ll manage one of the most exciting teams in the state — one that presses full-court and regularly flushes away alley-oops. Their style of play brings what seems like their entire town across the state to see them play, like it did in Greenville.
Great Falls hasn’t lost to a 1A school all season, and it hasn’t lost to anyone since Christmas.
“It feels really good to be here,” Talford said. “We knew at the beginning of the season what we had to do and what we had to do to get here. And coach helped us.”
By leading these seniors, who he’d told a decade ago that he’d coach one day, Fair fulfilled a prophecy. And now he and his team are a game away from delivering history.
This story was originally published March 5, 2020 at 1:58 PM.
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