In the second game of the season for both teams,
the Irondale boys basketball team traveled to Anoka for a non-conference contest
last week. It wasn’t a highly anticipated matchup, considering that the
Irondale Knights went 1-18 last season and the Anoka Tornadoes finished 0-19.
That combined record of 1-37 is in the past now,
and both teams have new leadership in first-year head coaches who bring energy
and solid basketball backgrounds – including
college coaching experience -- to their new positions.
Irondale coach Trent Davis and Anoka coach Jesse
Jefferson are both 31 years old. They are Minnesota-born but spent time in
other states before returning. Both work with students in non-classroom roles
at their schools; Jefferson is a student achievement
advisor at Anoka and Davis is a behavior specialist at Irondale.
“It’s impactful. It feels good,” Jefferson
said of his job away from basketball.
Jefferson was born in Minneapolis and
moved to Georgia when he was 12. He played on a state-tournament basketball
team at Sprayberry High School in Marietta, Ga., and returned to Minnesota as a
player at Bethel University in St. Paul from 2011-13. He was a junior varsity coach
at Coon Rapids from 2013-17 before becoming a member of the coaching staff for
the Bethel men’s basketball team.
He’s in his fourth year working at Anoka,
and said he had never really thought about becoming a high school head coach
until he had spent some time there.
“I worked at the school for a few years
and fell in love with the school and the kids,” he said. “I wanted to change the
basketball culture.”
Davis was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew
up in Apple Valley. He attended St. Bernard’s High School in St. Paul, playing
basketball there on teams coached by Ed Cassidy that went to state tournaments
in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Among his teammates were future Minnesota Gopher Trevor
Mbakwe and Jordair Jett, who was the Atlantic 10 Conference player of the year
at St. Louis in the 2013-14 season.
“We had some good teams,” said Davis, who
played basketball at Wisconsin-Superior and became an assistant there after
graduating in 2014. He coached girls basketball at Gateway High School in
Kissimmee, Florida, for two years before returning to Minnesota. He spent the
last three seasons as an assistant coach at the College of St. Katherine in St.
Paul.
“It’s a pretty wonky coaching background,”
Davis said. He added that one thing he learned while coaching in Florida was
the importance of a basketball team with support that included a program to
teach the game to kids before they got to high school
“That made me come up with the idea that if
I ever take a high school job again, I would want more support,” he said.
Davis said he has found that at Irondale,
calling it “the perfect opportunity. I always wanted to stick with college basketball,
but if I had the chance to coach in high school I definitely wanted it to be a team
with kids coming up.”
Four Knights are averaging double figures
in scoring, with D.J. Anthony at 15, Dane Dedominces at 14, Drake Gomez at 12
and Jordan Tieh at 10.
At Anoka, Jay Nyamari leads the team with
a 22-point scoring average, Keenen Rodriguez is at 14, Peyton Podany at 13 and A.J.
Howze at 10.
Unlike Jefferson, who has been at Anoka
for several years, Davis is new on the scene at Irondale this year and learning
about the school and the students.
“I’m trying to get to know the players on
a game level at this point,” he said. “We want people to talk about Irondale
with a positive aspect and we want our players to be good young men, which starts
in the classroom. We want them to go to class, do their job and be students
first.”
Both coaches stress the importance of
culture on their teams, and both know that expectations – at least on the
outside – are not high this season. Anoka
is in the Northwest Suburban Conference and Class 4A Section 7. Irondale plays
in the Suburban East Conference and Class 4A Section 5.
“We have high expectations for ourselves
and I think we can compete to win our section,” Jefferson said. “We want to
compete in every game.”
Davis said, “I’m not sure how far we will
go. We could end up in the middle of the pack in our conference, which is tough
with teams like East Ridge and Cretin-Derham Hall, Mounds View and others. We’re
trying to take it game by game because it’s so new to me. … We really want to
get Irondale basketball on the map and get people talking about us.”
--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of
Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn
and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts.
Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org
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