The Nation Ford Falcons have hired Charles Brown as their next boys’ varsity basketball coach.
Brown comes from Central High School in Pageland, where he has been boys’ head coach for the past five seasons at the 2A program. He has been teaching at Central for the past decade and will be teaching in the technology career cluster at Nation Ford. He was named Central’s Teacher of the Year for 2022.
A native of Moncks Corner, Brown played three seasons of small college basketball with two of those seasons being at Spartanburg Methodist and one season at Limestone College. He finished his college education at Coastal Carolina University.
Brown has coached three All-State players over the past five seasons at Central, and said being at a bigger school intrigued him about the job.
“I hear they got great athletes here,” he said. “I wanted the opportunity to see if I can branch off from a smaller school to a bigger school.”
Brown said his philosophy is to have five players, play as one. Brown told the players in a meeting Tuesday he was going to be tough on them, but equally hard on himself.
“My goal is to teach them how to play basketball in the structure we provide for them,” he said.
Having played in college, Brown said it has given him an insight on coaching that he wants to make the program better.
“I am here to enhance what the kids can already do,” he said. “I am not trying to rewrite what has already been done. My expectations are to help progress these sophomores, juniors and seniors.”
He said his goal for year one is to make the playoffs, which the Falcons have missed the past three seasons.
“I think playoffs would be great for us this year,” he said.
Brown said he feels like Nation Ford has a lot of potential to grow moving forward.
“I am going to provide them with some structured freedom to play within the way we want to play,” he said. “Within the structure, we are still going to be detail oriented. Basketball is a simple sport. If you do what you are supposed to do that is half the battle. It is about how to play the game and how well you know how to play the game.”
Mac Banks: mac@fortmillprepsports.com, @fortprep
