There’s a new era ushering in for Tallassee basketball programs, and it starts at the top.
New basketball coaches have been introduced for the Tigers with Ty Hardnett taking the reins for the boys team and Richard Taylor taking over for the girls.
Both are familiar with how Tallassee works as Taylor was the assistant coach for both the girls and boys teams a year ago, and Hardnett is the co-defensive coordinator for the football team.
Hardnett boasts a ton of experience on the football field. He started his career in Dothan before working as an assistant under Hall of Fame coach Danny Horn at Benjamin Russell for three seasons. Hardnett then served a year at Greenville High School before taking up a spot in the collegiate ranks as the defensive coordinator for Faulkner University.
Last season, he served as the JV boys coach so this is his first year as a head coach for basketball, but he played at Horseshoe Bend under another Hall of Famer, Mike Boyd.
“My coaching philosophy has to be that hard work is going to beat talent every day,” Hardnett said. “We really want to get out and play the game the right way, through mechanics and through coaching. I would say my philosophy would be that we’re gonna really stick to the basics and be very, very good at the simple things.”
Hardnett has big shoes to fill after the departure of Keiven Mixson, who was a staple at Tallassee for many years.
But both new coaches say they’re going to hang their hat on defense.
“I expect us to be a young team, but we also return a lot of guys that played a lot of minutes last year,” Hardnett said. “We want to be big and be able to control the game through rebounding and defense. We have a lot of good team speed coming back, so we’re going to predicate Year 1 on playing great defense and being able to run and get easy buckets.”
It’s similar for the girls team, which is also coming off a less-than-stellar season.
Like the boys, Tallasee’s girls squad will return a lot of young players who earned valuable minutes last year and defense will be the name of the game, especially as the season starts.
“Going into the season, we’re going to focus more on playing defense,” Taylor said. “We do have some girls that can play defense, and I think if we can play a little better on defense then we can score more points. We’re going to look for transition points so we can get out and score a little better.”
Both coaches have familiarity with their teams, which they expect to work to their advantage in terms of transitioning to a new face at the helm.
“I think it should be a pretty normal transition because I am familiar with the girls,” Taylor said. “It won’t be one of those things where I'm a new coach trying to totally learn the girls. I think it’ll be a pretty smooth transition, and we’re just looking to really build off what coach (Alfonzo) Johnson started and really try to take it as far as we can.”