BLANK SLATE
Volcano Vista boys basketball coach Greg Brown has guided program from its inception
The decision, at the time, seemed unusual. Here was coach Greg Brown in 2007, coming off two straight championship game appearances with the Manzano Monarchs, including a win in the 2006 final, and clearly at the height of his young coaching career.
And then he left those comforts behind.
Why? To build something from scratch, among other reasons.
Volcano Vista, on the other side of town, was new. So new that in the fall of 2007, there was no varsity basketball team. The campus was built in an area that would consistently draw in new kids by the dozens.
Manzano had been turned into a powerhouse under Brown, true, but now he was attracted to this blank slate on the high desert of the West Side.
And sometimes, a blank slate is precisely what a coach craves. Call it an intellectual challenge.
This was a chance for Brown to spread his wings in a way he had never done before, to literally move into Albuquerque’s thennewest high school and put his hands into the dough, as it were, and mold the Hawks boys basketball program in his image.
There would be no coach to replace, no previous tradition at the school to uphold, no lingering beefs with parents of returning athletes. Everything, more or less, was starting from zero at Volcano Vista. It was his white canvas to paint as he saw fit.
“It was a decision I had to make,” Brown said of his choice to resign at Manzano and switch schools. “That was in the best interest of my family. It was a difficult decision.”
I’ve known Greg since his playing days at Albuquerque Academy which date to the late 1980s, and he is, if nothing else, a thorough, meticulous guy — much like his dad, Mike, the former Chargers coach. For the Browns, there is reward in precision.
Almost exactly a full 10 years after Brown bolted Manzano, you could just about say that his house at Volcano Vista was finally completed.
The Hawks, the No. 12 seed, last Saturday won the Class 6A championship, a first for this program.
They beat No. 4 Eldorado, No. 8 Atrisco Heritage and No. 2 Las Cruces last week, culminating with a 47-39 victory over the Bulldawgs in the final. No nerves, just steel.
And, just a year after that eyepopping postseason run by 11 seed Rio Rancho, the Hawks went out and set the bar a little higher.
“You know when you have a special team, and the character of this team was second to none,” Brown said. “It was a deserving championship for the guys.”
Rio Rancho’s 2016 run teased the possibility of Cinderella.
Volcano Vista’s 2017 run will make every subsequent 6A tournament even more of a free-for-all than it already has become.
Atrisco Heritage coach Adrian Ortega last week, after his Jaguars upset No. 1 Oñate in the quarterfinals, said the state’s coaches grasp the current parity and that it’s there for anyone to take.
Strangely enough, I suspect Rio Rancho and Volcano Vista derive more pleasure from the way they won blue trophies, being off the radar, than even the top-seeded teams would have enjoyed had they been state champs.
The Hawks grinded out three Greg Brown specials in their unexpected run, not giving up more than 45 points in any of the three games in Week 2. His guards made shots, his team defended like crazy, and he had the best player on the floor in all three games in senior forward David Cormier.
When you add in Brown’s playoff experience, perhaps it is not all that surprising that Volcano Vista conquered the state.
The school didn’t start playing varsity basketball until the 2008-09 season. Brown’s first year, 2007-08, he had just a C-team.
This season was the program’s ninth. For comparative purposes, it also took Rio Rancho High about a decade to win its initial boys basketball title before the 2007 season.
“Building a program has been a process, and it’s taken some time,” Brown said after the Hawks completed their championship run last Saturday night at the Pit. “But we had faith (that) it was gonna come together when it was supposed to.”
It took some prodding for Greg to even join his team in front of the cameras and microphones after the final. He was sitting off to the side, next to his father, his mentor. Later, he remarked about how he always wants to make his dad proud. If you know the Brown family at all, then you know Greg Brown didn’t need to win this championship — or any championship — to accomplish that goal.
And now, with two rings at two different schools in the state’s upper division, Greg Brown further stamped himself as one of New Mexico’s elite basketball minds.
Volcano Vista struck gold with this hire. And the foundation of the Hawks’ house is solid.
“I’m glad,” Brown said, “that I got an opportunity to coach here at Volcano Vista.”