Holliday overcomes past academic woes
Former Rancho basketball player Justin Holliday has spent life bouncing from hotel to hotel, apartment to apartment — searching for a place to belong.
After 18 arduous years, he might have finally found one.
Holliday, a 6-foot-5-inch scoring guard, was offered an athletic scholarship by junior college powerhouse Howard College this month. He will meet with the coaching staff in the next week for a final interview to determine if he indeed will be heading to Big Spring, Texas, this fall.
“I really didn’t have nothing,” he said. “Basketball really changed everything for me, honestly.”
Holliday sports an exuberant sense of bravado both on and off the court. There’s the grizzled exterior he developed to protect his mother and two sisters, and there’s the kindred spirit within that he developed by caring for them.
He grew up in South Central Los Angeles, his father abandoning him early in life. His mother worked odd hours to provide, often leaving Holliday and his sisters alone at the darkest, loneliest hours.
Holliday half-jokingly said he became the man of the house when he was 7 and turned to basketball to provide refuge amid personal turmoil.
His family moved to Las Vegas midway through his freshman year, and he attended Valley, where he disregarded school work and was expelled for fighting.
He played AAU basketball for the Las Vegas Punishers despite no experience at the high school level and earned a reputation as a top-notch local player before transferring to Clark with hopes of making the school team. The academic issues persisted, and he was ineligible there, too.
“Not knowing how to listen to people messed up a lot of things for me,” Holliday said.
Rancho afforded him an opportunity to recover scholastically, and he averaged 25.4 points in 19 games during the 2016-17 season.
“Getting in a structured environment allowed him to see ‘I can do a lot more if I do it like this,’ ” Punishers coach James Feltus said. “Toward the end of the season last year, he started to calm down a little more.