HESPERIA — New Hesperia boys basketball coach Jason Price knows a thing or two about program-building. Combine that with his prior experience in Oceana County, and his hire was seemingly a no-brainer.
Price, who will also teach physical education at the school, grew up in Reed City, graduated from Western Michigan University, and was briefly athletic director at Walkerville before moving just outside Jacksonville, Florida in the late 2000s and taking over as boys coach at the brand new Oakleaf High School, which opened in 2010. Price built the program into a strong one that won three district championships and qualified to play in nine regional tournaments through a power rating system similar to the one used to seed Michigan districts. Price’s overall record was 241-166, highlighted by a 24-2 season in 2022-23.
It helped Price’s - and Hesperia’s - case that he had family on his side in Panthers’ girls coach Ty Elenbaas, whose cousin Chrissy is Price’s wife. The family - Jason and Chrissy have three kids, a son in middle school and twin three-year-old daughters - came back to the area to be with extended family.
“I got a call from him saying, ‘I’m thinking about coming back and taking a job here,’” Elenbaas said. “Through conversations of basketball with him over the years, I’m beyond excited. You look at his resume and he’s a phenomenal coach. He knows his stuff. A rising tide is good for everyone. Him coming in was great. I did whatever I could to put in a good word, because you talk basketball with him for five minutes, he knows his stuff.”
At Oakleaf, Price coached in a much different environment than in Hesperia. Families were more transient, owing to the nearby naval air station that brought kids in and out as service members were transferred around the country and even the world. Because Oakleaf opened in 2010, there wasn’t the same type of historic community atmosphere as exists in western Michigan. Still, Price enjoyed success, coaching dozens of collegiate players and even a couple of players who played in the NBA - Nassir Little, a first-round draft pick of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Jonathan Bryant, who was briefly part of the Chicago Bulls organization. Both now play overseas.
While the circumstances are far different in some ways as Price moves into his second act as a varsity coach, there are also similarities to what he is stepping into at Hesperia, whose last winning season was 2015-16.
“I think it’s structure,” Price said of what he hopes to apply in Hesperia. “In basketball, you have five people on the basketball court, but it takes more than that. We have to coordinate stuff from the junior high level, the elementary level, the high school level. You’re going to have waves up here. Down where we were at, we might not have had as many of those. It’s one of the things that I enjoyed about my growing up and being in this area, is being able to take a kid like we had in camp that might be a fourth or fifth-grader and see him develop and come all the way through in high school.”
Despite the Panthers’ lack of wins the last several years, Price sees some ingredients for success. The players are young and hungry. The facilities are in place; Price noted there’s never a lack of gym space to play in, and the locker rooms are being redone this summer. And already the Panthers are seeing evidence that putting in the work can produce improvement.
They saw that evidence at a team camp in Albion earlier in June, just weeks after Price accepted the job. In one scrimmage during the camp, Hesperia tangled with Tri-Unity Christian, which made it to last year’s Division 4 final four and lost in overtime to eventual state champion Concord - a game Price, not knowing he would soon be coaching against the Defenders but a basketball junkie nonetheless, was watching down in Florida. Price said his team led Tri-Unity after the first quarter of the scrimmage and ended up losing a close battle by 11 points.
“This is what we’ve done after six practices,” Price told the team afterwards. “What can we do after six months? What can we do after a year? What can we do after two years? I think that type of belief is what’s important. The support from the athletic director and the community is that they want something like that. Our AD (Kaden Seelye) comes from Rockford, a state championship team in basketball. We were talking and we’re just straight down the line on what good basketball programs should look like and how we need to go about developing it and growing it and investing your time.”
Price has enjoyed the welcome from the community, saying he’s been stopped several times by Panthers’ alumni in town offering well wishes. It evokes memories of his time playing for Reed City.
“These small towns sometimes are great places because they have people that are starved for real success for this school, because they really do care about it,” Price said. “The school here is the community. They really rally around the football team, the baseball team, the basketball team, and if they have any type of success, it’s such a really great feeling to be a part of it. At Oakleaf, you were part of 65 schools in the greater Jacksonville area...It’s a little different when you can do it in these types of communities.”
