The coach Jerald Brown who is calling the shots from the sidelines for the Emmaus boys basketball team looks a little different than the forward Jerald Brown who stalked the court as a standout player decades ago in Texas. “I’m a 47-year-old young man, a seasoned man,” Brown says. “I say the gray hairs I have in my beard aren’t gray hairs, they’re wisdom highlights.” But, all appearance alterations aside, make no mistake about it: Mr. Basketball is back.
The title was bestowed on Brown in 1996, effectively crowning him the best high school player in the entire Lone Star State, all 260,000 square miles of it. Brown was born and raised in Houston, and his entrance into athletics seemed predestined, thanks to geography (“In Texas everybody plays sports,” says Brown) and genes; not only was his father a professional baseball player, but his mother and two sisters excelled in sports as well. Brown initially played football and basketball—“I always had a ball in my hand,” he says—but it was his tall, lanky build (he’s six feet, eight inches tall) that cemented his fate. “When you look at my size and the weight I had on me at the time, basketball was the obvious way to go,” says Brown.
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The same year he was named Mr. Basketball, he shared a court with Kobe Bryant and other future stars during the McDonald’s All-American Game. “We had a pretty strong class coming out of high school,” Brown says. He also played on the U.S. Junior Olympic team, which tangled with the best high school players from across the Atlantic.
Brown then took his hoop dreams to Texas A&M University, where he had to adapt to a new reality: “That was the first time I ever really experienced losing,” he says. At the time, the school was shifting out of the NCAA’s Division 1 Texas-centric Southwest Conference and into the Big 12, where competition was stiffer. Even though he was named the Big 12 Freshman of the Year for the Aggies, Brown says he slipped into a depression as the losses piled up, which impacted his play on the court. He even contemplated taking his own life. He credits an act of divine intervention on the side of a highway with keeping him from following through with it. From that moment on, his faith would play a prominent role in everything he did. “That’s my core, my foundation. Everything permeates from there,” says Brown.
Post graduation in 2000, he was unsure of his next move. His agent got him a tryout with an up-and-coming (and now defunct) professional team, the Pennsylvania ValleyDawgs, which was based in the Lehigh Valley and coached by NBA legend—Chocolate Thunder himself—Darryl Dawkins. It was Brown’s first brush not only with life in the Lehigh Valley, but also with experiencing four seasons worth of changing weather. Brown quickly learned, when it came to that white stuff that tended to accumulate in wintertime, he wasn’t a fan. “In Texas you don’t have to shovel sunshine,” he says. “Up north, you definitely gotta shovel snow.”
Brown wasn’t with the ValleyDawgs for long, but relocating to Pennsylvania was a clutch move for a different reason. He met and fell in love with his now wife, Reagan Brown, an Easton-area native. Before officially tying the knot, Brown toyed with the idea of playing professional basketball overseas while Reagan stayed behind in the Lehigh Valley. He made it as far as Germany before he came to his senses: “I got there and I realized she was the one. What are we doing? Why are we kidding each other?” They got married in 2002.
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Over the years that followed they had four children and moved back and forth between the Lehigh Valley and Texas several times. Brown says he wanted his children to spend some of their formative years in his old stomping grounds, soaking up the Texas way of life and quality time with family there. Brown’s brood finally settled in Emmaus in 2021. Around that same time, he decided he was ready to part ways with the lawn care business he had spent many years cultivating. “I wanted to be able to utilize the gifts and talent that God has given me to be able to impact the community,” Brown says. “I found a home in the Emmaus family, the Hornets family.”
Students at Emmaus High School first got to know him as a hall monitor, a part-time position he took on to supplement his income from the lawn care business. Brown was hired as a full-time student advisor for the 2023–2024 school year. In his role, he helps all grade levels make good decisions and work through issues that may be holding them back from reaching their full potential. “I love being able to walk with and reach 3,000 students each year to hopefully help make a positive impact on their lives,” Brown says.
"I love being able to walk with and reach 3,000 students each year to hopefully help make a positive impact on their lives."
But just beyond the hallways and classrooms, the thud of leather on hardwood beckoned in the gymnasium. “It was just time,” Brown says of his decision to throw his hat into the ring for the position of head boys basketball coach. “It was time for me to get back to the court.” Brown is not a coaching novice; he has several prior posts under his belt, including a brief stint as head of the Easton Area High School girls’ program. But, during his previous gigs wielding the whistle, the demands of raising four young children weighed on him: “You only have so much time in a day.” Now, though, with his youngest child a freshman at Emmaus High School, his family gave him the green light to pick up the coaching clipboard once again.
Brown calls this a rebuilding year for the Hornets, as the team moves ahead without the five seniors who graduated in June. “I enjoy galvanizing the troops, bringing them together for one goal, one mission,” he says. “I love seeing teams coming together and becoming one heartbeat.” And he’ll be drawing inspiration from a long list of mentors. “I’ve had multiple different coaches throughout my career that have taught me and led me,” Brown says. “And you have this wealth of knowledge that you want to pass on to the next generation.”
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Although his competitive playing days are in the rear-view mirror—“I am officially semi-retired,” he says—Brown can still be coaxed into a pick-up game here and there. There are things he thinks about from his heyday on the hardwood that make him feel a little wistful. “You miss the locker-room, the bus rides, and you miss the games,” says Brown. “You miss the fans, you miss the stage, suiting up and running through that threshold and going out and performing for the fans.” And yet Mr. Basketball is exactly where he needs to be. He has no regrets about never making it in the NBA. “God has placed me where I am supposed to be at this stage of my life to share with the community, and student body of the East Penn School District,” Brown says. “What a great honor to be able to serve!”
Published as “Insight” in the September 2024 edition of Lehigh Valley Style magazine.
