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| Holland new Indians coach |
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5/24/2013
By Dan Manley
Advocate Sports Editor
Their names might not be household words. In fact, many haven’t even heard of the basketball mentors of new MCHS boys’ basketball coach Jason Holland.
But rest assured, Holland comes well equipped to his new job as he steps into a program with heightened expectations after last year’s regional championship run and trip to the Sweet 16 Final Four.
Holland takes over as the Indians’ new boss after leading the Oldham County Colonels to three straight 8th Region title games with two regional titles to their credit along with a trip to the Final Four.
“I’m just really excited about the support I already see for this program,” Holland said just 24 hours into the new job last week.
Why Montgomery County? Holland seemed to be just settling into a great job on the fringe of Louisville with a reported solid array of talent coming up.
“There’s no North Oldham or South Oldham to deal with,” was one of the elements that Holland talked about in his decision.
“With a young family we wanted to be in a great community to raise our children,” said the father of a daughter headed into the seventh grade this fall and a son who’s a second grader.
And don’t forget the basketball.
“It’s obviously a place where you have a chance to win every year,” Holland said. “A great, competitive high school basketball environment with a great facility and a lot of interest. It just feels like a place where a coach like me should feel at home.”
Jason Holland gives you the sense that he’d feel at home about anywhere, though.
Basketball for Holland began at the Red Bird Mission school.
He actually grew up at Beverly where there wasn’t even a stop sign to let you know you were there.
You don’t hear a lot about Red Bird these days. The tiny school, coached by the legendary John D. Wilson, hasn’t been able to compete with the big boys of the 13th Region in recent years.
But back in the 1997-98 season when Holland was there, the Cardinals finished 25-7 and lost to Clay County and the legendary coach Bobby Keith, 56-51, to deny Holland and his teammates a trip to the Sweet 16.
“I lived right on the county line (Clay and Leslie) and I could have gone to a number of schools,” Holland recalled. “But I had a grandfather who wanted me to go to Red Bird and that’s where I went.”
Holland was in a graduating class of 21.
“I knew every one of my classmates,” he laughs.
As for his high school coach, Holland doesn’t have enough time to tell you what he thinks of Coach Wilson.
“Not just as a coach, but as a father figure, as a friend. It’s hard to say how much he means to me.”
From there Holland had the unique opportunity to play for legendary (there’s that word again) Coach Roland Wierwille, the late coach of the Berea College Mountaineers who not only won 451 games at the school in his career but also turned a lot of boys into men. One former player has said that short of enlisting in the Marines, playing for Roland Wierwille during his coaching prime was the best preparation for war that anyone could experience.
“Coach Wierwille really got involved in every aspect of who your were,” Holland noted. “He made sure you were getting your grades, he made sure you were in the convocations, which were a big part of the Berea experience. He demanded a lot. I’d been on the happy train a little bit through high school and he just toughened me up a little.”
Unfortunately for Holland, the player, he arrived at Berea along with players named Daniel Brown and Tony Goatley. Those two guards just happened to score a combined 4,149 points during their careers, which didn’t leave a lot of time on the floor for other guards.
But Holland, as he had with John Wilson, learned a lot about basketball, about coaching and about life at Berea.
He had some entry-level coaching positions at Richmond Model and Lincoln County and then went to Florida to coach for a short time. He came back to Kentucky to take the Henry County job.
“We had a young family that was going to grow again and we felt the need to be back in Kentucky,” he recalls. “It was kind of late in the game that year, the Henry County job was the one that was available and I was happy to go there.”
After a “three-win season” for openers, things got better at Henry County and it was obvious to others that Holland was an up-and-coming coach. That led him to the Oldham County job where after a 12-16 first year his teams had three highly successful years. Next stop—Montgomery County.
“I’ve always liked to coach a team that can play fast and slow,” he said. “Sometimes you have to adjust because of the competition. Ideally, you slow down the other team’s offense with good defense and you play fast on your end and score a lot of points. Basically, you coach both ends of the floor.”
“My daughter (Zoey) is excited about the prospects of being a Lady Indian and playing in a great program, my son is at the point where he’s excited about almost anything and my wife and I are excited about being a part of a great community where you feel like a little hard work will yield some success,” Holland said.
The Family
Holland’s wife is Theena. She’s a Fairdale High graduate from the Louisville area where Lloyd Gardner had such a great run as the coach and where she became a basketball fan.
“I’ll get home and she’ll be telling me what we should have done better,” Holland said. “She’s definitely a fan of the game. But I just tell her that she’s a volleyball player.”
Their children are Zoey and Taytum.
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