By Karrington Kincaid, The Seattle Medium
Seattle Prep Head Basketball Coach Granville Emerson has been recognized for his resilience and leadership through his first couple years of coaching the Seattle Prep basketball team.
Although Emerson has been around basketball most of his life, his journey into coaching was not easy.
Emerson’s journey began at the tender age of eight, evolving from his years as a youth player to a significant milestone when he took on his first coaching role. He began coaching his stepson at Chatsworth Recreation Center outside of Los Angeles, where his team clinched the regional championship for the first time.
Granville coached his stepson, who was 8 at the time, until he was 13 at Chatsworth Recreation Center outside of Los Angeles, where he coached his team to the regional championship for the first time. Emerson got his first coaching job when he was a teenager coaching 8th graders at Seattle Academy after not really looking for work in the first place.
“I found the ad for the job in the newspaper,” says Emerson. “With curiosity to see if I could land the job, I put in my resume about previously coaching my stepson and landed the job shortly after an interview.”
This early success paved the way for numerous opportunities. Emerson joined former high school basketball coach Calvin Johnson’s staff at Cleveland High School, initially as a volunteer assistant. Subsequently, he delved into coaching at AAU Friends of Hoop, a move suggested by his nephew Sterling ‘Sporty’ Carter.
After successful stints at AAU, Emerson took on the role of Head Coach at Northwest School, earning accolades such as Coach of the Year and Emerald City Coach of the Year in 2010. His journey led him to Seattle Prep in 2011, where he served as an assistant coach for eight years before taking on the interim role in 2018 and 2019.
Emerson’s breakthrough as a head coach came in 2022 when he assumed the position after the departure of the former coach, Mike Kelly. Leading a prestigious institution like Seattle Prep comes with significant responsibilities, and Emerson embraces the opportunity to integrate faith-based discussions and prayers into his coaching approach.
“One of the beautiful things for me being the son of a Pentecostal minister, and being raised in the church is that Seattle Prep is a faith base institution,” says Emerson. “So, I’m actually able to do the type things I’d like to do as a coach in terms of talking about God with my players and having prayers with my players.”
Emerson says that basketball is a metaphor for life along with the school’s mission under the ‘Cura Personalis’ which stands for the care for the entire person. Having an unselfish mentality as well as the need to look out for other people is one of the main things that the school promotes in sports and in real life.
According to Emerson, coaching basketball is more than winning and losing, it’s about the life lessons that are taught and learned along the journey.
“[one thing about] our program is the ability to understand that life is not always going to come your way, it has distractions, it has things you cannot control, Emerson explains. “Just like in basketball you have to learn to control the uncontrollable and be able to fight through any adversity that you may perceive to come your way.”
Basketball is a way of building up your character, especially with the amount of adversity that teams like Seattle Prep constantly face in the Metro League. With teams so many teams in the league competing at a high level, playing together as a team is a big piece of what it takes to be successful in the end.
“Hard work overcomes talent when talent fails to work hard,” says Emerson. “I thoroughly believe that so if you don’t have the most talented team, then I believe my job as a coach is to get players to play hard and then as a coach and a teacher teach them how to play the game and teach them how to play the game fundamentally sound.”
Beyond the court, the primary goal of Seattle Prep basketball is to nurture fundamentally sound players and men who can excel in various aspects of life. As he continues to lead Seattle Prep’s basketball program, Emerson’s hope is that his impact resonates far beyond the wins and losses, by shaping the lives of the young men under his guidance.