A Sense Of Self

Tom Nelson has used the game of basketball to define his identity and it's taken him from Portland, to Los Angeles, and now his permanent home in Boston helping others realize their own dreams.

By Danny Priest

@dpriest3

Massachusetts has a strong presence in the Division I college basketball world. All around the country, players from the Bay State are not only on rosters, but often making major contributions.

Just in the state itself, Boston College has Gianni Thompson (Newton, MA), Merrimack is home to Jordan Minor (Kingston, MA), and Kyrell Luc (Dorchester, MA) made his way to Worcester to play for the Crusaders of Holy Cross.

Expanding further and back in time, David Watkins (Dorchester, MA/University of New Hampshire), Sami Mojica (Chelsea, MA/Drexel University), and Mark Gasperini (Moscow, Russia/American University/University of Massachusetts Amherst) all had successful four-year careers at the collegiate level.

Not all New England products share the same connection, but many, including those six, share at least one experience. They are all products of the Brimmer and May school.

The tiny, k-12 school resides in Chestnut Hill no more than a mile away from the Boston College campus. The school has only about 400 students, but in recent years it has emerged as a basketball powerhouse and a hotbed for emerging, high-level basketball talent.

Each of the six players listed above and countless others who passed through Brimmer and May’s doors to chase a basketball dream were all greeted by the same person: Coach Tom Nelson.

Nelson has been with the school for 11 years and he’s helped countless young men reach their dreams. Oftentimes, he sees the potential in players before they can even see it in themselves.

Take A.J. Reeves for example. The Roxbury native is gearing up for his senior season with the Providence Friars and has scored 702 points in his first three years. The first time Tom Nelson saw Reeves, he was a skinny, five-foot-nine kid.

Talented? Sure.

Destined to be a top recruit? Not so much.

Nelson thought otherwise.

“I believed that guy, with the proper work ethic and he had it, could become one of the better players in the country,” Nelson said. “A lot of people laughed. His mom even laughed at first. Louise [his mom] was laughing like, ‘You really believe this?’ and I said, ‘Nah, I know this.’”

Nelson meant every word of it. He was right, too. By the time Reeves finished his senior season at Brimmer and May he was the No. 55 recruit in the country according to the ESPN Top 100 rankings.

From five-nine kid to one of the most sought-after recruits in college basketball, Nelson was right all along. It wasn’t the first time either. Thompson, Luc, Mojica, Watkins, they all share the same story.

Quietly, Brimmer and May, along with his involvement with the Rivals AAU program, has positioned Nelson to help a lot of kids realize their dreams.

Before he could use coaching as a tool to help others succeed, he needed the game of basketball to help give him a purpose in life.

Basketball As A Constant

Given his basketball network and what his resume shows (Phillips Academy - Andover for high school, Holy Cross for college) most would assume that Nelson is a New England native and spent his entire life in the area.

It’s not the case. Nelson came to Massachusetts alone. A 15-year-old sophomore on scholarship to play basketball for Phillips Academy. No parents, no relatives, no one to count on or talk too, just the game of basketball.

Nelson was born in Salem, Oregon. His mother, Vesta, was still a teenager at the time of his birth and sent him to California to live with his grandparents.

From them, Nelson learned discipline, how to be an athlete, and to maintain his grades in school. He described his grandfather as a “tough guy to be around,” but he learned a lot from them. By the time he was six, his mom had moved to Portland and his grandparents to Los Angeles.

His routine developed into spending the school months in Portland with mom and the summer months in L.A. with his grandparents. Despite a lot of back and forth and frequent change, basketball was always a constant.

Ask him and Nelson will tell you he’s from Los Angeles, but his basketball roots grew in Portland.

“In Portland, I was around the Stoudamire and Mashia families a lot, people that were pretty influential in Oregon when it came to sports,” Nelson said. “So, I learned a lot in my early years about how to play basketball from them.”

Nelson’s aunt was married to Eric Mashia, a fixture of basketball in Portland. His daughter, Erica, was the Oregon player of the year as a senior at Jefferson High School in 1995. Also in that 1995 class at Jefferson was a name most Massachusetts residents now know: Ime Udoka.

The new head coach of the Boston Celtics shared a lot of court time with Nelson growing up. Also playing in the Nelson, Mashia, and Udoka trio was Damon Stoudamire. The 1996 NBA Rookie of the Year was a few years older than Nelson and his counterparts, but they looked up to him and wanted to mirror their games after him.

Stoudamire now serves as an Assistant Coach on Udoka’s bench in Boston.

“I was just around basketball 24/7 as a little kid from nine years old when I started really playing all the way until the time I left,” Nelson said. “It was every day, all the time.”

L.A. may have been home, but Portland was where Nelson’s basketball family lived and his love for the game was born. When Nelson was 11 years old, tragedy struck the family that would alter the routine he’d grown accustomed to.

Nelson’s grandfather passed away and by the time he was 12, he and his mother had moved to L.A. with his grandmother. He still visited Portland, but with much less frequency, and Los Angeles was officially his home.

“When someone asks me where I’m from, I always tell them Los Angeles because that’s where I had to prove my worth,” Nelson said. “I had to go into that place constantly and prove, without family around or people that I grew up with when I was little, I had to go around and prove to those guys that I could really play.”

Constantly on the move and now away from his support system, Nelson needed the game to find his self-worth.

“I was on my own,” he said. “I had no uncles anymore, it was just me, my mom, my grandmother, and that was it. I literally had to walk out there and say, ‘I’m good enough.’ That’s where I spent a lot of my seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade years really trying to become who I became as a basketball player and person.”

Change Of Scenery

Though it wasn’t easy, Nelson stayed committed to the game. Despite not having a physically imposing frame, he kept getting better and better and interest soon followed.

Nelson’s exploits on the court caught the eye of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. The private high school of some 1,000 students wanted Nelson to come play basketball. Located 23 miles from downtown Boston, the school and situation were much different than the environment Nelson had been growing up in.

“I had never been to Boston, and I had only heard rumors about Boston back in the time where they said it was not really a place for Black people in the 90s,” Nelson said. “It wasn’t a place for me to be, but I was growing up in a place where there was a murder every day. Anytime I could go to a place that seemed safer than that I was happy to go.”

Eager to accept the challenge of proving himself all over again, Nelson was in. He was set to join the Varsity team as a sophomore. Nearly 3,000 miles from home and totally on his own, it was time again to see what the game could do for him.

“I was ready to go home right away,” Nelson said. “For the first couple of weeks, I was thinking ‘Why am I here?’ I felt like a fish out of water. I was used to the city and now I’m in Andover. Things were a lot different there and school was extremely hard.”

Always a good student, Nelson wasn’t fully prepared for the academic intensity at Phillips. To make things tougher, he didn’t have basketball to fall back on in the beginning of the new school year.

“I was challenged every day, in every aspect of everything I did. That can get annoying and hard and I had no family to go to, no one to cook me a meal, no one to just pat me on the back and give me a hug,” he said. “I’m 15 years old and I’m just trying to survive. My mother said give it until basketball season and I fought through.”

Nelson went home to visit his mom for Thanksgiving that year. When she asked him if he could make it through the full school year back in Andover, his response was simple.

“I think when I’m playing basketball, that’ll save me.”

It would.

Nelson returned to Andover and his next three years were filled with success on the court. He’d settled in and kept improving but getting recruited by colleges proved to be his next challenge.

By his senior year, schools back in California such as Pepperdine and Loyola Marymount started expressing interest, Division II Assumption College offered him, but Nelson had little knowledge of the recruiting process and he knew he didn’t want to go back home.

Eventually, Holy Cross expressed interest. Located 55 miles South down I-495 and West across I-290 from his high school campus, Nelson knew little about the school. He did, however, have a teammate from Phillips, Walter Brown, who had played for the Crusaders.

It was a small sense of familiarity in a daunting recruiting process filled with unknowns.

Dealing with everything entirely on his own, Nelson knew that Holy Cross wasn’t offering scholarships at the time. They’d have him on the team, but he needed a way to pay for school.

Nelson decided to do what he’d done three years earlier when he moved cross-country to play ball. He took another leap of faith.

“I really didn’t want to go home to California, I was trying to stay away from the situation out there when it came to the violence and the gangs, so I decided really on a whim that I would just go to Holy Cross and find a way to fund it, at least for that first year and see what would happen,” he said.

The decision worked. Nelson was a solid player at Holy Cross and he found a way to cover the tuition through a combination of loans and scholarships. He wasn’t making any All-Conference teams, but he did find his calling that would morph into his livelihood for the future.

Coach Nelson

Never a big star on the court for the Crusaders, Nelson was still an influential voice among his teammates.

“I could easily start telling early on that I was going to be a better coach than I could be as a player,” he said. “People would listen to me. Even the starters and the people who played more would listen to me about what my ideas were and about how we should play and what we should do. I had started formulating that maybe being a coach was the way I was going to go.”

After graduating Nelson went to work in the financial industry, but he just couldn’t stay away from the game for long.

He kept playing when he could and when he got offered to coach sixth and seventh graders for the Mass AAU program in the Holliston, Medway, and Franklin area, he jumped all over it.

Opportunities continued to build as Nelson accepted an Assistant Coach position at Dean College in Franklin in addition to the work he was doing with the AAU team.

“That really got my pallet going. We were really good. We were ranked as high as twelfth in the country. I was working for a guy named Gerry Corcoran and he was strong, a tough man, six-nine, just tough.”

Corcoran, who had spent time on Jim Calhoun’s staff at UConn, had a philosophy that Nelson agreed with and fully bought into.

“He coached the kids tough, he was hard on them, and he played basketball free and fast. It wasn’t a whole lot of plays that were run, we just defended man-to-man and got out on the break in transition. We were one of the better teams in college for the couple years that I worked with him. Then, he left and moved on and they let me become the head coach.”

Nelson was right where he wanted to be. The head man at Dean, doing the AAU work, and honing his craft as a coach. Coach them tough, but let the team play free and fast. It reminded Nelson of how he had played growing up in LA.

He continued to climb the coaching ladder and left Dean to join Don Spellman’s staff as an assistant at Framingham State. Spellman had seen Nelson’s fire and style in scrimmages with Dean and wanted him on his own bench.

In a couple years, Nelson helped transform the Rams from a six-win team to a conference contender. He had branched out and started his own AAU program called “Ballas” with his friend Sherwyn Cooper and the rag-tag group of middle schoolers he coached had turned into a highly competitive high school team.

Everything was trending up, then Spellman decided to step down as coach.

Nelson wanted the head coaching job. He deserved the job. The program had transformed, knocked off ranked opponents, become contenders, and he was at the forefront of it all.

He didn’t get it.

Just as quickly as everything had gone right, he was out.

“I felt like the rug got pulled from underneath me,” Nelson said.

“That was a really sour taste as a coach that was really not under my control. I had done a really great job and worked really hard, but I realized that sometimes working hard and doing a great job doesn’t always mean you get what you think you’re going to get.”

So, once again, as he’d done so many times before, it was time to move on.

Prove himself again.

Nelson quickly hooked on to the staff at Brimmer and May working under Greg Kristof. His plan was to take a transition year. He had accepted an offer to move his AAU team over to Expressions Elite with Todd Quarles.

Brimmer and May, Expressions, reset for a year and then move back to the college ranks. Nelson’s AAU program had some impressive talent. Makai-Ashton Langford, Greg Kristof. That year went by quickly and a new door opened. Kristof left, the Brimmer and May job was open, and suddenly Nelson had his path forward right in front of him.

Right Where He Belongs

Nelson’s dream had been to coach in college, but he couldn’t say no to the Brimmer and May job. Rather than coaching collegiate athletes, he had the opportunity to turn young kids into exceptional high-level recruits.

After a one-year run with Expressions, Nelson had planned to switch his AAU program back to being the Ballas. Like his coaching aspirations, those plans would change.

“I got a call from Vin Pastore,” Nelson said. “He said, ‘Hey, I don’t even know how many kids you got, but I love what you’ve done with your program, and I love what you do with your camera for Ballas T.V. The thing you guys do with promoting kids, can you bring that over to us and we’ll see what we can do with the Rivals.’”

Nelson had started Ballas alongside Cooper and together they had created the Ballas T.V. YouTube channel to show off highlights of the top prospects in the region. The talent, the camera, Rivals and Ballas, it was all a perfect fit.

“I knew that Vin was very loud, I had seen him coach many times, but I liked the way his kids played,” Nelson said. “It reminded me of Gerry Corcoran and what we did at Dean. Fast, up-tempo, not a lot of plays, but get out in transition and guard hard, man-to-man.”

It all came together at once and hasn’t changed since. Nelson has turned out college athletes with consistency at Brimmer and he, Vin, and the rest of the Rivals staff have turned that program into a grassroots powerhouse.

Now, Nelson knows exactly who he is and his philosophy is the same for his high school and AAU programs.

“I’m trying to win, but I’m also trying to develop individuals so they can become scholarship players or play at the highest level they can possibly play at, whatever that may be,” he said. “If it’s high-level Division III, Division II, or Division I, wherever it takes them, I just believe in coaching them so that their habits become correct each time they play on every possession.”

Nelson can’t help but to coach his kids hard because it’s within him.

“We believed in being in the gym a lot,” Nelson said. “When you put those things together, from being a kid and trying to scratch and claw to prove to people that I was good at basketball by working my behind off all the time, that’s why my philosophy is what it is now. I had to be that way in order to survive being a small guard.”

Nelson could have jumped ship a long time ago if he wanted too. He could have rejoined the college ranks, continued climbing the ladder and pursuing that dream, but his heart led him another way.

“The more that I kept doing it every year, I just kept saying to myself that if I leave here, who is going to do it? Who is going to be the person in my role? I’m pretty good at this role and I have a good quality of life,” he said.

Finally, after years of change, risks, and unknowns, he’s settled down in a place where he’s comfortable.

“Nobody can do what happened to me at Framingham State, where I thought I was working really hard and I knew I was working really hard, but I didn’t get what I deserved,” Nelson said. “In this situation, I get to control how I work and what I do, it’s the product I put out. I control my own destiny, so I’ve stayed. As I become older, I’ve just become more complacent and feel comfortable saying my self-worth here is valuable.”

Without Nelson, it’s hard to know where some of the New England guys would be. Maybe they still go DI, maybe they don’t, but the impact he’s made on their lives and so many more is undeniable.

“At first, I used to think I needed to coach Division I to prove to myself that I had more worth,” Nelson said. “Then, I realized my self-worth was really valuable where I’m at right now.”

Now, Nelson is a lot of things. An Assistant Athletic Director, a math teacher, a P.E. teacher, and a mentor. Brimmer and May is home.

He’s a long way from “home” in L.A., but between the Rivals and Brimmer, he’s exactly where he needs to be and he’s changing lives every year for the better. Basketball gave him his purpose and now he’s returning the favor, one scholarship at a time.

This story was originally published on threestep.com