The gift of basketball: Dalton State coach Alex Ireland received gift of newspaper article that helped start his path to coaching

Dec. 25—When former University of Florida basketball player Brett Nelson agreed to a 2001 photoshoot and interview about his shooting form with national newspaper USA Today, he couldn't have possibly known the impact it would have on an 11-year-old Alex Ireland.

Or that the feature, which appeared in the February 28, 2001 issue of the newspaper, would be hanging, framed, on the wall of Ireland's office in Dalton, Georgia, 22 years later.

Ireland is the head basketball coach at Dalton State College. When he received the spread on Nelson — which is headlined "Picture perfect" and shows four different photos of the different stages of Nelson's shot — as a gift from a childhood neighbor, Ireland was a kid that preferred watching professional wrestling to basketball.

"I like to keep things in my office that kind of bring me back to when I started falling in love with the game," Ireland said, showing off the framed feature in his office in Ottinger Hall on Dalton State's campus. "Coaching gets so tough and it's such a grind, that sometimes you just have to take yourself back to when you fell in love with the game, and that always helps me do that."

Ireland was gifted the article as a child by a nextdoor neighbor who saw, and helped instill, a burgeoning love of basketball in Ireland.

"Aunt Donna" was how a young Ireland knew the neighbor, though the two aren't related. Donna Repke was a friend of Ireland's parents.

A graduate of Duke University and a fan of its storied basketball program, "Aunt Donna" would ask Ireland's parents to put the Blue Devils' games on TV when she came over to the Ireland household.

"I was nine or 10 and just wanted to watch wrestling, so it annoyed me," Ireland recalled. "In order to annoy her, I would root against Duke, and when I found out that Duke's rival was North Carolina, I would root for North Carolina. From there spawned a friendship where she taught me how to fill out my first bracket and taught me a lot about college basketball."

Ireland remembers watching the 2000 Final Four of the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship as he began to become intrigued by the sport of basketball.

Repke then gifted him the article out of her copy of USA Today, and Ireland immediately cherished it.

"I had a little corkboard in my room, and I left it tacked up there all the way until I left for college," he said. Once he was hired at Dalton State in 2017 and became the head coach in 2019, the article left the corkboard and was framed for display in his office.

When Ireland received the article, he'd spend hours out on his backyard hoop, recreating those five steps to the perfect jump shot.

"It was one of the purest times for me in basketball. It was me in the backyard," he said. "I had a goal out there, and I just spent hours out there, and that newspaper article played a big role in that. I had been taught all of those things, but seeing it there, with a guy I was watching on TV. I would spend hours out there shooting, and then I would go back and check my form."

By the time he was 16 and playing high school basketball, Ireland was already realizing he wanted to be a basketball coach.

Another memento in the office is a ball signed by the 8- and 9-year-old players on the recreation league team that Ireland coached in his teens.

"I probably decided I wanted to be a coach when I was about 16," Ireland said "I just knew that my future would be in coaching and not playing."

Ireland attended college at Kennesaw State University. The men's basketball team was coached at the time by late Whitfield County native Tony Ingle, who would go on to become head coach at Dalton State and eventually gave Ireland an assistant coaching job in 2017.

"I went into a walk-on tryout with coach Ingle, who hired me here, and said 'I don't know if I'm good enough to play or not, but I want to coach,'" Ireland said.

Ireland might have still found a love for basketball without being gifted that piece of newsprint.

But that photoshoot and interview with a University of Florida basketball player from 2001 symbolizes for Ireland the developing love of a sport that he'd one day make his career.

"I think it's an example of the impact that athletics can have on our lives that goes far beyond wins and losses and the minutiae that we can sometimes get caught up in in coaching," Ireland said. "It takes me back to a time when someone that I really didn't know very well had a big impact on my life by introducing me to sports and basketball."

"It's had a huge impact on me and my life outside of basketball, and now I'm in a position where I can do that for other people."

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the 2023 Holiday Edition of Dalton Living magazine.