Take a seat in his chair and meet Stroudsburg's Micaiah Brown, aka 'The Ballin' Barber'

On Jan. 27, Micaiah Brown was the starting point guard for the Stroudsburg High School varsity basketball team against rival Notre Dame-East Stroudsburg.

Most players would enjoy the 60-44 win and either celebrate with some friends, relax or even get back in the gym for more basketball.

Not Brown. By 3 p.m. that afternoon, he was at 560 Main St., engaging in his other passion: cutting hair.

Brown is a barber at the shop his father used to own, Pocono Barbers. He cuts alongside his two brothers, Isaiah and Josiah, and a few others with a chair in the shop. And it was his brothers that inspired him to pursue the business in the first place.

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"My dad has been cutting hair since we were children," Brown said. "Then my older brother, Isaiah, started cutting hair at around 17 years old. When I saw that money coming in, I thought, 'I'm definitely going to do that.'"

Brown started practicing during his sophomore year of high school under the guidance of his father, Allen Brown, who owned Pocono Barbers and a barber school called "Success Barber Academy." When Micaiah turned 16, he became old enough to enroll at the barber school.

"It was easier because he was my dad," Micaiah said. "I didn't have to do a lot of written work, but I was going to class every day after school. I would be in there with the afternoon session at 3 p.m.

"The exam was tough. It was nerve-racking because it was just me in there. So you go in there with an instructor. Before COVID, you would take the exam cutting a real person's hair, but since then, it's on a mannequin to make it easier. So you do procedures on a mannequin, make sure you know how to sanitize and complete all the procedures you'd do every day in the shop."

He took the exam in November of his sophomore year after six months of schooling. Two weeks later, Micaiah Brown was a licensed barber. But that was only half of the initial journey.

Micaiah's father, Allen, sold the barbershop, resulting in Allen, Micaiah and Isaiah conducting business out of the barber school. Two years passed, and the shop owner told Allen that he planned to sell the shop once his lease ends.

Allen was already aiming to purchase the entire building, so once the shop became available, he sold the barber school and purchased the building - the shop as well as the apartments on the upper levels.

While Allen was working on the building, however, Micaiah and Isaiah were working on the shop. So once the building was in their father's possession, the two brothers made good on the offer, purchasing the shop with their own money, and now they are the owners of the shop.

As of today, Micaiah, his two brothers, and his father all cut hair, along with three other barbers and a hair braider.

Now a recently licensed barber, Micaiah had an interesting start to building his clientele.

"I cut my brother's hair and posted it. And people reacted by saying, 'That's not your cut,' or they were surprised by it," Micaiah said. "That served as a motivation to keep going."

His plan was to use an influencer strategy – cut a popular person's hair; that way, others would want to come to him.

"I'm asking people in the team; they're saying they're not messing with it," Micaiah said. "The first teammate I cut was Eric Carr, who was on the team last year. I still cut his hair today. He didn't really care about his hair, so he said he would do it."

Micaiah gave Carr a taper, a cut that takes a veteran barber about 20-30 minutes. For the young Micaiah, however, who wanted to ensure a good cut, a taper took about two hours and some help from his dad.

He mostly did one side, and I did the other side," Micaiah said. "His side obviously looked better."

Micaiah made the most of his dad's assistance – when he posted a picture of the cut, he posted the side his dad completed. Fortunately, that gave him the boost he needed as more people appreciated the work. Working with his dad also motivated him to cut faster, and now what used to take him an hour or more now only takes him 20-30 minutes.

Soon Micaiah took another bold step, which was offering haircuts free of charge.

"I gave out free cuts for a month," Micaiah said. "Then I increased the price to $5, then $10, then $15. I've increased since then, but I still give a friendly discount to some people."

Soon Micaiah started cutting most of his teammates and even other basketball players on the mountain, which created a hectic daily schedule: get out of school at 2:20 p.m., drive (or even walk) to the barbershop to begin cutting at 3 p.m., and make it back in time for 5:30 practice. If it was a game day, he'd cut until about 90 minutes before tipoff.

But he admitted it was rough early on as some of his teammates were casualties of a young barber.

"My first cut from Micaiah was actually him shaving my head completely off," Micaiah's teammate Tymel Welcome said about his first cut. "He was on the job for about a month, and he cut off my hair while trying to line me up. He cut me up a little bit but it worked out well."

Stroudsburg's center, Kevin Polonia, had a similar story about how a young Micaiah gave him a less-than-stellar haircut, but he applauds his teammate for how he's improved to become one of the best on the mountain.

"It just shows his work ethic," Polonia said. "Not only when it comes to cutting hair, but on the court as well. He's always going to put his all into something. He's never going to give 50%, and now he's one of the best in the area and it paid off."

As it turns out, one of his biggest supporters was head varsity coach, Tarik El-Bassiouni. He became the coach last season, so when Micaiah first told his coach that he was a barber, he was proud of how responsible and committed his starting point guard was.

"It shows the type of kid that he is," El-Bassiouni said. "Most kids aren't in the gym because they're goofing off, getting in trouble or just being lazy. One thing's for sure, he's definitely not lazy. So if he's not in the gym, he's trying to make money at the shop.

"He's got to pay his own way. If anything, it made me respect him more from the jump."

Micaiah recalled a time where he told his coach that he would be late to a practice because he had several appointments, and El-Bassiouni responded, "Just give them all Ceasar cuts and get to practice." But there is a mutual respect that has strengthened that bond.

After high school, Micaiah says he plans to continue cutting hair at the shop and save money before diving into real estate. For now though, he's taking it one cut at a time.

This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Stroudsburg basketball player Micaiah Brown a barber off the court