New hand on the Ranch

Melanie Johnson’s phone doesn’t usually get service at the Bay Street Publix in Sarasota.

It did on one fateful June day.

Johnson received a call from then-Lakewood Ranch High girls basketball coach Tina Hadley. Johnson, previously an assistant coach at Booker High, had helped Hadley run her summer league team, and was planning on joining the Mustangs as an assistant coach, so the call was not completely unexpected.

What Hadley asked Johnson, however, was.

“She said, ‘I was wondering if you were interested in a head coaching job,’ and I said, ‘Sure, where?’ When she said Lakewood Ranch, I said, ‘What? Where are you going?’

“I had no clue she was leaving. I was completely shocked.”

Johnson jumped at the offer and accepted, though the move was not officially announced by the school until Aug. 31. She knew the type of program Hadley had built at Lakewood Ranch, and the culture surrounding it. Johnson said the experience feels like “walking into a dream job.”

The 32-year old Johnson knows a lot about dreams. She started chasing first one, playing basketball professionally, in elementary school. She would shoot baskets while waiting for her mother, Peggy Johnson, to finish her day as a high school teacher in Georgia. At the time, she used to say she wanted to play professional basketball until she was 85.

She was on a clear path to being a basketball lifer.

Eventually, she played professionally for three seasons, first for Besiktas JK of the Turkish Women’s Basketball League, then for teams in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Austria. Johnson was told by her former teammates at the University of South Carolina, where she was a two-time, second team, All-Southeastern Conference player. she would fit into the culture in eastern Europe, and that the transition would be easy.

It was anything but easy as Johnson constantly felt like an outsider. On her first road trip in Turkey, she ate a postgame sub on a fresh, flaky roll. Crumbs from the sandwich fell onto Johnson’s lap, and she brushed them to the floor, to the horror of her teammates.

“Bread is sacred to them,” Johnson learned after the fact. “They were offended that I had let the crumbs touch the floor. As you walk through the cities, you’ll see bread tied to trash cans.”

That’s so less fortunate folks can walk and get some, and not let any morsel of it go to waste.

She won’t have to deal with anything like that with the Mustangs. There, her challenges will be more basketball-related, like continuing Hadley’s winning ways. Johnson has taken bits of strategy from each of her past head coaches and combined them with info from other coaches she reveres, like the University of Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma.

She also remembers that her players are humans first, teenage humans at that, and athletes second. She knows that sometimes a player will have problems in their personal lives or at home, and she’ll support them through everything, she said.

Johnson has at least one believer already, and it’s the coach whose sneakers she is now tasked with filling.

“She played at a high level, which is great,” Hadley said. “I like her coaching style. I like her no-nonsense (attitude). I like that she has practice plans, which is very important. You cannot fly by the seat of your pants. I was impressed (during summer league) because those are some of the things that I do. I think she’ll make a really good head coach.”