Troy Brown Jr. was at home with his family in Las Vegas when the Washington Wizards made him the 15th overall selection in June’s NBA Draft. He was the first player taken not to be in attendance at the draft in Brooklyn, N.Y.
That’s because it was important to share that moment with his parents and siblings, Brown said.
“They’ve always been my rock,” he said. “Even when things haven’t gone great for me, I know my family has always been there for me to fall back on. Through the ups and downs I know they’ve been here to support me. For me they’re definitely my number one priority.”
Troy Brown Sr. and Lynn Brown raised their three children, but also have touched the lives of many more in the Las Vegas community. Not only parents and coaches, the Browns worked for decades in the Clark County, Nevada government — Troy Sr. as a juvenile probation officer, his wife in the Department of Family Services.
“I can’t tell you how many people in the city would call Troy for advice or have him come talk to a group of kids and things like that,” said Dedan Thomas, a family friend who has worked with Lynn and coached with Troy Sr. “Just always encouraging, always, always. Whether they were rival teams or kids playing for him, it was always about the kids.”
Brown Sr.’s retirement in March 2017 has not stopped him from still lending his help to families who ask for it.
“I’m just trying to mentor them,” Brown Sr. said. “A lot of kids don’t have fathers in their lives.”
Kids from all walks of life
Brown Sr. humbly believes his NBA-bound son and two daughters, 25-year-old Jana and 23-year-old Jenae, get their athleticism from their mother.
Though he was otherwise a self-described “Vegas boy,” Troy Sr. met Lynn in college at Texas A&M-Kingsville, where he played basketball and she was on the volleyball team. Brown played power forward but was small for the position. To make up for it, he played the game as a facilitator in and around the paint.
He also put in the effort.
“For him, when you’re undersized like that, you gotta put the work in,” Thomas said. “And I can just remember just always talking about work. Just keep working. And that’s where Troy (Jr.) gets his work ethic from.”
Thomas himself didn’t play college ball with Brown Sr. — in fact, he was a UNLV Runnin’ Rebel at the end of the Jerry Tarkanian era, and also played for Rollie Massimino and a young assistant coach named Jay Wright in the early 1990s.
But Thomas, a social work major at UNLV, knew he wanted to be a coach at some level and decided to take a job at a place called Child Haven to learn more about working with kids. There, he met Lynn Brown, who was pregnant with Troy Jr. at the time.
Child Haven is the county’s shelter for children who are abused, whose guardians go to jail or who otherwise need to be removed from their homes. Lynn Brown worked there as a childhood development specialist for more than 30 years and also retired in 2017.
“(Troy Sr.) and Lynn are a lot alike,” Thomas said. “Just always positive, always has some kind words, always encouraging.”
“Encouraging” comes up time and again when discussing Troy Sr.’s attitude toward helping youth, whether in his job or on the basketball court. His compassion was shown through his motivational ways as he encountered young people of all stripes.
“From A to Z,” Thomas put it. “From really really good kids to the kids that got in trouble. Just from all walks of life.”
Brown Sr. co-founded an AAU program called the Las Vegas Rebels, later renamed to West Coast Basketball, with whom his son would soon start playing. (Almost fittingly, Brown Jr. has returned to the city years later in a professional capacity — playing for the Wizards in the Las Vegas Summer League this week.)
Thomas said Brown Sr. made sure the other adults who came to coach for West Coast Basketball would “check their egos at the door.”
“It’s not what’s best for me, it’s not what’s best for him, it’s what’s best for the kids,” Thomas recalled. “That was kind of our staple of the whole program.”
Family matters
Troy Sr. lost his father when he was eight years old, and coaches and other men in his neighborhood served as his father figures. So when he was first asked if he wanted to work with children, the prospect of paying it forward and being a role model to others felt right to him.
It’s borne out in his own parenting — in how the Browns’ only son composes himself. For instance, he hardly sounded like an 18-year-old when speaking about his family and Christian faith at the Wizards’ introductory press conference.
“I feel like we’re a very spiritually gifted family. We really appreciate everything and everything is a blessing,” Brown Jr. said. “Even the hard opportunities in life that you have to struggle with, you don’t ever see it as something that’s like pity. It’s something you can always work through, and that’s something that my parents have always established in my life and made sure that I knew that.”
The generation of players Brown Sr. coached at West Coast Basketball have made it to high-school age and, in many cases, gone on to college. For instance, Brown Jr. played with Chase Jeter, a highly-touted recruit who committed to Duke and later transferred to the University of Arizona.
As the prospect of college ball enters the picture for more players, Brown has remained available to them in an advisory capacity. He wants to see that these players make the right choices and are not taken advantage of.
“The business of sports can get to be tricky nowadays,” he said. “Everybody’s not there for the right reasons.”
Not surprisingly, that’s one of many things Brown Jr. learned from his old man. Asked during his first Wizards conference call what he felt he needed to improve on, he spoke about more than his game on the court. He was concerned with “being able to make business decisions in the right manner, especially in ways where it doesn’t affect the team.”
The elder Brown is not a helicopter parent. He and his wife wouldn’t have encouraged Brown Jr. to “make the jump” to the NBA if they didn’t think he was ready, he said. He also stopped coaching his son when he reached high school.
“When I played basketball it was more intense,” Brown Sr. said. “So being intense is not always a good thing when you’re raising your kids. Sometimes it’s difficult for a kid to understand — for them to separate coaching and parenting.”
They won’t be around Washington much, but the Brown family will be the main advisers in the orbit of the Wizards’ newest investment. As Thomas put it, they’re “tight-knit. No entourage.”
“They say tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are,” Brown Sr. said with a hearty chuckle. “So you got to have some good people around you.”
• Adam Zielonka can be reached at azielonka@washingtontimes.com.
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