The three seventh-grade girls sit together after school debating back and forth like kids their age tend to do.
Zhaire Mack, the elder of the group at 13, is sure that Steph Curry is the best basketball player in the world. She wears Curry’s signature Under Armour shoes to match her Golden State Warriors socks.
Kylee Kellerman, a few months younger, prefers LeBron James. The Cleveland Cavaliers are, of course, this southern girl’s favorite team. Zhaire shutters. To her, LeBron is far too old for their generation. “LeBron looks like he’s like 50,” she says before letting out a hearty laugh.
Kennedy Rivers, the youngest at 12, isn’t sold on either. The best in her mind is rising WNBA and former South Carolina star Tiffany Mitchell. “She can beat a lot of the boys,” Kennedy assures confidently. The other two, she admits, are OK too though.
Unable to come to a consensus, the three shift the conversation toward the night’s game. In a couple hours, they’ll take the court for the final game of Philip Simmons High School’s inaugural varsity season. All three are starters — heavy responsibility at such a young age. But for now, the mood is light. They fire off long jump shots, maneuvering disruptively through a group of cheerleaders who are attempting to warm up. The greatest concern of the moment is deciding who of the three can best palm a basketball. None of them are particularly close yet.
Philip Simmons' Kylee Kellerman drives past an Oceanside defender.
Open tryouts
Dustin Williams is building from scratch.
After five years as an assistant at Wando, the 30-year-old earned his first head coaching opportunity this summer at Cainhoy’s new public high school about 15 minutes from where he grew up in north Mount Pleasant.
Williams was given a sparkling new gym, a healthy budget, ample resources and support. Filling a roster with legitimate players, though, would be his responsibility.
Open tryouts yielded little results during the early summer months until a group of seventh graders strolled unassumingly into the gym one day.
“It was difficult at first, being a new school, to get bodies out here that wanted to put in the work and play the game,” Williams said. “Luckily though, these three just sort of fell into my lap with some type of skill set.”
Kennedy, Kylee and Zhaire grew up playing together at Daniel Island School, just a few miles from Cainhoy. Kennedy and Zhaire transferred to Philip Simmons Middle School when it opened last year. Kylee stayed behind. Philip Simmons High School’s startup varsity program was an opportunity to reunite the three friends who were quickly gaining reputations as three of the better middle school players in the area.
“We’ve been friends for a while,” Zhaire said. “And since we were pretty much better than most the girls in middle school, we said, ‘Let’s try the high school team and see how we do.”
“I think we wanted more of a challenge and wanted to get better,” Kylee added. “I was kind of nervous at first because I’ve never experienced that and I didn’t know what it was going to be like.”
“It was kind of scary at first,” Kennedy said. “But on second thought it was kind of fun.”
“Yeah, there were jitters the first few days of tryouts,” Zhaire admitted. “But then it was like ‘Oh my gosh. We just made the high school team.’”
Williams says keeping the three seventh graders on the varsity was an easy decision — one of necessity mostly. They were immediately his best options. Convincing their parents to take the leap, though, wasn’t as simple.
“They showed signs of maturity and skills beyond their age,” Williams said. “I know parents could be worried about things like growth and maturity. Most of the time, they’ll be 12 and 13 going against 16, 17 and 18-year-olds so I get it.”
Williams is the son of Fred Williams, who spent more than three decades coaching middle schoolers in the Mount Pleasant area. Fred attends nearly every one of Philip Simmons’ home games, perched somewhere high in the bleachers logging mental notes he’ll relay to his son later. His most impactful message so far has been to simply trust the process.
“I knew we were going to take some lumps early,” Williams said. “We were going to get beat up a little. And we did. That can be hard for a parent and a coach. You wonder if you made the right decision. But after a little while you could see the girls building confidence and playing with some swagger. They weren’t scared anymore.”
First-year head coach Dustin Williams leads the Philip Simmons' varsity girls.
Triple trio
Williams affectionally refers to them as "the babies."
Kylee stands just 5-foot-2. She drowns in her baggy purple warm-ups. She’s the shortest on the team but maybe the most polished. She has a tight handle and smooth jump shot crafted on the steel rims at the outdoor court behind the school near her house. Her mother used to play field hockey at Connecticut. Kylee’s also had the benefit of a personal trainer since she was 10. She leads the team in scoring, assists and steals.
“I started playing when I was like 6. I just tried it one year and never wanted to stop,” she says. “I don’t think of it like I’m better than girls my age. I just think I’m very privileged to be on this team. It’s pretty cool.”
Kennedy is an inch taller than Kylee. She too has good handle, low and in control. Her best asset may be her quickness. She’s a scrappy defender with fast hands. She’s second on the team in assists and steals. Her mother played basketball at Cornell and coached her daughter’s youth teams for years. That’s who taught Kennedy to play, turning days into nights shooting with a full-sized ball in the driveway.
“The defenders are better now so you have to make better moves,” Kennedy said. “You really have to make the right moves to get past the defense. Some games there’s pressure but I don’t really think about that. It’s just a game you have to play. I don’t think about how old or big they are. I just play.”
Zhaire is the tallest of the group at 5-foot-8. She looks to be just beginning to fill out a long, lean athletic build. She’s been playing basketball since she was 3 years old. She sprouted to 5-foot-3 by the time she was 11 and was dwarfing most of her competition. She carries a bubbly personality, maybe the most lively and expressive of the three, that matches her play on the court. She leads the team in rebounding and blocks and is second in scoring. She’s registered two double-doubles this season and just missed on several others.
“Basketball is my favorite but I play mostly all sports except golf and water polo,” she says. “Basketball’s the most fun though because it’s a team sport. Someone comes down and I can pick them up. I try to push the team.”
All three admit there are times they wonder what it would be like to play against kids their own age in the middle school league. All three smile when they think about it. All three, though, are confident that traveling the accelerated path to the varsity was the right decision.
“Sometimes my friends talk about it,” Kylee said. “It seems like they’re having fun. But I am too.”
“I was just thinking about that yesterday,” Kennedy added. “I would never move back though. I just think about how much different it would be than high school ball.”
“It would be a lot different,” Zhaire said. “We’re lucky to be on this team all together and playing together.
“Me, Kennedy and Kylee, how can I put this? We’re like the triple trio.”
Philip Simmons' seventh-grader starters Zhaire Mack (left), Kennedy Rivers, and Kylee Kellerman were friends years before jumping to the Iron Horses varsity together.
Growing pains
Starting three seventh graders as a first-year head coach is a bold gamble, even if Williams tries to downplay the experiment. If it works, it’s brilliant — he’ll potentially have six years to develop the same core together. If it fails, though, the first major head coaching decision of his career falls flat.
“It was scary but at the same time I knew it was the process that was best for us,” Williams said. “I looked at it like, these are the dice I’ve been handed and we’re going to roll them.”
Philip Simmons lost its first three games of the season by an average of 37 points.
“It felt like I jumped from kindergarten to ninth grade,” Zhaire said. “There are a lot of 6-foot players who are taller than you. They underestimate us a lot. They think we’re really bad because we’re just coming up. But we progressed as players and then they realize how we play and they try to come up to our level. It was fun to see that.”
Philip Simmons broke through with a win in its fourth game, settled decisively by 14 points. The girls followed it up three days later with a second win, this time by 24. Kennedy had her best game of the season in the latter, posting a well-rounded 12 points, six steals and four assists.
“Those were the best games,” Kennedy said of Philip Simmons’ first two wins. “We were excited, our parents, our friends, the school, everybody’s excited. It’s really cool to be the first team at this school. Everything you do is history.”
Seventh-grader Kylee Kellerman typically battles defenders much larger as a starting guard for Philip Simmons' varsity team.
Philip Simmons won a game in the Carolina Invitational — one of the largest girls basketball tournaments in the nation — over the holiday break. The girls nearly pulled off a second win, losing by just one point to division runner-up Academic Magnet in the final moments.
“You can tell they’re talented. I was very impressed,” said Bud Walpole, coach of the Academic Magnet girls for the past 14 years. “They’re young but well coached. They moved the ball as well as anyone we’ve faced so far. An up and coming program.”
Kylee was a Carolina Invitational all-tournament selection. She scored a career-high 19 points in Philip Simmons’ win. She outdid herself three weeks later with a 22-point performance in another win. Kylee went through a stretch from late December into early January in which she scored 12 or more in seven of eight games, and 15 or more in four of them.
“The girls are a lot bigger definitely, they’re a lot more physical and the pace of the game is a lot faster,” Kylee said. “I was used to being able to drive into the hole but it’s a lot harder now. They can just stand tall and block my shot. My first few games I was kind of off and it was difficult to get into a rhythm. But now that I’ve been playing with the older girls more I’ve kind of gotten used to it.”
Having Kennedy and Zhaire there with her, and vice versa, has helped smooth the learning curve as well.
“We’re more comfortable because we know each other really well,” Kylee said. “We click.”
“We already know a lot from playing with each other already,” Kennedy said. “It’s really cool. I’m glad I have them here with me.”
Zhaire Mack lines up a shot as she rises above the defense.
Fairy tale
It’s the fourth quarter of Philip Simmons’ season finale. The opponent is Oceanside, just a second-year program itself. The game’s been tight throughout, a little wild and raw at times but entertaining nonetheless thanks to the girls’ animated emotion and enthusiasm.
Philip Simmons gains possession down one point with 31 seconds to play. The immaturity casts a shadow in the crucial waning moments, though, as Philip Simmons turns it over twice in a span of six seconds. Two hopeless ill-timed heaves seal the loss. Kennedy, Kylee and Zhaire each had opportunities in different situations late.
The girls mope toward their bench, wearing the frustration of the disappointing finish in the expressions on their faces. They gather their emotions quickly before congratulating their opponent and huddling as a team for a chant of “family” before exiting the floor for the final time this season.
Philip Simmons finishes its inaugural season with a modest 5-10 record, exceeding some early expectations while also falling short of goals that had since been revised.
This is no fairy tale ending. Not yet. Much is still to be written. The story will continue to unfold, chapter by chapter, over the next five years. This is just the prologue — a warning, of sorts, for the competition that’s going to face this budding program led by a promising young coach and his precocious middle schoolers.
“Don’t judge us yet,” Williams said. “They’re learning every day. I’m learning too. We’re growing together. We’re going to get there. They have the skill. The chemistry is there. I’m proud of what they’ve accomplished already but don’t judge us yet. Give them a year or two. Then we'll talk.”
Philip Simmons' Kennedy Rivers rises past an Oceanside defender.
