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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

CHELSEA – After a weeks-long search, the Chelsea Hornets have officially secured the future leader of their girls basketball program.

Denton Johnson was board-approved by the Shelby County Schools Board of Education on Thursday, June 12 to become the next head girls basketball coach at Chelsea High School.

“Being in the Shelby County community is phenomenal,” Johnson said. “Just the community of Chelsea is really nice. My family, we live close by Highway 119, so we’ve even looked at moving to Chelsea a few times so you always start there. To me, when Chelsea comes up it’s how nice the community is, and then the leadership with Dr. (Brandon) Turner and coach (Michael) Stallings, and then all the way up to Dr. (Lewis) Brooks as a superintendent, all with coaching backgrounds, that was important to me.”

Johnson is best-known for his success with Ramsay boys basketball, which he led for the past nine seasons. The Rams won area championships in each of the last seven seasons and were the No. 1 team in Class 5A entering the playoffs in 2025.

Over the course of his tenure, Johnson took Ramsay to back-to-back state championship games in 2021 and 2022 and made the Final Four five separate times. In all, Johnson amassed a 209-90 record with the Rams.

Johnson is no stranger to Shelby County though as he was previously an assistant at Spain Park in addition to Enterprise and Buckhorn. He also served as a graduate assistant at Jacksonville State.

Throughout his entire career, Johnson has sought to build a culture of success from day one. While that culture is already there, the goal hasn’t changed.

“They’ve been playing together since they were like kindergarten, first grade in elementary school, so to me, that goes a long way in the camaraderie of easy flow, easy transition is the kids are going to play well together already,” Johnson said. “They’ve already experienced success in basketball and other sports at Chelsea, so as far as what am I going to bring, I’m just going to add my flavor of what I do.”

As for what his flavor is, Johnson shares some DNA with the departing Jason Harlow, the reigning Class 6A Coach of the Year who led the Hornets to seven-straight playoff appearances before leaving for Homewood.

Johnson runs a press defense, which Harlow’s teams excelled in, but the differences come in the half-court offense. He runs a more up-tempo offense that starts with dribble-drives while emphasizing pace, space and cuts, and his goal is for all teams in the Chelsea feeder system to run the same offense and defense.

For Johnson, taking over for a strong foundation was a key appeal of joining Chelsea, and it has the added benefit of sharing the defensive and cultural principles he had at Ramsay.

“The foundation that coach Harlow had laid was important to me, because a lot of these situations, you’re going in as a rebuild,” Johnson said. “This situation is in a healthy position to just take the wheel and steer it straight as you can and don’t wreck the ship, so to speak, and it’s in a healthy position to win right away, so that’s the unique deal.”

Now, Johnson will take over a talented young core at Chelsea, including All-County stars Olivia Pryor and Caroline Brown, as he aims to parlay his success on the boys side into one of the most successful girls basketball programs in the Birmingham area.

That strong continuity plays into one of his strengths as a coach focused on developing players into strong people on and off the court who can take the lead in the program.

“I’m a players’ coach,” Johnson said. “I told them tonight the top three things that we’re going to focus on is player experience, we want to have a phenomenal player experience, player-first program, we’re going to focus really high on academics and then we want to win. We want to move the needle to see what we can do to win a championship and that’ll be on them as far as the habits we create every day, the work we put in practice and skill work, so far as me though, I’m just a driver of that. I’m going to surround them with other really, really good coaches as well.”

He already has a great view of the players for not only sticking out the seven weeks it took to hire Johnson, but they showed out en masse to the Board of Education meeting to welcome him to their home.

“They were all at the meeting tonight to meet me, so that let me know that the kids are all in,” Johnson said. “For them to be patient on hiring a new coach, stay at Chelsea waiting on the new coach, that lets you know that they’re locked in and ready to get going.”

Now, the work begins to ensure Chelsea builds off its state championship appearance in 2025.

Johnson is determined to prove himself as a worthy leader of the program and earn the players’ trust.

“The kids are not going to care really what I’ve accomplished or what we know until we show that we care about them,” Johnson said. “I’m going really get in and develop a relationship with kids and just give them our all, and we’re going to make a run at this thing and see what we can do.”