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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

CHELSEA – As Haley Trotter walked off the Legacy Arena floor on March 1, 2025, she closed the book on her career with the Chelsea Hornets.

While she and her teammates fell short in the state championship, they took pride in representing Chelsea on one of the biggest stages in Alabama high school sports–the Class 6A state basketball championship.

However, the loss took nothing away from Trotter and the legacy she left at Chelsea High School–the all-time leader in multiple statistics, leader of an Elite Eight run in 2024 and runner-up finish in 2025 and a trailblazer who received many honors a Chelsea female basketball player hadn’t before.

That continues as she becomes the 2025 Shelby County Female Athlete of the Year. It’s an award that culminates the constant work that wrote her name in Hornets lore forever, but it also signals the start of a new era as she takes her skills to the collegiate level.

 

Born baller

Trotter’s basketball journey started the day she was born. Her mother Lori Weber brought her home from the hospital in a Jordan Brand outfit. Weber played herself, making the Final Four at Vestavia Hills before playing college ball at West Alabama. She also coached Chelsea girls basketball before Jason Harlow’s arrival in 2018.

Trotter discovered the game on her own accord though, dribbling the ball around from five years old before playing competitively with Chelsea Youth Club.

Her skillset grew as she got into middle school, and she said that was when everything started to click within her game. Going into her eighth-grade year, she caught Harlow’s eye at tryouts.

“She showed up there and I remember watching her and thinking that she was a good athlete, and I said to my coach at the time, one of my assistants, I said, ‘You know, this Trotter kid is pretty good,’” Harlow, now the Homewood girls basketball coach, said. “‘I think she’s got an opportunity to maybe at the end of the year be somebody we bring up from the JV, right? And she could get varsity minutes and dress if we make a playoff run.’”

It didn’t take long into the summer for Harlow to realize Trotter wasn’t just a future varsity player. She was a current varsity player and didn’t need to play JV because of her talent and ability to be coached.

Trotter admitted it was overwhelming playing on varsity as an eighth grader. However, she settled her nerves by reminding herself of the faith Harlow had in her and simply went to work to prove him right.

“Whenever he had pulled me up, he pulled me up for JV, and I was like, ‘This is a little fast,’” Trotter said. “I can’t lie, but whenever he pulled me up to varsity, it was like I had to play better. I had to be with their speed, and it felt like a lot of pressure, but at the same time, it wasn’t, and I just knew that he wouldn’t put me in this situation if he didn’t think I was not good enough for them.”

She quickly validated his decision. Trotter worked her way into the regular rotation as a freshman and was an All-Region pick during that 2021-22 season when Chelsea reached the Elite Eight.

Trotter got very close to the seniors that year and learned a lot from them. However, she also learned something crucial the year before when the Hornets made the Final Four in 2021–that Chelsea was a program that could achieve anything it set out for as long as everyone put in the work.

“At first, like when we first went to the Final Four, it obviously made me nervous,” Trotter said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I kind of like this. I like the fact that we’re getting so close.’ So obviously, I always tried to push us and make our team to go further, and because I wanted that ring, I wanted the blue map and I wanted the hat. So, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re actually good enough to go that far. Like we can do it.’ So every year, ever since we made it to the Final Four, I was like, ‘We can do it again, we can actually do this.’”

 

Trot to the top

Trotter worked relentlessly in the gym to reach new levels each year, never being satisfied with her skillset but instead always working to add a new layer to her game.

Looking back on where Trotter was as a freshman, Harlow said she started off as a solid mid-range shooter and was the team’s best rebounder even though she was so young. She evolved as a sophomore to start attacking the rim in order to fit into Harlow’s system better and make up for the loss of a large senior class.

Her gains as a sophomore coincided with her becoming a starter on varsity and joining Alabama Southern Stars to improve her game on the AAU regional circuit. She said that was when her game hit another level.

“That’s how things got real, and they got me out there to showcases where we were traveling to like Chicago, Virginia, Kentucky, where I could see bigger coaches,” Trotter said.

She took another step forward by taking a step back to the 3-point line and becoming a lethal shooting weapon from deep as well, complementing other shooters like Sadie Schwallie, Caroline Brown and Olivia Pryor to give the Hornets another option.

As a result of those gains, Chelsea started succeeding more as a team. The Hornets followed up on a 27-5 record during Trotter’s freshman year in Class 6A with a 22-8 record and trip to the Class 7A Sweet 16. Then, Chelsea did one better, going 26-6 during Trotter’s junior year and making it to the Elite Eight.

The individual awards started coming her way too with her first Shelby County Player of the Year award after the 2023-24 season as well as a North-South All-Star selection. She averaged a double-double that year with 18.5 points and 10.5 rebounds per game.

She wasn’t satisfied with her game though. Harlow said she worked on her ball-handling, breaking the press and her deep shooting over the offseason ahead of her senior year.

While her stats took a hit due to the plethora of weapons around her, she still posted 17.7 points, nine rebounds and 2.1 assists per game. As a result, she was a finalist for Class 6A Player of the Year, was selected to the Alabama All-Star team and All-State First Team and won her second-straight Shelby County Player of the Year.

Harlow credited those individual gains to her meticulous planning over the offseason and consistent work ethic in practice.

“Every year, I think she was organized with coming in with the mindset that there was an aspect of her game that she was going to be better at by the end of that year and that she worked on it,” Harlow said. “And she was a good practice player, so she got it done.”

However, Trotter turned the praise back on Harlow for helping to grow her game. She said the extensive time they spent together not only turned her into the player she was on the court but also a better person off of it.

“Growing on the court, coach Harlow really changed and really helped me,” Trotter said. “He plays a really big role in me growing on and off the court, because I saw him every day throughout those four years, like he was like another parent. So, he helped me use new skills. He helped me use new ways to move around people, obviously on the court, and then off the court, he helped me how to be a leader and never back down from situations that are hard, that kind of helped me too.”

Trotter evolved into one of the team’s most trusted leaders over the course of her five-year varsity career. Harlow recalled that Trotter was never one of the vocal players when she came in but just quietly went about her business, putting in the work to get better while trusting the established leaders who were there.

That changed as she became an upperclassman. Her work ethic became more apparent as her role within the team grew and she became a star player her junior year.

Then, after Chelsea graduated two of its most vocal leaders in 2024, Harlow challenged Trotter and her fellow seniors to step up in the huddle. She did just that, and people listened because they saw the result of her hard work.

“Because of that, she had success on the floor and as being one of the hardest workers, other kids knew, ‘Hey, if the best player on the team is our hardest worker, I can learn something from that, and I better bring my best effort on a regular basis,’” Harlow said. “And because of that, by the time she was a senior, when she spoke, people stopped and they listened to what she had to say, because obviously she had proved through her work ethic and the accolades that she had received, that she deserved those moments to do that.”

Her senior season was when everything came together both individually and for her team. For the first time as a starter, she secured an area championship after going 8-0 in area play, a longtime goal for the team.

That momentum paved the way for a dominant run to the Central Regional title and a spot in the Final Four, where the Hornets got past Mountain Brook and set up a showdown with top-ranked Park Crossing.

It was a true grand finale for Trotter and her fellow seniors as they played their final game under the bright lights of Legacy Arena with their hometown supporting them.

While it ended in defeat, their run to the championship game continued changing any narrative that Chelsea can’t be a basketball school. Trotter is proud to be part of the change and enjoyed representing her hometown on the state’s biggest stages.

“Everybody was like, ‘Oh, you go to Chelsea.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I go to Chelsea.’ But our girls team is actually really good, and it felt good to represent Chelsea,” Trotter said. “It’s not a bad thing. I never did degrade it or anything. I love Chelsea. They’re a good school, good program, but there’s nothing wrong with them.”

 

Start of something new

Now, Trotter leaves Chelsea behind as its all-time leading scorer and rebounder and first player of any gender at the school to be named an Alabama All-Star, North-South All-Star and Shelby County Player of the Year.

She is on to a new frontier in college basketball as she will play for Shelton State Community College. She made the decision to stay close to home but also play for one of the top junior college programs in the country. The Bucs reached the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) national championship game in 2025 and have maintained a relationship with Trotter since her freshman year.

Just like in high school, she isn’t satisfied with where her game is and is already on campus working with the team to adjust to a new position and the stylistic differences of the college game.

“I hope to grow by a lot of things actually, like obviously my 3-point (shot), because we had to take a step back even further, my ball handling and just little things,” Trotter said. “I’m now not a post anymore, I’m going to be a guard. So, I got to do a lot of guard work that I have to work on, so that’s a big difference and a big role.”

While Shelton State will bring a lot of changes, Trotter has given herself grace to fail while she is learning. She aims to overcome those early challenges by working hard to become the best player she can be.

“Definitely not getting in my head and not getting so frustrated, even though I’m going to get things wrong here, because they’re different, everything’s different here,” Trotter said. “From a basketball standpoint, I’m going to take my rebounding with me. I can’t lie, because everybody did not like me when I rebounded or anything, but I’m just saying I’m taking that with me, but also my work ethic, that’s something I would like to take with me as well.”

It’s a work ethic that came to define her when she played for Chelsea and what elevated her to become the Shelby County Female Athlete of the Year. And it’s the same work ethic that gives her and everyone around her confidence that this is only the beginning of her story, not the end.

“I’m confident because I know she’s going to put the work in,” Harlow said. “I’m confident that she’ll have success. And I’m confident because I’ve seen her face every challenge that’s put in front of her and work through it and understand that that’s how you get through things. You roll your sleeves up and you get to work and you get the job done. And I know she’s going to do the same over there and I know she’s going to have great coaching and great people around her and do special things with the rest of her basketball career, but she’s going to do special things in life as well.”