SILER CITY — A staple of Siler City’s volleyball community is gearing up for his seventh season on a Chatham County sideline.
But when Johnny Alston suits up for his team’s first regular-season game on Aug. 16, he’ll be doing so as the newest head coach of the Jordan-Matthews Jets.
Last week, Jordan-Matthews announced via social media that Alston, the former head coach at Chatham Charter, would be trading in his purple-and-silver armor for a blue-and-gold pilot’s uniform, moving less than three miles away in a switch from the Knights to the Jets.
“He heard that we had an opening and he reached out and expressed interest in it,” Josh Harris, Jordan-Matthews’ athletic director, told the News + Record. “Once we got him in, sat him down and talked to him, it was a pretty clear-cut decision on our end. He seems like he really cares. Every person I’ve talked to … was just through the roof about him. He’s just an overall great person and that’s what you want, you want good people first, then the strategy comes second.”
He’ll be replacing Taylor Crowder, who spent two seasons as the Jets’ head volleyball coach.
Alston has spent 38 years coaching volleyball in some capacity, with his most recent stint coming in the form of six seasons with the Knights from 2015-21.
During his time at Chatham Charter, Alston’s teams posted a record of 52-70 and earned two NCHSAA 1A playoff berths, including the program’s first postseason appearance in 2018-19.
After a 2021-22 season that saw the Knights earn the most wins in program history (17) and suffer a first-round exit as the East’s No. 19 seed in a 3-0 loss to Pamlico County, Alston chose to step away from Chatham Charter to explore other coaching opportunities, a move that Knights athletic director Clint Fields said he understood.
“He just felt like he’d done all he could do at Chatham Charter and he kind of wanted to see what other opportunities were out there,” Fields said. “I told him I didn’t want him to go or anything like that, but he thought it was best for him to see what other opportunities he could have.”
In addition to having coached in Siler City for the last seven years, Alston is also a member of Jordan-Matthews’ Class of 1977, having played football for the Jets during the mid-1970s before graduating and moving on to compete at running back for the North Carolina A&T Aggies in Greensboro from 1977-81.
Alston’s hiring marks the seventh J-M alumni on the school’s current head coaching staff, joining the baseball, basketball, football, golf, softball and swimming programs.
“It’s a little bit of a mix,” Harris said when asked about J-M’s tendency to hire former athletes. “They have a good understanding of Siler City, so that always helps, but they’ve also just been the best options. It’s probably more of a coincidence in how it’s worked out, but it’s as much them and their interest in coming back as it has been us seeking it out.”
Given Alston’s long and illustrious coaching history, ending up at his alma mater 45 years later is hardly a surprise.
But to a younger version of himself, the sport he’s coaching might’ve been.
A few decades ago, If you would have told Alston that he’d be the head volleyball coach at Jordan-Matthews, he wouldn’t have believed you.
“They didn’t even have volleyball at Jordan-Matthews when I was in high school,” Alston recalled. “When I was at A&T, I walked into the gym every night and volleyball was going on — because it was the same time as football season — but I didn’t pay an ounce of attention to it. I just walked through on the way to somewhere else and they’d be playing and I’d watch maybe a minute.”
After graduating from N.C. A&T in 1981, Alston started his coaching career in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where he spent time coaching middle school basketball and football. While in Virginia, he coached players like former Virginia Cavalier and 10-year NBA veteran Bryant Stith, who he still has contact with today.
There, he became engulfed in basketball coaching circles throughout the region, connecting with legendary minds like former UNC coaching Hall-of-Famer Dean Smith.
But once Alston left Virginia, late J-M football coach Phil Senter helped him find a middle school coaching gig in Liberty, where he was originally hired to coach basketball.
It was there that he first learned the game of volleyball.
“They asked me to coach volleyball (in Liberty) and I said, ‘Man, I don’t know anything about volleyball,’” Alston said, laughing. “We went 7-7 that year and I sort of liked it. It was a lot of fun. The girls did a great job, so the next year, we started winning. We won some county championships and then it just became a given that, after basketball season, I’d coach volleyball.”
For years, he coached middle school volleyball in Randolph County, including at Northeastern Middle School in Liberty, where he helped start a county-wide volleyball tournament and eventually coached his daughter, who also fell in love with the game and played both school and club volleyball.
Alston’s first taste of high school volleyball came in 2008, when he went to Providence Grove High School to begin helping out former Patriots head coach Tony Joyce as an assistant, who he praised for his knowledge of the game.
“I went over there and learned even more about the game because he was a good volleyball coach,” Alston said. “He knew what he was doing. But I also got exposed to better teams in other areas of the state moreso than just the middle school teams in Randolph County, which helped a lot.
“Once I got to high school and started seeing it played at a high level, I started coaching, planning and learning more,” he added. “I’m still a student of the game myself.”
While at Providence Grove, Alston began seeing more of his athletes taking volleyball to the next level, most notably Tori Baldwin, who went on to play four seasons at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and become the Rams’ all-time blocks leader (519).
“One day I was driving back from Washington, D.C., and I was going through Richmond and I looked up and her picture was on a billboard,” Alston said proudly. “I was like, ‘Oh my Lord.’ That was sort of neat.”
During his time in Randolph County, Alston continued to make connections with coaches throughout the state in both basketball and volleyball, providing him with some of the best coaching minds to both lean on and glean information from.
“The man knows almost everyone in North Carolina in some capacity at the high school and college level,” Fields said with a chuckle.
In 2015, just one year removed from the program’s inaugural varsity season, Chatham Charter hired Alston in what would be his first varsity volleyball head coaching role.
The Knights also named him the head coach of the women’s basketball team, which he led to a 12-16 overall record and the program’s first playoff appearance in his one season on the job.
In seven years at Chatham Charter, Alston created a legacy.
He was instrumental in molding the Knights’ youth volleyball camp early on, the formula and structure of which was eventually adopted by men’s basketball head coach Jason Messier for his youth basketball camps.
“He’s really done a lot for our school and even for me professionally,” Fields said. “Especially as a young (athletic director), him being around athletics for 25-35 years really helped. If I had something come up or he saw something better or experienced something in another school, I’d ask him questions and he’d tell me, ‘This is how we did it at PG or in Asheboro.’ … He’s a great sounding board with a lot of experience.”
In 2018, during Alston’s fourth season coaching the Knights’ volleyball team, he began experiencing chest pains and shortness of breath the same night the team won its 10th game of the year, a first for the program.
The next day, Alston took a trip to the emergency room and was later diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a form of cancer that starts in the bone marrow and can quickly spread to the blood and other parts of the body.
As tough as it was to hear the diagnosis, Alston said one of the hardest parts was coming to terms with the idea that his season was over and he’d miss the Knights’ first-ever postseason appearance.
Determined to get back onto the court, Alston went through a series of treatments and, right before Christmas of 2018, he found out he was in remission.
In March 2019, Alston underwent a bone marrow transplant aimed at keeping him in remission and, as of now, is still cancer-free.
“According to the doctor, he said from that point, I’ve got to go five years before he uses the word ‘cured,’” Alston told the News + Record last October, “but so far, my appointments have been going well.”
“Getting to know Coach Alston, even when he had cancer and was sick, he was always upbeat and positive,” Fields recalled. “You would’ve thought he’d won the lottery. … He always said, ‘We’re going to make it through. It’s going to be all right.’”
Alston rejoined the Knights after a year off in 2019-20 — when the team was coached by Holley Hall, who led them to a 16-12 record and a playoff berth — and posted back-to-back winning seasons before he stepped down this offseason.
Chatham Charter improved each season under Alston, never having fewer wins than it did the season before — aside from the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season, where the Knights went 5-4.
“I remember a saying from Burton Cates up there at Eastern Randolph … he said something along the lines of, ‘Leave the program better than you found it,’” Alston said. “I think we accomplished that (at Chatham Charter).”
In his next step, Alston has the opportunity to take over the volleyball team at his alma mater, a team that he said he believes has been trending in the right direction.
“At Jordan-Matthews, hopefully, everything will fall in place and they can look up and feel like we’re going in the right direction,” Alston said. “I just love teaching the game. … Hopefully, we can have a great run of success down there.”
Reporter Victor Hensley can be reached at vhensley@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @Frezeal33.