Longtime Brantley High School head basketball coach and current Alabama High School Athletic Association Associate Executive Director Tony Stallworth was among the members of the 2014 Alabama High School Sports Hall of Fame class inducted on Monday night at the Renaissance Montgomery Convention Center.

Stallworth was inducted as a basketball coach for his standout coaching at BHS from 1990-2005 where his teams compiled a 298-47 record and won three straight state championships in 1993, 1994 and 1995.

Additionally, Stallworth was named Class 1A Coach of the Year in 1993 and 1994 and Class 2A Coach of the Year in 1995. He coached Brantley’s junior high team from 1988-1990 to a perfect 48-0 record.

“I can say that my journey to getting into basketball is plain and simple,” Stallworth said. “In Beatrice, Ala., that’s all everybody ever had. It was you play ball or you didn’t.”

Stallworth described his journey into coaching.

“I knew I didn’t want to teach because I was hard to be taught,” he said. “So, I ended up in recreation. In recreation, you get a lot of basketball and a lot of ethics. A lot of them are simple rejects from high school. Then, I started the venting process. If I can get these kids here to love this game and discipline them, then maybe I can teach. My thought process kind of revisited me a little bit. So, I ended up in my first actual high school job coaching girls. I found out real quick that this might not work.”

Then Stallworth wound up at Brantley.

“(I) got another shot at it, and I went to more of a teaching process,” he said. “The smallest part of my check was coaching, so then I started to understand that it’s for teaching purposes. I grew from that point.”

Stallworth said the majority of administrators these days are former coaches.

“So, we’re talking about discipline. You’re talking character building and punctuality. Those type things are things that build and mold student athletes to be better people,” he said.

Stallworth attended J.F. Shields High School in Beatrice and Huntingdon College in Montgomery. He was also inducted into the Huntingdon College Hall of Fame in the fall.

At J.F. Shields, he played alongside NBA star John Drew.

He began his coaching career at Lomax-Hannon Community College in Greenville.

He also served as assistant principal and principal at Brantley and worked at the Central Office within the Crenshaw County School system.