South Georgia - In The Game High School Sports Magazine

Turner County must feel slighted. Two of its star athletes and one head coach have left the single-A school for the bigger stage of Region 1-AAAAA and Tift County. The most recent of the pair was Tadric Jackson, a freshman who was the Blue Devils starting quarterback. Jackson, who was recently featured as an In The Game Freshman Focus, is 6’2” and possesses a stunning blend of speed, strength and athleticism that leaves him poised to have a record-setting career at Tift.

A year before Jackson arrived, there was Breon Dixon, a 6’8” power forward who, like Jackson, was making headlines as a freshman. Dixon has been on the high school basketball radar since he was 14 years old. Now a 17-year-old senior, Dixon and the Blue Devils are among the favorites to make a deep run in the playoffs. Dixon’s career in Turner County started with immediate success. He grew up playing basketball but didn’t get really serious about the game until he was 12 and in middle school. One of the middle school coaches noticed how much taller he was than everybody else and asked him to try out. He made the team that first year, as a sixth-grader. About halfway through the season, he was starting. “I wasn’t even sure I’d make the team. But when I was starting, I saw I could play a little bit and I got serious about the game,” he says. By eighth grade, Dixon was practicing with the varsity.

Dixon made an immediate impact at the varsity level during his freshman year. He helped lead Turner County to the state finals, where his team lost to Hancock Central by four points. A year later, Turner returned to the finals, losing to Whitefield Academy by 13 points. By his sophomore year, Dixon was already thinking about playing college basketball, and he had been advised to play against better competition. He was having success at the single-A level, but his stock among collegiate programs would rise tremendously if he played on a bigger stage. Then his head coach at Turner County, Eric Holland, announced he was moving to Tift to take the head coaching job. “When Breon learned I was moving to Tifton, he told me he was going with me,” says Holland.

It was the perfect combination – Dixon could stay with his head coach and play in one of the premier regions in the state. The Holland-Dixon duo brought several important qualities to the Tift program. Holland is a fantastic coach who knows how to win basketball games. He won four straight region titles and took Turner to the aforementioned back-to-back finals appearances. Dixon brought his size, athleticism and his ability to perform well in big games to Tift. He also has a winning pedigree with his pair of region championships and playoff experience.

Holland knew Dixon would be one of the best players in the region, but he also knew it would take a little while for his star player to adjust to AAAAA basketball. “The 5A level has better coaching and more true basketball players. In A ball, you can bring your B game on a few nights and still score 20 points. You can’t do that in 5A. There are a lot of big men in the region and he had to learn how to get in there and bang with the big guys,” recalls Holland. It didn’t take long for Dixon to get the feel of the 5A game. “By December, I could tell he was adjusting. By January, he was one of the top five players in the region.”

Dixon turned in some big performances in his first year at Tift. Perhaps his best all-around series of games came in the Jones County tournament, where he averaged 27 points per game and was named tournament MVP. Playing against the host team, Dixon turned in a triple-double with 27 points, 19 rebounds and 13 blocks. “My teammates didn’t think I had that kind of game in me. I didn’t, either,” laughs Dixon. “I just had a good night.” Tift won the game by eight in overtime.

Dixon showed he could put up big numbers in the biggest games. He had a huge game against Coffee in the region tournament. Against Lowndes in the same tourney, he scored Tift’s first 19 points. Tift won the region title – Dixon’s third in a row and Holland’s fifth straight – and moved on to the playoffs as a number-one seed. In the first round, the Blue Devils defeated Creekside, 36-34, then moved on to face Stephenson, a perennial contender from the metro area. Stephenson came out on top, 60-53. Tift finished the season with a 24-5 record, and Dixon put up some solid numbers, averaging 14 points, 11 rebounds and five blocks per game. He capped the year by earning All-Region and All-State honors.

This year, Tift should make a case for a second-straight region championship. The Blue Devils have 10 seniors on the 2010-2011 squad, and four players are back who either started or played regularly last year. Tift also has Jackson, who has already made a tremendous impact early in the season. Jackson was starting in the Turner County middle school program as a sixth-grader and playing above the rim at 13 years old. “He was scoring 30 points per game as a sixth-grader,” recalls Holland, who says Jackson is like a son to him. As good as Dixon, Jackson and his teammates are, the Lowndes Vikings and Valdosta High Wildcats will also stake a claim as the top team in 1-AAAAA. “Jay Rome is clearly the best player but Breon is right behind him,” says Holland. Rome, a Wildcat, is the three-time Region 1-AAAAA Player of the Year.

In addition to the exposure he enjoyed by making the finals for two years with Turner and the Sweet 16 last year with Tift, Dixon played AAU ball for three years with the Georgia Blazers and the Georgia Stars. He knew he would one day have the opportunity to play college basketball, and that it would take more than athletic ability alone to get to school. He has always done well in the classroom and has solid grades. “My mom would kill me if I didn’t make good grades,” he laughs.

Dixon has had several smaller schools and mid-major programs looking at him, including Middle Tennessee State and Mercer. He has verbally committed to Middle Tennessee State but is keeping his options open. “He can be a really good mid-major player. I think he can play right away,” says Holland. Dixon is being recruited as a power forward, which Holland thinks is a good fit for Dixon at the college level. “He has everything he needs to play the four. He can score, he can defend, everything,” Holland says.

Dixon would like to stay close to the game he so dearly loves after college. He is considering majoring in health and physical education, or maybe even sports science. Either way, his ultimate goal is to go into coaching. “I’d like to be a high school basketball coach,” he says matter-of-factly.

Dixon is solid academically and tremendously gifted at basketball. Dixon also knows that he isn’t going to be successful without the help of his teammates, and he has an incredible supporting cast of players with whom he shares the floor. The pieces of the puzzle are in place for the Blue Devils to give the Wildcats and Vikings a serious challenge for the 1-AAAAA crown this year. Dixon and his coach have also won three straight region titles together. They aren’t interested in seeing their streak end this year, in Dixon’s final high school season. And that could spell trouble for not only the Wildcats and Vikings but also for the Packers, the Trojans and whoever else Tift faces once the playoffs arrive. •

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