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Alston hoping he's settled down at Lehigh

10/10/2014, 12:30am EDT

By Ari Rosenfeld

Brandon Alston (above) committed to Lehigh, reclassified to 2014 and transferred all in the same day. (Photo: Mark Jordan)

Ari Rosenfeld (@realA_rosenfeld)
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To say that Lehigh freshman Brandon Alston had a meandering path to Bethlehem would certainly be an understatement.

Alston spent his first three years of high school in Virginia, attending Paul VI as a freshman and Middleburg Academy for his sophomore and junior years, during which he scored almost 900 points. He then came to New Jersey in order to play for head coach Mark Taylor at national powerhouse St. Benedict’s, before heading to Life Center to be closer to his sick grandmother.

After not quite seeing eye-to-eye with the coaching staff at Life Center, Alston ultimately transferred to Herndon High School, just one town over from his Vienna, Va. home.

It was the decision to come back home, which he actually announced on the same day as his commitment to Lehigh and his reclassification to the 2014 class, that proved to be the most rewarding of Alston’s many moves.

“Once I was at Life Center, I kind of just didn’t like the school as much and I decided to just commit and come back home,” he said. “My last high school that I went to, Herndon, I kind of wish I would’ve went there longer.”

He will now join with fellow freshman guards Kahron Ross and Tyler Jenkins to give the Mountain Hawks some much-needed depth on the perimeter, something that head coach Brett Reed acknowledges they did not have enough of during last season’s 14-18 campaign.

The team’s three leading scorers, lead by then-senior Mackey McKnight at a modest 13.5 points per game, were either point guards or frontcourt players. Sophomore sharpshooter Austin Price, at 8.4 points per game, was the Mountain Hawks’ leading scorer from the wing.

“This last year we were very thin in the perimeter. That led to an over-taxation; some of our players that were playing meaningful roles and their minutes had to be too high,” Reed said. “We didn’t have the depth, we didn’t have the versatility, and we didn’t even have some of the components that we needed to playmake and have some individual scoring production output.”

However, while Ross and Jenkins both play the point, the 6-5 Alston will be expected to bring a scoring punch from the wing to a team that was largely devoid of such a weapon last season.

“Austin Price is a good shooter in a younger class, but he’s not necessarily a tremendous creator for himself,” Reed said. “I think the inclusion of a Brandon Alston gives us a perimeter player who’s got decent size, decent strength, and has a scorer’s mentality that can bring another element to our offensive arsenal that we might not have had before.”

While it’s his scoring that receives the most attention, Alston, who actually played point guard during his senior year of high school, thinks it’ll be the other facets of his game that initially get him minutes.

“I realize as a freshman that I can get on the floor by playing defense and not just trying to always put the ball in the basket, which is something that comes naturally for me,” he said. “Also, a lot of people overlook the fact that since I get into the paint so much, that I pass. So I’m gonna try to get the big men the ball. We have some good big men on our team that can finish around the basket, and we also have Jesse who can shoot 3s, so when I’m driving it’s good that he can space the floor.”

It’s now clear that while transferring between three different high schools in two different states during his senior year, Alston was just searching for a place that felt like home.

While he needed to return to Virginia to obtain that feeling last year, it has not taken him long to find the same feeling at Lehigh, 200 miles away from Vienna.

“The coaching staff at Lehigh really sold me on it. Coach Reed, Wyches, and Kruegs, they did a really good job of recruiting me and showing me that they really wanted me to come to the school,” he said. “Then when I came to the school, I liked the campus, and I loved the blend of academics and athletics.

“I feel like I’m in the right place.”