Brewer High School announced the hiring of new head basketball coaches for its boys and girls varsity teams Wednesday.
Carl Parker has been named the new boys varsity basketball head coach, while Tanna Ross was selected as the varsity girls basketball head coach.
Parker has coached at Maine Central Institute, Lee Academy, Nokomis, Bangor and most recently Old Town as the junior varsity head coach for the last three seasons.
The Witches are coming off their first state basketball championship, a Class A victory over Falmouth under head coach Ben Goodwin.
Ross replaces Chad LaBree as head coach of the girls basketball team.
Brewer Superintendent Greg Palmer said the administration “felt it was time to hand the program over to someone who works in the district and has walked in these girls’ shoes as a local high school basketball player and someone who played at a very high level collegiately at the University of Maine.”
Ross was the girls junior varsity coach last year and saw firsthand how much the community cares about the Brewer basketball teams after the boys team’s state title.
“It’s just a wonderful community,” Ross said. “I just got hired as a PE teacher at the [Brewer] Community School this year, so it’s been just fun being fully immersed in the community and it worked out well enough that the boys won a state championship. So just being a part of that and learning how much the teams are embraced in this community was just something special. You can’t not want to be a part of it.”
Ross played on the University of Maine women’s basketball team and after finishing her college career in 2011 has coached basketball since.
“I’ve always wanted to be potentially a head coach at some time and I just felt like now is the perfect opportunity for me to try and get to that point,” Ross said. “I’m pretty excited to work with this group of girls and see what we can do.”
Ross wants to set up a summer program and is excited to help grow the Brewer girls basketball program.
“Luckily I’ll be able to put some basketballs in their hands pretty early,” Ross said. “We’ll have a summer camp that I’ll get the word out about soon and hopefully we get a ton of kids for that and show some interest in that and see what we got for talent coming up through and absolutely, the sooner, the better I feel. If you want to develop an actual program and continue success for a long time. I think that that’s super important.”