For Weleetka High School junior Terran Pitts, achieving success in basketball has been mostly a do-it-yourself endeavor.
“Terran is a hard-working kid who has done a lot on his own because I worked a lot with his older sister until she graduated and he was kind of on the back burner,” said his coach and dad Cory Pitts. “He’s really self-driven and I love watching him play. He’s always been a good player and even took some lessons at Connors last year and this year he’s becoming more of a leader by example and vocally.”
Working on his own has never really been a problem according to Terran.
“It really wasn’t a big deal to me because I was in elementary school and she was in high school and I understood why she got more attention,” he said. “I think having to play games without my parents always being around made me play a little harder to get better on my own.”
Even now, Terran’s work ethic centers around working out on his own.
“I improve by pushing myself when I’m by myself,” he said. “I’ll go to the gym and go 100 miles an hour, and when I’m done, I want to be dripping in sweat and shoot like I have an NBA player guarding me.”
The Pitts family moved to Weleetka from Indianola this year, which has required some adjusting. He was a sophomore starter on a senior-heavy team at Indianola and averaged about 14 points a game but never felt like that team gelled.
“I think I took some crap last year because some folks thought I was starting just because I was the coach’s kid, and I never felt we had a very tight inner circle there,” Terran said. “But at Weleetka it’s different because I think the other kids can see what I do and how I prepare and I’m more of a role model now, and I want to show them that I’m the hardest worker out there.”
Though he’s got a couple of high school years left, Terran already has one memory that he’ll treasure.
“My freshman year at Indianola, we were playing Crowder and we were down by three with about four seconds to play. I got the ball in the corner and shot it a mile high and hit it to tie the game and then we won in overtime,” he said.
