New Brownwood Lions basketball head coach Will Parker on Wednesday made his first public comments since accepting the position. Parker was a guest of athletic director Sammy Burnett on the KOXE Coaches’ Show, which can be heard Mondays and Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m. and viewed at KOXE.com.

“Coming here, moving up a classification, taking over a really good program, I’m pretty excited to try and take it to the next level,” Parker said. “I’m really, really pumped.”

In six seasons as head coach at Dublin, Parker posted a 124-64 record, including 117-45 over the last five years with five playoff appearances and a pair of district championships. During the 2020-21 basketball season, Dublin posted a 20-10 record and advanced three rounds deep in the playoffs – the fifth straight year in which Dublin tallied at least 20 victories.

“Every year we made it a point to try and strengthen our schedule at Dublin and every year Brownwood was one of those teams I wanted to schedule because I knew they had athletes and they could run and brought out the best in our teams,” Parker said.

Parker stated he had talked with former Lions head coach Nadir Dalleh, now the head coach at Howard Payne, even more in recent weeks regarding the Brownwood program.

“We just talked about kids and relationships and how important that is to him, and I feel like it’s going to be a pretty smooth transition,” Parker said. “We talked about personnel and I’m really excited about jumping in head first and getting in there. I know the freshman group is pretty athletic and the junior high teams were huge.”

Regarding his philosophy on the court, Parker said, “I’m a run and gun coach and we get after it. The last five years Dublin has led the state of Texas in scoring and three-point shooting. A lot of people think we don’t play defense, all we do is score, but a lot of that offense is based behind a really strong defense. We’ll pressure the whole game, 32 minutes up and down, and we really try to wear teams down. The philosophy behind that and why we play that way is to me if you can play a fast game the more reps you get the better you’re going to get. Our practices are full speed, you’re going to get more reps in and you’re going to get better as a basketball player and a basketball team. It’s a lot of fun to watch, a lot of fun to play and a lot of fun to coach as well.”

Burnett spoke about the decision to offer the job to Parker.

“I don’t care as much about basketball knowledge as I do how you run your program, and the first thing Will talked to me about was his relationship with the Lord, how he impacts kids, and how he brings his Christian faith to his program,” Burnett said. “That’s our No. 1 goal, to give our kids a proper foundation that they can use to be successful.

“Then we talked about the day-in, day-out activities of how basketball is run and how can we mesh those with football, baseball, track and soccer and all the other sports we have and how we can give every kid an opportunity to be successful. His desire and what he wants to do I thought meshed really well with what we have going and what we want to continue to do, so it was a pretty easy decision.”

Parker will also help coach the Lions cross country program.

“I’ve really fallen in love with cross country the last five years,” Parker said. “We were able to do some big things at Dublin. We hosted about three or four cross country meets last year. Our boys won three of the last four district championships and competing against Brock and Peaster that’s saying something. We were seven points away from making it to state as a team this year, but we had one runner make it out so we got to go Round Rock and experience that. I’m just as excited to bring that experience and knowledge to Brownwood and bring that boys program up, too.”

Parker’s wife, Leah, will teach speech at Brownwood and the couple has three children – Jayce, 9; Cannon, 7; and Laila, 4.