Like most socially inclined teenagers, Tagen Pearson wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of being uprooted from a comfortable environment filled with lifelong friends shortly before he entered high school.
His family’s move from suburban Kansas City to La Grange in the summer of 2016 also meant he would have to get used to basketball in a new environment.
Pearson, now a sophomore guard, enrolled at Nazareth and began playing for his father, Sean Pearson, a 1991 graduate of the school who remains an icon of Roadrunners athletics.
“It’s a lot to handle sometimes. There are people who hold me up high because of him,” Tagen Pearson said. “But I just do ‘me.’ I don’t try to do what he did. I try to play my own way.”
That’s exactly how Sean Pearson wants it.
As both a coach and father, he goes to great lengths to ensure that Tagen Pearson doesn’t feel pressure to replicate the prodigious success that he enjoyed during his career, which ended with him as the Roadrunners’ all-time leading scorer and rebounder.
Encouraging Tagen Pearson to forge his own path is working out fine thus far. After he had stretches of being in and out of the lineup as a freshman, the younger Pearson has become a full-time starter this season and is one of the Roadrunners’ most dangerous scorers.
Tagen Pearson has shown flashes of the same brilliant play that defined his father’s basketball career, which included college ball at Kansas. But Sean Pearson has made clear that his sons — Tagen and his younger brother Talen, age 11 — ought to put academics first.
“The only pressure I put onto them is to get great grades,” said Sean Pearson, who joined Nazareth’s hall of fame in 2007. “If Tagen stopped playing basketball tomorrow, I’d still love him the same.”
Another hallmark of Sean Pearson’s coaching philosophy is making sure he treats his son, a 6-foot-1 guard, the same as his teammates.
That came through loud and clear in the third quarter of the Roadrunners’ 49-36 loss to Carmel on Friday, when Tagen took an ill-advised 3-pointer only seconds into a possession and without making a single pass.
It took the blink of an eye for Sean Pearson to scan the bench for a replacement.
And there was no argument from Tagen Pearson.
“I can’t do something everyone else wouldn’t be able to do,” Tagen Pearson said. “He looks at me as a team player, and I didn’t live up to that. I can’t be selfish and just try to create for myself.”
Steve Reaven is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Twitter @Pioneer_Press
