Saraland’s sibling coaches trying to make championship history

 

 

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

SARALAND — She doesn’t mind being Jeff Kelly’s little sister, not that she has a choice, but Dana Kelly Mason wants to be regarded for her own accomplishments, which are stacked as tall as a jacked-up outside hitter spiking a volleyball down someone’s larynx.

And there’s one thing in particular that Saraland’s volleyball coach has done that Saraland’s football coach will never do.

“The number of wins,” said Mason, who has 522 of them. “I’m pretty proud about that. I will always hold that over him.”

Kelly has 187 football victories in 21 seasons. At that rate, he would reach 500 wins in another 35 years, when he is 80.

“I’m not gonna be coaching anywhere long enough to get close to that,” Kelly mused without doing the math. “She will always be the wins leader in our household, so we’re proud of her for that. She may be looking at the 500. I’m just looking at 1-0 as many times as we can do it.”

Mason, 40, is five years younger than her brother but they share a lot of similarities, except for the fact that she was an Azalea Trail Maid. They’re math whizzes, analytical, ultra-competitive and are also coaches who might become the first siblings to win state championships at the same school in the same year in different sports.

Saraland’s football team (8-0) is ranked No. 1 in Class 6A and aiming for its third straight trip to the Super 7. The volleyball team (39-6) was ranked No. 2 in the regular season’s final poll and is trying to reach the state championship round for the second consecutive season. The Spartans are in the Super Regionals this week in Montgomery and the state tournament in Birmingham is Oct. 29-31.

The brother and sister currently have a combined 709 wins, so it’s fortunate they can compute robust numbers without the aid of a calculator. Mason has a bachelor’s degree in math, a secondary degree in education and a master’s in sports management from Jacksonville State. Kelly, who in a nearly impromptu fashion became a football coach instead of a banker or financier, has a bachelor’s and master’s in business administration from Southern Miss, where he was the starting quarterback.

Their seemingly professorial personas mask something deeper.

“Neither one of them like to lose,” said their father, Tommy Kelly.

Last year, both teams reached the state championship round and both were defeated — the football team to Clay-Chalkville 31-28 in an attempt to win its second straight Blue Map and the volleyball team, in the finals for the first time, lost to Mountain Brook 25-15, 25-14, 26-28, 25-15.

 

Long, slow road to the top

 

The siblings have painstakingly reached the top of their profession.

“Both are very detail-oriented,” said Saraland High School principal Scott Croley, who grew up with them and worked for years under Kelly on his football staff. “They have great attention to detail with everything they do. They’re very intentional with things that they do. When the game is on the line, they have a certain level of intensity in which they’re able to push kids and get the most out of kids.  Everything has a reason in terms of how they hold kids accountable, how they hold their coaches accountable. And I can say that from experience because I’ve been one of them. There are not a lot of surprises with either one of them.”

It took Mason 18 years to reach the state finals but her program had already shown it belonged among the state’s elite, beating 31-time state champion Bayside Academy along the way in 2023. Just to show it was not a fluke, the Spartans beat the Admirals again earlier this month.

It took Kelly 19 years to win his first state football championship and now he is one of the state’s preeminent coaches with the best record (57-8) in Class 6A in the last five years.

Their father said they get their patience from him.

“They got most of their hard work from their mother,” Tommy Kelly said. “They may learn from me to make less mistakes and just go slower than bullying right through somewhere. I don’t talk to them a whole lot about coaching.”

 

‘She’s on the john’

 

Mason and Kelly developed their love of competition while growing up in an athletic family in Saraland and Deer Park, which perfectly describes the majority of the warm-blooded inhabitants there. Kelly was an All-State quarterback at Citronelle and eventually became the starting quarterback at Southern Miss and had a brief NFL career with the Seattle Seahawks. Mason played volleyball and was an NAIA All-American softball infielder at Spring Hill College.

“I think Dana was probably the best athlete,” Kelly said. “She was just really, really good in her own right. She grew up a right-handed hitter but ended up turning around and becoming one of those slap hitters.”

Mason holds the SHC record for striking out just twice in the 2005 season. Her brother might hold the record for the most guys who struck out while trying to get a date with his sister.

When they called the house, Kelly often made up the same excuse for why she couldn’t come to the phone.

“She’s on the john,” he’d say. “I’ll tell her to call you back.”

The next day, those who were informed she was indisposed asked if Kelly told her they had called.

“No.”

“But your brother answered the phone.”

“I was glad he went to college,” Mason said.

Kelly pleaded guilty to brotherly mischief.

“You wanted them to be a little bit concerned,” he said. “You wanted to make sure that they were the right kind of people. Some of it probably was just aggravating, just my personality, just aggravating your little sister.”

 

Put on the gloves

 

But while she might have felt like slapping him, unless you count unofficial and informal wrestling matches when they were young, there was never any direct athletic competition between them.

“It wasn’t competitive, like, ‘I’m going to do better, I’m doing to get more wins,’ it was an understood respect,” Mason said. “It’s like, ‘I see you.’ We wanted to win. He was into wrestling. He would practice his moves on me on the floor. He just thought it was so funny.”

So did she. “He was a bag of bones,” Mason recalled.

Years later, when he would come home from Southern Miss, Kelly often got his sister and parents to run pass patterns for him in what was the closest thing to the Unofficial Yard Championship of Deer Park.

“When you’re in Deer Park, there’s not a lot of guys that you can meet up at the local field and have a bunch of receivers to throw to, so you make do,” Kelly said.

He’d pass out receivers gloves to his family — a necessity — then start throwing.

“Well, he just pegged me,” Mason said. “He made my mom one time put on a helmet and said, ‘Go run out there,’ and we were just always playing. I just thought it was really cool because I had these gloves.”

Kelly said his father insisted on wearing the gloves.

“It got to the point where he wouldn’t do it unless I brought him some receiver gloves because he said the balls would hurt his hands,” Kelly said. “Dana ran her share of routes. She was a pretty good receiver, too. If they had flag football back in the day, she would have been a very good player.”

 

Days of discipline

 

The competition extended to the classroom, where Kelly was Citronelle’s valedictorian, their older sister Audra was the salutatorian and Mason was third in her class, tripped by a B in English. Even then, she was taught not to make excuses or take the easy way. Mason felt her English teacher was too tough and she wanted to switch to what she anticipated would be a more enjoyable class taught by her volleyball coach and attended by her friends. Her mother refused.

“No, it shouldn’t matter what teacher you have,” Neci Kelly told her daughter. “I’m not changing your schedule.”

Mason finished high school with all A’s except for that English class.

“I finished third,” she said. “I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, I completely understand because students shouldn’t do that.”

All the Kelly children felt their parents’ differing methods of discipline but all with the same effect.

“I don’t think Tommy’s ever gave all three of them a whipping at all,” Neci Kelly said. “It was me.”

Tommy Kelly had common-sense solutions to misbehavior. At one point, Mason said her sister Audra got into trouble and complained about living at home and her father had the perfect solution.

“My dad gave her a grocery bag and said, ‘Go upstairs, put in it anything you bought with your own money and you can leave if you think you’ve got it so bad,’” Mason said. “And she went up there and she came downstairs with her empty bag. She said, ‘I guess I’ll stay here.’”

Mason said her brother was more clever, more clandestine.

“He knew what not to do or, if he was going to do anything, he was going to do it to where nobody was watching,” she said. “By the time I came along, there was more of a magnifying glass.”

At times, Mason said the magnifying glass still exists since she and her brother are both coaches.

“If I was doing something wrong, he would turn me in,” she said.

Would she turn him in?

“Oh, exactly, 110 percent,” Mason said. “I am the one in the family that, even though I’m the youngest or the baby, he knows that I don’t put up with his crap like the rest of them do. I give him a hard time. If he dishes it out, I will give it back to him. He seems to think he’s the family manager but I’m the one that isn’t scared to have the last say. He knows that, too. (His wife) Lisa knows. She says, ‘I love when you’re around.’”

 

‘The golden child’

 

Despite those proclivities, Mason and Kelly are close, although she contends he is their parents’ favorite — “The golden child,” she said. The proof, she contends, remains in their parents’ two-story home.

“I will tell you this hidden secret is the reason why I know that he is the favorite,” she said. “His bedroom at the top story, it’s still exactly the way he left it when he went to college. Same wallpaper — green paint, maroon wallpaper, got football guys on it — and you have to see the articles from when he was in high school or college or whatever up on the wall laminated, like he’s still there. It’s like a shrine. My room, when I went to college, they packed it up and my mom said, ‘Here you go.’ As a matter of fact, if you want to see any of my plaques, they’re hanging on my office wall down here on the corner ‘cause my mom brought them to me.”

She’d like a Blue Map to go with them but gave assurances she wouldn’t come close to dropping it, as her brother nearly did after beating Mountain Brook 38-17 at Jordan-Hare Stadium in 2022.

“I would definitely handle with care, use both hands and celebrate a little more gently than he did,” Mason said. “That would be the ultimate end if we both were able to do that. That would be amazing. I can’t tell you two other people in the state that have that expectation as much as we do. The drive is there, the sacrifice is there, we just have to finish.”

Kelly wants his sister to succeed and said his football team would feel some pressure to win another state championship if the volleyball team does.

“I will be extremely proud of them, extremely, extremely proud,” Kelly said. “The thing about the timing of the volleyball tournament, if that’s the case, then that puts a lot of pressure on our boys and that’ll be about the time we get kicked off in the playoffs. That would definitely generate a ton of excitement in our school. I think it would give our guys a lot of excitement going into the playoffs to be ready to be at their best as well.”