New coach Henson emphasizes confidence in taking over young Vikings

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Eli Henson’s past and present all came together July 4.

He drove past his grandfather’s old house in Akron on his way to the Fourth of July three-on-three basketball tournament there. That was his past.

At the tournament, he saw how much community enthusiasm there was for the tournament, a staple of the town birthday events for decades. That was his present.

That allowed the new Tippecanoe Valley boys basketball coach to speak of his vision for the future of the program. He speaks of consistency.

“Valley football is good every year,” Henson said. “So my goal is to get the community to feel the same way about basketball. I want it to become a basketball school as well.”

Henson was hired at a Valley school board meeting April 30. He replaced Joe Luce, who stepped down to take the Wawasee boys coaching job.

“To me, it’s a job I’ve always been interested in,” Henson said of Valley. “It just never really worked out that I had a chance to apply for it.”

Henson has a 193-139 record in 14 previous seasons as a head coach. He previously coached at North White (2011-16), Whitko (2016-20) and Manchester (2020-25). He guided North White to a sectional crown in 2014 and most famously took Manchester to the Class 2A state title just one month before accepting the Valley job.

He is believed to be the first coach to win a state championship and then resign to take another coaching job since Jason Delaney won the Class 1A state title at Waldron in 2004 and then left to take the Southport job.

Henson is a 2004 Elwood grad, where he played basketball for his father Dave. Dave Henson is a 1968 Akron High School grad, where he played for his father Floyd. And Floyd Henson was both the last boys basketball coach in Akron history – he won sectionals there in 1968 and 1974 – and the first coach in Tippecanoe Valley history, guiding the program from the opening of its doors in 1974 to 1978.

Henson was asked what he tells people when they ask where he is from.

“That’s a tough question,” Henson said. “Because where I always say where I’m from is just where I went to high school, and that’s Elwood. And I lived there for a couple years after high school. But if I talk to people around here where I’m from, I just say Macy, Indiana, because that’s what my address was for 21 years of my life.”

But his grandparents’ house was in Akron, and he said he is familiar with the towns that make up the Valley community.

“My grandparents raised their family in Akron, and I just had a chance to drive by their house as we were doing the Fourth of July tournament,” Henson said. “That was kind of cool. I’m very familiar with Akron, very familiar with Mentone. Those are communities where as a kid I was there a lot. We did a lot of our grocery shopping at Viking Foods, so it’s like I’m very familiar with our area.”

Henson said he considered applying for the job when it was vacant in 2022, but he said he wanted to see through the development of his players at Manchester. That group, which included future Grace College players Gavin Betten and Ethan Hendrix, formed the nucleus of his state championship team.

“At Manchester I knew what I had in our program with Gavin, Ethan and a lot of those younger guys, so I wanted to stay there and complete everything that we had put in together working at Manchester with those guys,” Henson said. “So it just worked out to where we had the season we had at Manchester. We ended things the way any team would want to end their season.”

Henson taking over the Valley job 51 years after his grandfather marks the third generation of a family dedicated to basketball. Dave Henson later was the head coach at Caston, Whitko, L&M, Elwood, North Miami and North White. He also came out of retirement – he had not coached anywhere in 10 years – to be an assistant on the 2025 Manchester state champions.

“That’s our basketball legacy,” Henson said. “My dad and my grandpa are all about basketball. That’s something that’s rubbed off on me, and that’s something that’s given me my passion. … When that job came open, knowing my grandfather was the first coach and that my dad grew up in that area, that’s big. That’s cool. That’s something you want to be a part of. And I had the chance to do that. When I told my dad, I could see the excitement and just hear it in his voice when I told him so.”

Floyd Henson died at age 78 in 1998. Eli said he does not remember talking much basketball with him at a young age, but he does remember his grandfather attending his games when he was young and having a “great relationship” with him.

“When my grandfather passed away, I think I was in the fourth or fifth grade,” Henson said. “I don’t remember a lot of things from my early elementary or early ages. Probably not a lot of people do. To say that I learned a lot of basketball stuff, I can’t say that. That wouldn’t be the truth. I mean, I always remember going to his house and watching games.

“I think the big part is it’s my dad. I grew up in a gym with my dad. So I would say all my knowledge and all kinds of stuff like that would come from my dad. Where did this knowledge come from? It would come from his dad.”

Then they got to share winning a state title together at Manchester with father assisting son in Dave’s apparent coaching swan song. Dave was also an assistant on the North White team that won a Class 1A sectional in 2014. Eli said Dave will not be on his Valley staff.

“That was awesome,” Henson said. “Not too many players or coaches get to experience that with a sibling or their father. So that was pretty special for me. Him and I coached a little at North White together, and we hadn’t coached since. So for him, he came out of retirement after 10 years… and for him to be a part of that as well, I’m sure he would say the same thing about how awesome that was. It’s just a special moment. I know as a player and a coach, he never won a state championship. And as a coach and a player, sometimes you don’t know if you ever will get an opportunity to do that.”

When Henson talks about style of play, he talks about relationships. Teams cannot succeed before coaches and players develop mutual trust. He said it is his job to get to know his players as people first.

“We’ve just got to get comfortable around each other,” Henson said. “I want them  to know what I value, and I’m trying to figure out roles and putting all those players that we have in our program in spots where they’re going to succeed. I think this first month that I’ve been around is just for one, just really trying to get to know them as much as possible. That way, I can relate to them, and I can build that relationship with them as much as possible. If you want to get your kids to go out there and play hard for 32 minutes, practice hard and put in all that time, you’ve got to build that relationship with them.”

Asked about his career as a high school basketball player, Henson jokes that there was not a shot in the gym he did not like. In fact, there is a greater message in what he says about always having the same demeanor.

“I think a big thing with me that I try to instill in our players that I learned as a player was play with confidence always,” Henson said. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done the last couple of possessions. You have to always play with confidence. If you even start to play with doubt, that’s when a lot of negative things are going to happen on a basketball floor.”

In his five years at Manchester, they averaged at least 60 points per game in four of them. All four of his Whitko teams averaged at least 55 points per game as well.

Henson said an uptempo style is in line with the family philosophy. He speaks of playing comfortably and freely. Players should not worry about making mistakes and instead should not hesitate to make plays.

“Something that came from (my dad’s) dad was just our tempo of play,” Henson said. “That’s how my dad liked to play too. We like to be aggressive on both ends of the floor. Get the ball down the floor. Work hard to get a quick shot in transition but a good shot in transition. Just making sure that – I think one thing my dad taught me which all coaches should already do anyways – is just make sure the players on your roster know their role and know where they fit in on our team. Because that’s something that comes with their playing more comfortable if they know what their role is and they know what to do on the floor.”

When Henson talks about basketball skills, he said the most important skill is playing hard.

“They have to learn what it’s like to work hard,” Henson said. “That’s every single drill in practice. That’s the only way to get them to work hard for 32 minutes in a game. You’ve got to work their butts off in practice, get them to understand what it’s like to play aggressive, what it’s like to play that uptempo style, and the only way to do that is simulate that kind of stuff in practice, so that’s really what I’ve tried to do my whole coaching career.”

Henson takes over a Valley team coming off a 20-6 season last year and won the first Indiana Northern State Conference title. The season ended with a 45-43 overtime buzzer-beater loss to Columbia City in the Class 3A, Sectional 20 final, and Henson’s new team would appear to look totally different from that team.

Starters Ian Cooksey, Blain Sheetz and DeOndre Hamilton graduated, and Stephen Akase and Davis Cowan are expected to transfer to Wawasee to team up again with Luce.

Henson said Valley played 17 games this summer, which he called  “perfect for us” as he tries to balance teaching his players what he wants with getting them some game experience. He said he does not have a player taller than 6-0 or 6-1 and that they go about seven or eight-deep right now.

“If you don’t have experience, it’s going to take time,” Henson said. “And I know that. Our guys know that. And I’m pretty sure our fanbase understands that. But what I’m looking for is we can always control our effort. And once we figure out we’re just going to outwork people, I think that’s when we’re going to start to get a lot better.”

Henson saw his Manchester team get better to where they finally won state. Then he spent part of his summer as an assistant coach for the Indiana Junior All-Stars. He said that no Valley player has asked him what it felt like to win state, but one of the Junior All-Stars did.

The amount of focus required might be considered intense.

Henson said that finding out that Fort Wayne Blackhawk would no longer be in their sectional in the spring of 2024 greatly improved his team’s chances. He said he knew Rochester and Oak Hill would be the biggest threats to his team’s chances of winning the sectional, and he said he watched film of every Rochester and Oak Hill game throughout the season.

Manchester then received a bye and beat Rochester 71-46 and Oak Hill 70-38 to win the school’s first sectional since 1995. Given the 30-year drought, he said the focus was on winning the sectional all season.

“Once we got that, I feel like our kids just played with confidence and played free,” Henson said.

But he later added that he wanted his players to keep “their foot on the pedal” in March.

Manchester rolled to a 54-36 win over Tipton in the regional at Logansport.

Then came dramatic wins over Jimtown and Gary 21st Century by a combined total of four points at the semistate at Michigan City. He remembers the noise the Manchester crowd made when Hendrix hit a 3-pointer with six seconds left to give the Squires a one-point win over Jimtown in the semistate semifinals.

While enjoying the moment with the community was one of the joys of the semistate, the 59-54 state win over University was more of a blur. In fact, Henson said he did not see his wife and children that day until the team got back home from Indianapolis.

Still, he embraces the permanence of what happened, and he said he will still watch film of games from the tournament run weekly.

“That’s something that I’ll never forget,” Henson said. “That’s something that’s going to bond our players and I for life together. I get excited just talking about it. My heart rate’s going up just talking about it.”

Later he said the state run got to the essence of why he wanted to coach.

“That’s something as a player and a coach, that’s why you do it,” Henson said. “That’s why we do this. That’s why we put so much time and effort into this.”

Now Henson said it’s about hitting the restart button at Valley.

He said when he toured the school that he was “dumbfounded” by the weight room.

“You can tell athletics is very important at Valley,” Henson said. “They take it very seriously as you should. They have the resources. They have the facilities. They have the facilities to have something great there.”

As for his coaching staff, Sean Shepherd will stay but move from JV coach to varsity assistant. Valley grad Matt Tolson is the new JV coach, and Kyle Ritchey will stay on as C-team coach. Casey Lane is a new addition as an assistant.

Henson will also replace Luce as Dean of Students, which is his first job in administration after 10 years as a special education teacher and five years as a physical education teacher.

His wife Stephanie is a second grade teacher at Pierceton Elementary School. He is father to son Hayden, 5, and daughter Sadie, 3.