The Charles Henderson Trojans saw their 2024-2025 basketball season come to an end last week in the Class 5A Regional Semifinals after a successful season.

For the fourth straight year, CHHS won an area championship and went undefeated in area play along with winning 11 straight games to finish the regular season. 

“All in all, I thought we had a pretty good year,” CHHS Coach Tim Fayson said. “We had a lot of younger guys playing, some new faces, and I thought we sort of turned the season around after we came back from Dothan (for the Downtown Hoops Classic). I think our guys really got focused and we were able to make a nice little run all the way until the regional tournament.”

Fayson credited his seniors for the turnaround. Senior guard Cody Cross is the middle child of Troy University men’s basketball coach Scott Cross, who Fayson said fell in love with basketball the last few years. Cross finished his senior campaign averaging eight points, four rebounds and two steals per game. 

“I can’t say enough about those guys,” Fayson said of the seniors. “Cody (Cross) is a kid who really wasn’t interested in basketball at first. Out of the three boys, his parents said he was the least interested in basketball.

“He’s just someone that works hard. Every single day he works hard to get better. To see him fall in love with the game and work his tail off was really impressive and meant a lot to me.”

This season was Kameron Christian’s first and only season with the Trojans but he left his mark, averaging 12 points, five rebounds and two steals per game to lead CHHS. 

“I don’t know where we would have ended up without Kam,” Fayson emphasized. “He’s the ‘Little Engine that Could.’ He was the energy behind our success the second half of the season. He’s a tremendous young man and a hard worker. Our success this season was largely dependent on him and Cody and what they meant to the team.” 

Fayson said that all of his seniors were leaders this season, however.

“I have to mention Quay (Grimes), Antonio (Frazier), Ced (Brown) and Mel Rodgers,” Fayson continued. “Those guys brought a sense of leadership to the team. Even though some of them didn’t get to play a lot, they had great attitudes all year long. They came to practice every day working hard and pushing the other guys. I thought those guys were tremendous and a lot of the stuff they did was sort of behind-the-scenes in terms of leading us, and really helping us down the stretch.”

Charles Henderson will return a ton of experience to next year’s team.

“This will be the first time I’ll have four or five guys that started at one point in the season coming back,” Fayson said of looking to the future. “I’ll have a group of seven or eight guys that got to play coming back. That’s huge for the program.” 

Among those returners are sophomore Tyler Cross and junior Jydarien Burney. Burney finished the season averaging 11 points, seven rebounds and two blocks per game.

“It was really good for all of those guys to get more experience, especially for my 10th graders,” he said. “I felt like it was imperative for those guys to sort of go through it, sometimes you just have to get put through the process. It was huge, especially for those guys in their first year on varsity, to get that experience heading into next season. 

“Now, we have a sense of where we’re going to be (next year) and how we need to be physically to play at the highest level in 5A. I think it was very instrumental to get those guys minutes at the varsity level.”