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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

NORTH SHELBY – Oak Mountain’s next face of the varsity girls basketball program will be a familiar one to many of the Eagles players and families as they look to push the program to the next level.

Oak Mountain High School announced the promotion of Aimee Harris to varsity girls basketball head coach on Saturday, May 11.

“We are extremely excited about Coach Harris being our next girls basketball head coach,” Oak Mountain athletic director Chris Blight said. “She has transformed our middle school program and have no doubt that she will have a positive impact on the culture of our high school program. We are looking forward to her getting more girls involved with the team and her having the opportunity to work with the team straight away this summer. Our girls basketball program will most definitely be on the up in the coming years.”

Harris said that she is looking forward to remain in the Oak Mountain area that she has called home for many years and continuing growing the girls basketball program.

“I’m super excited to just continue to help grow our program I’ve been living in Oak Mountain area for eight years,” Harris said. “My kids are in the schools here and I’ve been working with Oak Mountain the past two years at the middle school and I’m just super excited about really trying to just make things linear from the top down from our youth program, middle school, all the way up to high school.”

Harris coached girls basketball at Oak Mountain Middle School for the past two seasons after previously coaching at Westminster School at Oak Mountain and Indian Springs.

During that time at OMMS, Harris worked with seventh grade girls basketball coach Janine Noel to drive more involvement and excitement for the sport. Now that she is moving to the varsity program, she hopes to continue those efforts and create continuity across the school system.

“I really feel like so much of it starts kind of with the youth level,” Harris said. “And so, the past couple of years, Coach Noel, the other coach here at the middle school, we’ve been working with something she had already started a few years ago with our youth league and just trying to continue to improve and really pour into that, just each year thinking of new ways to bring more excitement to basketball, get kids in and just trying to make it more connected to what we’re doing at the middle school.

“Now, I’m just excited just to be at the high school and continue that so we go from youth and then blend it into middle school, and then from middle school, making it exciting for them, something to look forward to at the high school level.”

Harris pointed to how her love of basketball started in Starkville, MS through a strong girls basketball program that helped prepare players for the next level and succeed on the court because of the people they had throughout the program.

She also has experience building a program from the ground-up as she played for Samford’s inaugural women’s basketball team in college. She said the work they put in during the years she played helped take the Bulldogs to the top of the conference.

She hopes to use both of those experiences to build up Oak Mountain’s varsity program through hard work and putting people in place who can help the program grow from the ground up.

“I know any time you start a program or pick up from wherever place you’re in, it takes time and it’s a process, so I do know it is a process,” Harris said. “I’m really wanting to focus on our culture and laying the foundation.”

Harris will be introduced to the community at a special ceremony on Friday, May 17 at 6:30 p.m. at Oak Mountain High School.