TYLER, Texas — In high school, All Saints Episcopal School star guard Aston Francis took the state by storm, helping to lead the Trojans all the way to a runner-up finish in the state championship game. Along with some school records, he also collected the honor of Tyler Morning Telegraph All-East Texas Basketball Player of the Year.
He also got to play under the direction of his head coach and father Eddie Francis, a longtime head coach at All Saints and now the head coach at crosstown rival Grace Community School. The elder Francis knew with confidence what kind of talent he had in his son.
"His junior year, we had a lot of teams playing gimmick defenses on him," Eddie Francis said. "But when his point total didn't go down when facing those gimmick defenses, I knew that we may be onto a college level player."
However, following graduation from All Saints, the basketball career of Aston Francis seemed to be coming to a halt. After considering various schools in the recruiting process, he decided to stop playing basketball and enroll at Texas A&M as a regular student. Soon after, he told his father that he believed he had made a mistake.
With it being so late in the year, those schools no longer had a spot open for him. Luckily, a family friend and well respected head coach at Tyler Junior College, Mike Marquis, offered Aston Francis a spot on the team.
"He's a terrific young man with a great family. So you always want someone like that in your program. He had a skill, and that was that he could score the basketball," Marquis said. "To have a local young man who could do that was exciting. It was a good match from the start. We wanted him to be great, and I think that he figured out that he wanted to be great too."
After a year at TJC, Francis transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois, a Division III program. They had seen success previously, but when he arrived, they were in the bottom of their conference. Francis was determined to change that, and the rest is history.
The former All Saints star rewrote the Wheaton record books by the time he graduated from the program. He also became a March Madness hero in the Division III tournament his senior year.
He took a Wheaton team that made the tournament via an at-large bid and sent them on a Cinderella run for the ages. He averaged roughly 45 points per game on the tournament run, but his best game of all came in the Elite Eight. He put up a grand total of 62 points -- a career high -- as well as hitting the game-winning three pointer from the corner with under 15 seconds to play. When the dust settled, the Thunder were headed to the Final Four.
"It was the best game I ever played and the biggest game I ever played," Aston Francis said. "It was really special to me, years of hard work coming to fruition there at the right time."
Aston Francis set a bunch of records to memorialize his time at Wheaton. His 62 points set the single game tournament scoring record. On a larger scale, he broke the Division III single season scoring record, where his point total averages led the country, regardless of the level.
He also won the 2019 Jostens Trophy, awarded to the top student athlete in Division III basketball. Additionally, he was named to the D3 All-Decade team, a true testament to the legacy he left behind.
"Just the mentality and the confidence my teammates had in me to keep throwing me the ball and keep trusting me to shoot," Aston Francis said. "They believed as much as I did that the next one was going in. It just gave me the confidence to keep shooting."
Following his collegiate career, Francis played for a short time professionally before he realized that his calling was elsewhere. He returned back home to East Texas, getting an assistant job with Whitehouse basketball. But in 2023, he received the golden opportunity to further his career.
He was hired as the next head coach at All Saints - his alma mater - at just 26 years old. Just like his father had for years, he would be handed the keys to the program, which he made a name for himself playing in.
"I'm starting to see the much bigger picture now. There's a lot of really cool life lessons you get to teach as a coach," Aston Francis said. "It's a place I'm extremely familiar with and I grew up here. I felt like it was a God thing, that He had presented this opportunity to me. It was at the right time in my life where I kind of knew that I wanted to be in coaching full time."
Francis just completed his first year at the helm of the Trojans, leading them to double digit wins. However, if there's one thing that's been established with Aston Francis, it's that the sky is truly the limit.
"It was an absolute blessing to be able to share those memories and experiences with his best friends and his teammates. It was absolutely a highlight of my coaching career," Eddie Francis said. "I think that he's going to be an impactful player in the coaching business for a long time and I think that he will have a tremendous impact on the young people that he is entrusted to coach."