Travis Cannady wouldn’t call this his dream job. For openers, he had never even dreamed of being in this position. But then, he was brought up not to dream, but to work.

So when Travis Cannady was named to head up the boys basketball program at Adair, his alma mater, he did not even tell his parents.

He did not want to appear to be bragging. Certainly not to Fred and Kay Cannady.

Landing a new job, even this job, was not cause to boast. Celebration was unwarranted. Work was expected.

That’s the way it was around the Cannady home.

“I got my work ethic from my dad and my competitive side from my mom,” the 39-year-old Cannady says.

“My dad worked in the mining business. He’d go to work six days a week. That seventh day, he took off, and on Monday morning, he got right back up and did the same thing all over again.

“And my mom, whether it was horseshoes or cards, winning was the only thing that you did,” he said.

“I like to compete. And I like to work hard at what I do.”

What he does is coach.

He had been an assistant in various sports on the Adair campus for 15 years. He was content. He was working. He could have remained in that role another 15 years.

Yet when Brad Rogers stepped away from his coaching assignment last month, after 21 years of guiding the Warriors, there was but one choice to carry on this tradition.

The quiet and humble Cannady was selected. The team player. The loyal soldier. The dedicated coach. The hard worker.

Cannady accepted the job with confidence. With self-assurance. And certainly with expectations.

Outwardly, there was little reaction. Little emotion.

Inwardly, Cannady was ecstatic.

He was being entrusted with a program that had been in the hands of his mentors — Tom Linihan and Brad Rogers.

For the last 13 seasons, Cannady had worked alongside Rogers, shaping, nurturing the best boys basketball program in the county.

If moving into the head coaching seat is not a dream come true for the dedicated Cannady, his vision of the job certainly is imbued with dreamlike qualities.  

“I’ve got the best facilities. I’ve got the best athletic director. I’ve got the best parents. I’ve got the best administration. I couldn’t be more excited,” Cannady was saying the other day as he sat in the quiet, off-season environment of his basketball office.

To be coaching at his alma mater, where he graduated in 1990 without a chosen career path, “is awesome,” he said.

“I love this place. I don’t think there’s any better place to work,” he said.

“I’ve never been anywhere else. But I don’t want to go anywhere else.

“If I was an assistant and Brad stayed on for another 10 years, that’s what I’d have done. I’d be completely content with that.”

But Rogers moved on to another office, that of middle school principal, and turned the boys basketball operation over to Cannady.

“We’re not going to miss a beat,” Rogers says.

Cannady, succeeding a coach won 371 games, views the transition as one of preparation rather than of pressure.

“I’m looking at it as me having an opportunity to take a tradition-rich program and just keeping going with it,” Cannady said.

“I think I have all the tools.

“I’ve got 13 years invested under one of the best basketball coaches in Adair school history. It’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Cannady was not always so clear in his vision.

After graduating from Adair in 1990, and playing football under Hall of Fame coach Russell Kruse, Cannady had no plans for the future, no career blueprint.

He joined his father in the mining industry.

“I pushed a button in a 3-by-6 (-foot) aluminum shed,” he said. “I pushed a red button and a green button from 4 p.m. till 7 a.m. Watching that machine crush rocks.

“Every time I pushed that red button, that green button, I thought I really needed to be doing something else.”

His father agreed. After some six months, Fred Cannady approached his only son and suggested that he might be better off in a classroom.

Travis Cannady headed for Northeastern State.

“I knew immediately that I wanted to teach,” he said. “I don’t know why. I can’t answer that. Just divine intervention I guess.”

He recalled that two of his high school coaches — Kruse in football, Tom Linihan in basketball — had been “a wonderful influence on me.”

Cannady worked to put himself through college while beginning a family.

Once he graduated from Northeastern State, he returned to Adair in the fall of 1997, securing a job that would shape and define his future.

He thought of himself as a football coach, but because of what was needed at the time, he was directed toward basketball.

“And I fell in love with the game. Fell in love with coaching the game,” he said.

“I still like my football, but I kind of like the atmosphere of a tournament finals, or a district championship on a Friday night, or a regional championship. Just all the hoopla that goes into that.”

Falling under the influence of coaches such as Rogers and Roger Swofford, Cannady says, “it just ate me up.”

Bitten by the basketball bug, Cannady has not left the gym since.

He continues to feel that early influence, passed down from his role models.

Now, as he begins his own journey as a head coach, Cannady is in a position to influence others.

He would say that it is part of the job.

And he will work at it.