Preston Purifoy joined the Talladega College men's basketball staff as assistant coach in Fall 2022.
Prior to joining the Tornadoes’ staff, Purifoy served as the head coach of the Wisconsin Glo professional women’s basketball team where he responsible for analyzing opponents’ personnel tendencies in coordinating scouting reports and creating practice plans to implement game situations for players among various other responsibilities.
Purifoy spent the majority of the past eight years playing professional basketball in Europe including stops in Slovakia (2014-2015), Luxembourg (2015), Sweden (2016-2018), Czech Republic (2018-2019), Portugal (2019-2020), Spain (2020-2021) and Germany (2021-2022).
The dynamic coach also founded the “I Got Next” basketball training business in 2015 where he created and personalized training plans for players, organized group trainings and developed his coaching skills.
The native of Conway, Ark. graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) with a degree sports management and minor in business administration in 2014 after playing on the men’s basketball team with a full scholarship with the Blazers. While at UAB, Purifoy was part of the 2011 team that won a Conference-USA Regular Season Championship and appeared in the 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament.
Other awards and accolades for Purifoy include Arkansas Gatorade Player of the Year (2010), Arkansas Mr. Basketball (2010), Arkansas 7A state basketball champion and MVP (2010), All-Slovakia honorable mention (2015), Sweden Team captain (2017), Portuguese cup champions (2019) and All-Germany honorable mention (2022).
