Small town, big star: Sandersville helped make Dream’s Allisha Gray who she is

SANDERSVILLE — “Hey, how are you doing?”

“Hey, how’s it going?’

“Hey, how are ya?”

That’s the ringing refrain that greeted me, no matter which door I entered — whether it was the Hot Wings & Things or Scarlet Hollow — Books Gifts Thrifts or the CVS — on a visit to Sandersville, Georgia.

If you’re not familiar with Sandersville, it’s the small town that produced one of the WNBA’s biggest stars, Dream guard Allisha Gray.

Located about 130 miles southeast of Atlanta, Sandersville boasts dozens of ranches on both sides of the two-lane highway leading into town. With the fan blasting in my car as I rolled to the stop light on the outskirts of town, a pasture with freshly rolled bales of hay welcomed me. The trees lining N. Harris St. provided a welcome relief to the rising summer temperatures baking the asphalt leading into the historic downtown.

Nestled between four major Georgia cities — Macon and Augusta, Atlanta and Savannah — Sandersville is a town where everyone knows almost everyone.

In that way, it feels like a long way from Atlanta.

So, when you walk around the historic downtown, see the freshly mowed grass and perfectly painted signage, you may get a friendly wave from anyone sitting inside their business or place of work.

“It’s cool because it’s just like that Southern hospitality that you get,” Gray — one of the most recognizable names to call Sandersville home — told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“So, as I got older and I would go to different cities and just being so used to Southern hospitality, it was kind of like a shocker when you go to other cities and people aren’t as friendly or people not saying, ‘Good morning’ or people don’t speak or people not holding the door for you. So, it’s just like Sandersville, you always get that sense of like kindness, respect and a Southern hospitality.”

It’s a town where, when residents hear the name Allisha Gray, they beam with pride thinking about what she’s doing “up there in Atlanta,” and where they have memorialized her Olympic achievements on a mural downtown.

Atlanta Dream star Allisha Gray has a street bearing her name in her hometown of Sandersville. (Lauren Williams/AJC)

It’s a town with handwritten signs in all caps that say, “The world is short staffed please be kind to those who showed up,” and “Kindness doesn’t cost a thing,” posted above two checkout windows at Hot Wings & Things, Gray’s favorite restaurant.

Sandersville is the town that helped to raise Gray.

“It’s a small town,” she said. “So, pretty much like a lot of people know each other. I mean, you know each other’s business. So, it’s just (like) a well-put-together community.”

‘Everybody knows everybody’

Sandersville, which has an estimated population of 5,397, according to 2025 data from U.S. Census Bureau, has 89 listings on its business directory website, many of them located within a short drive of each other.

It’s roughly a four-minute drive to get from Sandersville’s historic downtown to Hot Wings & Things. Then it’s approximately another four-minute drive to Washington County High School, where Gray’s road to basketball stardom began.

Hot Wings & Things, a staple in Sandersville, Georgia, is one of Allisha Gray's favorite restaurants. (Lauren Williams/AJC)

“In those small-group communities, pretty much everybody knows everybody,” Gray’s father, Allen Gray, told the AJC. “Even now, they embrace her. I’m on the (school) board, so I just had a board meeting, and as I was leaving, the board members said, ‘Man, we are so proud of Allisha,’ and we get that all the time.

“In Sandersville, she has a mural. They named a street after her. She has a close group of friends that she had in high school that they’re even close today.”

That’s what Allisha appreciates about Sandersville now that she’s lived in other places — in college at Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Columbia, South Carolina — and in the WNBA in Dallas, Texas, and now Atlanta.

“Just how quiet and chill it is,” Gray, a four-time WNBA All-Star, said. “Like it’s not like the city. It’s small.

“You can kind of be to yourself,” Gray said. “It’s quiet. It’s the country. You can ride four-wheelers, dirt bikes, dune buggies. You can ride horses. It’s just so much stuff that you can do in Sandersville.”

With so many ways to stay occupied, Gray said it led her to spend very little time in the house. When she didn’t hop on a four-wheeler, she may have opted for a dirt bike. If it wasn’t a dirt bike, it was a bicycle.

“We’d ride bicycles through town,” she said. “So that pretty much was our getting out of house, just riding four-wheelers and dirt bikes, playing outside all day till the sun went down. Me, it was so nice. We even stayed and played “manhunt” outside, which is hide-and-go-seek at night.”

Outside, all the time

The Grays’ house became one of the most popular destinations in the neighborhood. They had a basketball goal in their yard, which made it a spot for people to come and play basketball.

Plus, Allisha hated the idea of not being able to go outside.

“I never was really inside the house,” she said. “Like when it was raining, you’d be up sick because you couldn’t go play outside.”

And on those days, the heat climbed, making it dangerous for anyone to be outside too long, but Allisha, her siblings and friends waited it out. They began their day of play when the sun went down.

“That was just the fun part of just being able to be outside all day, even with the sun going down, still being able to be outside in the pitch dark,” Allisha said. “It was just cool. We got to the point where we liked being outside so much my mom got a light pole installed in the backyard, so at night, we can continue playing basketball and stuff when the sun went down.”

The backyard and Allisha’s family helped cultivate her love of the game and led her beyond that space. She joined the Georgia Metros, a dominant women’s AAU basketball program.

“I was coaching at the time, and I received a letter from the Georgia Metros, and they were having trials, and Allisha was young — maybe 7 or 8,” Allen said. “And we went up there to the trials, and my wife and I were sitting in the stands, and they were doing layups, and we heard one of the coaches say, ‘That little girl right there is gonna be good, the way she’s making her layups.’”

And good Allisha became, even though ACL, MCL and meniscus injuries led to her missing her senior season at Washington County High School in Sandersville.

“There’s a physical part, but there’s also a mental part,” Allen said. “So, we invested in, made sure that she received. We had a wonderful young man who was her physical therapist, and what was crazy; it was out of the Sandersville Hospital, and he had never rehabbed a knee before. And yeah, it was wonderful. And he just did some research and spent some one-on-one time with her, and it took him about a year.

“And then it was to slowly bring her back mentally, so she’d feel comfortable playing mentally. And now, she doesn’t even wear a knee brace. It was a blessing that this young man was the one that rehabbed her.”