This Week's Story
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What made Don Haskins a winning basketball coach against small and big-town schools?
This Week’s Story relives American history and the Bible through brief inspiring stories presented on mp3 audio recordings and text for reading.
Oh, and could he ever coach basketball! part two
You heard about my buddy Herman Carr. We lived in a small segregated town— Enid, Oklahoma. Whites were on one side of town and blacks on the other side. Booker T. Washington High was for black students like Herman and Enid High School was for whites like me, Don Haskins.
No one seemed bothered that Herman was black, and I was white. We were buddies who loved basketball. Herman was a good player! I was not. My dad helped rescue me.
He put up a hoop, not the standard size. It was in our backyard. It was a carnival size. The rim was only a little bigger than the ball. By the time I was in high school the regulation size seemed like a tub for me.
Years later I was coaching at what is now University of Texas at El Paso. One of my players had poor form for shooting. He tested me. “Show me.”
No problem. I made seventy-five baskets in a row, because I had learned to shoot on the rim.
As a high school senior, I was named all-state. I knew Herman was better and he got almost no attention in the press. I was offered over one hundred scholarships to college. Herman joined the Army and played basketball. He taught me about life in American, things many white kids did not know.
After high school I was determined to attend Oklahoma A & M. I used to listen to their games on radio. Their team, the Aggies, won the 1945 and 1946 national titles. Their coach, Mr. Iba, was famous in the Great Plains and hated by his players, who declared,
“In college we hated him. Later we knew that he put toughness and discipline into us. His methods sometimes could be brutal. There were six-hour practices, no water breaks, sprints that seemed to never stop. No girlfriends. Defense was the constant staple. However, his coaching brought us together as a team.”
In college I managed to meet Mary. Once I was married, Mr. Iba did not bother me about girls
I would call my four years with Mr. Iba hell, but I would not trade them.
After college I coached high schools in little towns in Texas. I had not completed my college degree.
I became head coach in Benjamin, a town of 230 people. I drove the school bus for $400.00 a school year and coached. I rented a house for $35.00 a month for my family. A rattle snake greeted us on the front stoop and I shot him with a shotgun.
I had nine players for six-man football. All I knew was Mr. Iba’s toughness. We had a good six-man team and won the district championship for the first time in school history.
Coaching jobs for me followed at Hedley and Dumas in Texas. I finished my college degree and was hired at Texas Western College in El Paso. I arrived there with a country dialect, but no straw in my teeth.
We’ll talk soon about basketball and players at Texas Western College.
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