SUMMERFIELD, La. — After coaching 60 high school basketball games this season, Randy Carlisle is tired.
“But it’s a real good tired,” he said.
On Friday, Carlisle coached the boys team (22-7) at Summerfield High School to a state championship among Louisiana’s smallest schools. A week earlier, he led the Summerfield girls (30-1) to a state title, in what has been a frenetic playoff run that left him crisscrossing the state, ping-ponging from one team to the other on late-night drives and for early-morning practices.
His pleasant exhaustion came in pursuit of an achievement that is extremely uncommon, and maybe unprecedented. The National Federation of State High School Associations said it knew of no other coach winning state basketball titles with boys and girls teams in the same season.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Chris Boone, a federation spokesman, said. “I can’t say it’s never happened, but it would be pretty rare.”
The two trophies were presented Monday at a pep rally at Summerfield High School, which is home to an enrollment of 282 in prekindergarten through Grade 12 in a white brick building amid the rolling hills and piney woods of north Louisiana, near the Arkansas border. The players were given an ovation in the gym and feted with fried catfish and sheet cake. And administrators began trying to figure out how to pay for the championship rings.
Karla Aycock, a prekindergarten teacher, had an idea.
“Coach,” she said to Carlisle, “people would pay good money to throw a pie in your face.”
Carlisle’s basketball career is not unlike a nesting doll — one story tucked inside another story, slipped inside yet another story.
He is the son of a renowned coach. As a student in junior high school, he befriended Pete Maravich. A onetime point guard, he has held the national high school federation’s record for assists since the mid-1970s.
He and his wife, Tammy, live in a school they bought and are renovating about 25 miles from Summerfield. Their home is complete with a pecan-wood basketball court for teaching an exhausting workout regimen, an apartment in what was the home economics department, classrooms turned into horse stalls and a baseball field remade into a training arena for their son, Randall, a professional calf roper.
Until about two weeks ago, Randall, 29, held the national high school federation’s record for 3-point shots (516) made in a career.
“We hate second place,” said Randy Carlisle, 59, who has a salt-and-pepper goatee and a drawl honeyed with driven triumph. “If we’re going to do something, we’re fixing to go get it.”
As a boy, Carlisle learned to ride a bike while dribbling two basketballs. He sneaked into a darkened junior high gym in a speck of a town in north Louisiana and shot baskets by the light of the exit signs. His parents once found him dribbling a ball while sleepwalking through the house.
“The first two letters of the alphabet he learned were X and O,” said Frances Carlisle, Randy’s mother.
There were others like him in rural villages in Louisiana, unnoticed places that did not offer football and found their enthusiasm in basketball. Greg Procell, who starred at Ebarb High School in the late 1960s, remains the nation’s No. 1 career prep scorer. Bruce Williams, who followed a decade later at Florien High School, is still the leading high school rebounder.
Karl Malone delivered three state titles at Summerfield High School before becoming the Mailman as the NBA’s second-leading career scorer. His daughter, Cheryl Ford, played fiercely in the same gym, her early striving blooming into three championships and two rebounding titles in the WNBA. Demetress Bell was an all-state basketball player at Summerfield before a career as an offensive lineman in the NFL.
There is a sense both of the timeless and the forgotten in Summerfield.
Children ride horses and hunt deer and fish for bass and gleefully skid their four-wheelers through the mud in timber country. But it is a struggling place, too, an unincorporated community with a school, a fire station, a few churches, a vast majority of students on free or reduced lunches and a post office on reduced hours. A chance to shop and socialize has been lost at the shuttered Rebel Stop convenience store.
“Basketball is our lifeblood,” said James Scriber, 73, who retired last year after working in Summerfield as a teacher, coach, principal and Claiborne Parish school superintendent since 1967. “It draws the community together. We don’t have a store anymore. Our post office is on life support. It’ll be gone. What we have are school and church.”
It was Scriber who persuaded Carlisle to come to Summerfield High School for the 2014-15 school year and continue a coaching career marked by reluctance and inevitability.
His father, Clyde Carlisle, known as Buster, won 1,103 games as a high school coach in Louisiana and Texas, including two state championships in Clarksville, Texas, in the 1990s. The career victories would rank fifth among the country’s prep coaches, but Buster Carlisle declined to submit his won-lost record for official consideration, his son said.
“He didn’t care about that stuff,” Randy Carlisle said. “He thought you were only as good as your last game.”
From 1972 to 1975, Buster Carlisle coached his son at Minden High School, the family having moved to one of Louisiana’s larger schools. Randy wore No. 00 on his jersey, kept his hair (if not his socks) floppy like Maravich’s, dribbled through his legs and passed the ball behind his back, collecting 1,592 assists, a record that still ranks first nationally by more than 200 assists.
“He was a 5-8 Pistol Pete,” said Cliff Salmon, 59, a high school teammate of Carlisle’s who is now a family physician in Homer, La. “You didn’t turn your head or you’d get your nose broken.”
After high school, though, Carlisle said he felt conflicted about basketball. His father was a brilliant but stern coach who offered unsparing analysis of his son’s play. Randy often spent game nights at Salmon’s house, win or lose. And a game that once widened his world now seemed to narrow his ambitions.
“All I did was play my whole life,” Carlisle said. “It kind of burned me out. I never wanted to coach.”
He played only a handful of games at Louisiana Tech, then trained horses and gave clinics on calf roping. He also gave clinics on basketball and, in 1985, he orbited into coaching with a sense of grief and possibility.
A younger sister, Carol Duhon, died in a car accident. She had wanted Carlisle to become a coach. His father had urged him, too, telling him he had a gift to share.
Randy wanted to coach as an assistant in college; his father declined to use his connections, insisting that his son learn to develop a team in high school. When Randy called to say that his players at a small Texas school could not even make a layup, Buster Carlisle said curtly, “That’s why they hired you,” and hung up the phone.
Eventually, Randy Carlisle developed a reputation for taking fixer-upper teams and flipping them into something repaired and restored. In 2010, he won a Texas private school state championship at Lake Country Christian School of Fort Worth. In 2014, he arrived at Summerfield High School with an exercise program synthesized from playing man-to-man defense for his father and meeting Maravich, the Louisiana State star, as a seventh-grader.
The meeting, Carlisle said, came after he scored all of his team’s points — 38 or 46, the precise amount lost to time — in a junior high game. At a summer camp, he said, Maravich taught him to dribble with his fingers, as if playing the piano. This would strengthen his wrist and forearm and allow him to better control the ball. That way, he could play with his chin up and see the whole court.
As a coach, Carlisle developed a workout regimen called the Ultimate Seven, in which players use a set of tires for dribbling and calisthenics. It is a fatiguing routine designed to enhance flexibility, endurance, core strength and leaping ability. Players dribble the ball once with each finger. They dribble while doing situps. They dribble while balancing on one leg. They jump through the tires, holding the ball out, elbows locked, to gain the stamina to extend their arms on defense for an entire game.
“I thought he was crazy until we started seeing results; it hurts,” said Lakota Smith, 17, a senior center on the Summerfield girls team, which won state titles in 2015 and 2016. “But we’re stronger than most teams. They can’t handle the pressure.”
For the boys championship game last Friday, Carlisle dressed as usual in starched and creased jeans, lizard skin boots and a black sport coat. In his breast pocket, he placed a buckeye that his father, who died in 2014, had carried for good luck. And he watched as his team played as he once did, sharing the ball, adhering to a motto of “make your teammate better than yourself.” The Rebels had 22 assists on 26 field goals.
“When five play as one,” Carlisle said, “you win championships.”
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