Old-school coach taught his athletes life lessons

Some afternoons, the mood in the gym was so dark it felt like a storm was coming.

We weren't practicing well. We weren't listening well, and the only sound in the gym was the voice of our coach, Buddy Clark, angrily echoing off the walls.

He was making us pay for our inattention.

A former Marine who fought at Guadalcanal, Mr. Clark was tough as saw grass and there never was a shred of ambiguity in the way he treated us. We always knew what he wanted and he always let us know if he wasn't getting it.

But even on those darkest days, he was doing what so many unsung high-school coaches do: He was making us better players and better people.

Mr. Clark died last week at 82 in Wilmington, Del. He was a great man, a great basketball coach, who, in personality and ego, was as far removed from slick, high-profile guys like John Calipari and Rick Pitino as a coach can get.

In 1967, he was years ahead of his time.

He scripted every practice. In the afternoons before games, he walked us through shoot-arounds. We had scouts who took elaborate notes, and Mr. Clark expected us to pay attention to their reports and understand our opponents' offenses and defenses as well as we understood our own.

He made sure we thought the game as well as we played it. He was confident that his approach was right, and he was able to transfer that confidence to us.

I remember a night, about two-thirds of the way through our senior season, we were undefeated but weren't playing as well as we had earlier in the year. Mr. Clark thought we had lost some of that confidence.

He arranged through his longtime friend, Jack Ramsay, who was the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, to have our team attend a game against the Lakers.

The Sixers were on their way to an NBA championship and our coach made sure we got to Convention Hall early that night to watch the Sixers' pregame warmup.

He wanted us to learn from the confident way they went about their business. They weren't arrogant or smug. But they believed they were the best.

A decade later, I was lucky enough to cover Ramsay's Portland Trail Blazers. I mentioned that Buddy Clark had been my high-school coach.

"He was a great coach," said Ramsay, who early in his Hall of Fame career coached at my high school in Wilmington. "He could have gone anywhere he wanted, but he loved coaching and teaching kids. He was genuinely happy where he was."

Mr. Clark was professional, in the best sense of the word. He was meticulous in his preparation. Nothing any coach ever did surprised us. It was like he read minds — ours and our opponents'.

But he also was humble, and he coached us to be humble.

He made sure we shared our successes with the rest of the school. He made the students feel they were part of every home game, every win, just as coach Mike Holmgren does with Seahawks fans at Qwest Field.

He watched us in school and made sure we didn't strut around the halls, or act like we were big deals. It seemed as if he knew everything we were doing, every day.

High-school athletics, at their best, thrive because of coaches like Mr. Clark, who passionately want to win but also understand that their larger role is to teach their players the sacrifices and responsibilities that come with winning.

Of course, winning is important.

In the days before our state-championship game, Mr. Clark spoke to us about the difference between first place and second place and the extra preparation, effort and emotion it took to finish first.

We won the Delaware high-school basketball championship that year. We finished 20-1 and, 41 years later, I still understand he wasn't talking about winning at all costs.

He was talking about being better prepared to win than the other team. He used sports to subtly teach us lessons about discipline and hard work.

We weren't the most talented team in our state, but he knew how to get the best out of us. And somehow — even to this day I'm not sure how — he let us know that he loved us. He loved coaching us. He had as much fun that season as we did.

Coaching can be such an honorable profession when it is done the way people like Mr. Clark did it. Coaches can steer us out of trouble and head us in the right direction. They can teach us lessons that stay with us the rest of our lives.

Most high-school coaches don't do it for the glory. They aren't looking to take the next step. They do it because they love the gym, or the practice field. They do it because they love their time together with their teams.

They do it because they believe they can make a difference, the way Mr. Clark made a difference for us at Mount Pleasant High School in 1967.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com