Ripley tells Sports Club of lifelong passion for coaching

ACharles Ripley maintains that his basketball success at Little Rock Parkview was more the result of attraction than recruitment.

In 21 years of coaching boys basketball at Little Rock Parkview, Ripley's teams won five state championships, two overall titles and played for the state title 10 times. One of his prized pupils was Derek Fisher, now an NBA standout. Another was Keith Jackson, who became a football star for the University of Oklahoma and Green Bay Packers.

"I know I was accused of recruiting," Ripley said Monday during an appearance at the Arkansas Sports Club. "But Parkview was an arts magnet school fine arts, things like dance and music and art. Because of that, we had three girls to every one boy. We didn't need to recruit. The boys saw 3-1 girls to boys and they came to us. If we had a fight on our campus, it was girls fighting over one of our basketball players."

Ripley, currently the athletic director and men's basketball coach at Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock, recently had a Toast and Roast on his birthday that attracted about 850 people at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock's Jack Stephens Center. He was asked by Arkansas Sports Club director Mike Harrison to tell his life story.

"That's nothing," he said. "Like a lot of people, I had two of the greatest parents in the world. My father was not a great sports fan. He did fish for bass all the time on Lake Conway. He didn't care that much for sports, but he never missed a home game when I was coaching at Central or Parkview.

"Mom drove me to all my games as a kid and no matter what time I came home, she had a hot meal waiting. We had some elite players and prima donnas at Little Rock Parkview and I admit, I spoiled them. But I told them the first day of practice that they were spoiled but 'I'm more spoiled than you are, so I'm gonna get my way.'"

He said he wanted to be a coach since age 11.

"I've been around some fantastic people, but how many people get to do in life exactly what they want to do from age 11 to 62 and I'm still going," he said.

He remembered an aptitude test he took in the eighth grade.

"The counselor came to me and said he could find anything I excelled in," Ripley said. "I told him that was because they didn't have any coaching questions and that's what I wanted to be."

He credited former University of Central Arkansas coach Don Nixon for part of the inspiration to be a coach.

"I was coach Nixon's manager at the old Westside Junior High in Little Rock," he said. "That got me started. I was a baseball guy and liked football, but I never had any interest in basketball until then. Westside was quite an experience because the boundaries of the court were about two inches from the wall and there was a stage where the teams sat. Coach Nixon called a lot of timeouts, and we managers had to jump off the stage to make room for the players. I was a little fat boy at the time. Jumping off the stage wasn't too bad, but getting back on was pretty tough."

He got his first major coaching job as a 19-year-old student at Arkansas-Little Rock.

"Mike Malham Sr. called me about a coaching job he had with Little Rock Catholic's freshman team," Ripley said. "I was still a senior and a student and I wasn't sure I could do it. Well, they tweaked the paper work and I ended up coaching Catholic's freshman team while in college. It was cheating, but we did it."

He later moved to Forrest Heights Junior High before coaching high school at Central and 21 years at Parkview.

"At that time, any job in Little Rock, whether it was junior high or whatever, was an elite job," he said. "I was fortunate. I was a no-name, never played."

He said he's most proud that in 21 years at Parkview, he had about 50 athletes obtain college scholarships.

"And about 70 percent of those got their degree," he said. "You figure that against the going rate nationally, which is about 15 to 20 percent. And I had two filmers guys who started out filming our games at Parkview go on to become cameramen at local TV stations. I'm just as proud of them."

He said he takes not compensation for his current job as basketball coach and athletic director at Arkansas Baptist, where the president and friend Dr. Fitz Hill has revived a college that was near closure to a growing one with about 700 students in a couple of years.

"We don't turn anyone away, most of these kids have no other place to go to college," he said. "In two years, I have a hundred stories. When I get tired or dejected, I just go to the campus cafeteria. It's a reward to see the glow in those young people's faces, people who two years ago were thinking they would never get a chance to go to college."

NOTES: Harrison said about 50 tickets remain for the second Arkansas Sportscasters and Sportwriters Hall of Fame Banquet, which will be Saturday, Aug. 9 at the Brewer-Hegeman Center and will honor Jim Bailey, the late Bud Campbell and Frank Broyles (lifetime achievement award).

The next luncheon will be Monday, Aug. 11 Ryan's with the featured speaker Terry Garner, former basketball coach and athletic director at Lyon College.