Always giving a rip: legendary Little Rock basketball coach Charles Ripley has molded a long list of success stories

Arkansas Business, June 2, 2008 by Jim Harris

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Charles Ripley doesn't coach as many victories as he once did, when he made Little Rock Parkview a regional and often national powerhouse in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. These days he's head coach and athletic director at Arkansas Baptist College, which is in the second year of a junior college (two-year) athletic program and has no athletic scholarships to offer students. Nobody expected overnight success with the Buffaloes.

Before Ripley arrived at ABC at the behest of Dr. Fitz Hill, the school's then-newly named president, no one noticed if the private college had an athletic program. (It did--a four-year program that lost to the likes of Philander Smith and UAPB annually).

Forget the wins and losses for a moment and take note of what brings a rare smile to the face of a guy who good-naturedly tells a determined magazine photographer trying to get the right shot with the right expression: "I don't smile."

He does sometimes, especially when he gets to point out that two players off his 10-18 Buffaloes team from this past season earned NCAA Division I college scholarships and got their two-year diplomas from ABC. And, if they follow in the same path as the many young men Ripley mentored and looked after for years as a junior high and high school coach in the Little Rock School District, they'll earn their college degrees and eventually be known as good citizens and successes.

And that, more than the 400-plus wins in his lifetime, is what makes Charles Ripley, a 2006 inductee into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, proud.

He doesn't have to look far to see the positive influence he's had on athletes in Little Rock since the late 1960s, when he began coaching. One of his Parkview players, the multi-sports star Keith Jackson Sr., returned home after his all-star NFL career and started Positive Atmosphere Reaches Kids (P.A.R.K.), a spacious haven for youths to study, mingle and play sports, leading them to college opportunities rather than a life on the streets.

On television this month, one of Ripley's players, Derek Fisher, can be seen helping lead the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA playoffs. Everyone who even partly follows the NBA knows how much the addition of point guard Fisher has meant to a Lakers team that could barely taste success the past four seasons while Fisher left them for a bigger contract in Golden State and then to Utah.

Ripley still stays in weekly contact with Houston Nutt, the second-winningest football coach in Arkansas Razorback history who left the UA in November and was then hired at Ole Miss. Ripley coached Nutt in both football and basketball at Forest Heights Junior High.

But, more than that, Nutt, Jackson and Fisher were just three of hundreds who looked to Ripley as the first coach in the area to regularly open up his gym, at almost anytime and on any day, for nonstop basketball.

The constant refrain one hears from Ripley-coached players and their parents is his way of mentoring, and the love they all felt. Yes, he was tough, and yes, he was stern, they say. But at the end of the day, there was encouragement, love and a sense that someone truly cared about them.

Open Doors

He had no children of his own, he never married and was an only child. Ripley says his life, his hobby, was always being around athletics, and he ended up being a mentor and father figure to many athletes. "They adopted me and I adopted them," he said. "We just all hit it off."

Ripley's reach has extended to players he didn't directly coach but who also matriculated to the Parkview gymnasium that now bears his name--players such as Corliss Williamson from Russellville and Joe Johnson, who played at Little Rock Central. Williamson, after he retired last summer from the NBA, rejoined Ripley this time as a volunteer assistant coach at Arkansas Baptist.

"You didn't have to play at Parkview," said Nutt, who attended high school at Little Rock Central, when Ripley had just been promoted from the junior high ranks to lead the Patriots basketball program in 1974. "Players from Central, Hall, all over, came over to Parkview when he opened the gym."

Jackson, who completed his Patriots career in 1984, remembers basketball players from as far as West Memphis coming to Little Rock and showing up in the Patriot gymnasium. Annette Fisher, Derek's mom, says her house was a stopping off point for many youngsters in the early 1990s, including Corliss Williamson, when the players would be practicing for Amateur Athletic Union basketball at Parkview. "I called it Advanced Basketball, because all the elite players got to play together," Ripley said.

In 1987-88, Parkview was designated a fine arts magnet school by the district. To some of Ripley's coaching rivals, that meant a recruiting edge that made it difficult for them to compete. Ripley acknowledges that the talent level, and hence his coaching record, which was always good, got a boost in the last few seasons when Parkview became a magnet school. They still had to convince the athletes that basketball could commingle with the arts. Parkview won a state title that first year as a magnet with players who were already there, led by Luigi Dyer, who played collegiately at New Orleans, and Reggie Johnson, now an assistant coach with the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.