Commentary

Rogers a frequent stop on coaching carousel

I still remember a comment made to me in 1988 shortly after I was hired as a sports writer by the Rogers Morning News.

"Rogers is the place where coaching careers come to die," said Randy Reese, who covered the Mounties at the time for the Benton County Daily Record.

He was right, mostly, in regard to football and basketball.

The annual coaching carousel is particularly active at Rogers, which has made four significant coaching hires in little more than a year. Lamont Frazier accepted the Rogers boys basketball job last week to replace Wayne Herren, who resigned after five seasons with the Mounties, who finished 7-20 overall and 0-14 in the 7A-West Conference this year.

Rogers High and Rogers Heritage each hired new football coaches after the teams went a combined 1-19 in 2015. Rogers improved to 5-5 with Mike Loyd as coach while Heritage finished 1-9 under Tony Travis last fall. Scott Moore went 6-22 and 0-14 in conference play in his first year as girls basketball coach at Rogers Heritage.

That's a lot of losing in a community that's grown substantially from a sleepy, Arkansas hill town to a vibrant and prosperous area that each day looks more like a suburb of Kansas City. Frazier, a former football and basketball player at the University of Missouri, guided his high school teams to three district titles in five years at Willard, Mo. He is now faced with the challenge of matching some of that success in basketball for the Mounties.

"I have zero doubt that we can implement a system that fits us and the things we do best," said Frazier, who expects to be in Rogers full-time by the end of May. "We will focus more on that and less on the competition. I like players who are mentally and physically prepared and have a high basketball IQ, where they can adjust on the fly."

Bentonville High also made a boys basketball move last week when Dick Rippee was selected to replace Jason McMahan, who stepped down with a 138-88 record in eight years as the Tigers' head coach. Rippee and Frazier will arrive from Missouri, the 'Show Me' state, where both put highly successful teams on the court.

Rogers High is best known in sports for its dominant girls and boys teams in cross country. But Rogers fans want more, especially with rival Bentonville's rise as the state's top all-around athletics program in recent years. Bentonville's turnaround began with the hiring of Barry Lunney, who left Fort Smith Southside and won four state championships with the Tigers before retiring two years ago.

Rogers is hopeful its spate of recent hires will lead to some lasting success while competing in Arkansas' largest classification.

Rogers was hit harder than most when its school district split beginning in the 2008 season. Rogers was denied a state championship and a perfect season in football in 2006 when Fort Smith Southside rallied for a 22-20 victory. Prior to that season, Rogers hadn't made the playoffs since 1997 and its only other championship appearance came in 1952.

Rogers' only state championship in basketball came in 1957 when the Mounties competed in a lower classification. Rogers had some success in modern times in boys basketball under Marty Barnes, a former college coach at Arkansas Tech who led the Mounties to a second-place finish in the state tournament in 2009. Like Barnes, Frazier also has college coaching experience, mostly at Division II Central Missouri State, where he was an assistant for six years.

Frazier will be the first black head coach within the Rogers School District when he arrives later this year. That is significant, but Frazier had rather be known as the first coach to lead Rogers to its first state championship in basketball in the modern era.

"This will be my third high school job where I've been the first black head coach," Frazier said. "Whether I'm the first or 10th, it doesn't matter. It's about whether you can do the job or not and that's all I'm going to focus on."

Sports on 04/23/2017

Upcoming Events