• Clif Carroll joined the new Lamar men's basketball
staff on April 12, 2011, after spending three years as an assistant
coach at Collin College
• Prior to his time at Collin, Carroll spent two years as
an assistant at South Plains College. Carroll helped the 2007-08
Texans finish 30-5 and win the 2008 NJCAA national
championship.
• Began his coaching career as a student assistant in Bob
Knight's staff at Texas Tech, and now joins Pat Knight at Lamar
with a reputation of having an excellent familiarity
with the junior college ranks and the Southland
Conference.
Diary Series: Clif Carroll, Asst. Coach - Lamar ('Get your pirate on')
As I sat down to write this, I had notes all written out about how to take over a program that hasn’t won much and about the “Process of Winning”. I had all the cliché’s ready to go: “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, “embrace the tradition”, and “win every day”. Then I looked to some of my inspirations and thought, “what would they write about our team?”
About 10 years ago at Texas Tech, Pat Knight and Mike Leach really got into pirates. It might sound a little elementary and silly, but there is substance to their thought. Coach Leach took it to the public and a phenomenon was born. Everywhere you looked in the land locked city of Lubbock you would see pirate flags, pirate ships, and people dressed as swash bucklers. It bonded the community and gave that community a connection to Coach Leach and the football program.
Pat wants to do the same thing here in Beaumont. He educates our players on the mentality of a pirate. He reads them stories of how and undermanned group of pirates would take on the large navy’s of England and Spain. He says that if we will play basketball like pirates fight, we give ourselves a great chance to win. So today before our game we told our guys to “get their pirate on”, and the kids went out and fought like they were trying to steal something.
If you look through the history of pirates, you find that they were some of the most feared groups of men in their time. They were mostly rag tag groups of outlaws that banded together on inferior ships with inferior equipment. It was because of their guts, grit and guile that they had struck fear in the heart of even the mightiest of navys.
Our marketing director has caught on to the pirate concept and we are looking to break the campaign across our region. Like at Tech, we hope that our community will get into our theme and that will give them a connection to Pat and our program.
We hope that by playing basketball like pirates fight, we can spark an enthusiasm about our program in our region. I hope that I can coach up to the expectation of my mentors in which I hold in the highest esteem. We hope that we can win enough to connect our current program to our storied past and that maybe that past may raise their goblets and say “Arrrgh!”
Clif Carroll
Assistant Coach
Lamar Basketball
