Editor’s note: The induction of the first group in the Bryant Athletic Hall of Honor will be held this Saturday, May 30, at Bryant High School. A reception will be held at 6:30 p.m., with the induction ceremonies commencing at 7.
The following is a story published on Feb. 13, 2003 in the now defunct Bryant Times, featuring Carla Crowder on the eve of her 400th win as head coach of the Bryant Lady Hornets basketball team. Crowder will be inducted into the Bryant Athletic Hall of Honor this Saturday.
Steve Loibner, who served nine years as an assistant coach for the Bryant Lady Hornets under head coach Carla Crowder tells this story: “The 1991 team — I won’t say it was the best team we had — but we were far and away the strongest team in Class AAAA that season. We played Benton in the finals of the State Tournament at West Memphis and (Benton’s) Brandy Ayler, I think her name was, hit a 3-point shot at the buzzer to cut our lead to 19. Nobody else was within 20 points of us. They wouldn’t let us dress but 15 for the State Tournament and we were dressing 20 that year. I really felt like we had girls that didn’t dress that could’ve started for some of the other teams we played.
“We had just dominated State,” he continued, “and (Carla) and I both came home mad. They came to the coaches and asked who they wanted on the all-tournament team. Of course, Crystal (Tausen) and Beth (Young) were a lock. But Shannon Thomey — she’s coaching at Conway now — she had a decent year but had a great tournament. We told them that we wanted Crystal to be MVP if you’ll put Shannon on the all-tournament team. If not, we want Shannon Thomey to be the MVP. They said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ then didn’t do it. The whole time coming back, you know, we ought to be on cloud nine and we’re just crushed because Shannon was overlooked.
“And that’s Carla’s personality,” Loibner asserted. “She’s a remarkable person. She pours her heart and soul into it.”
Crowder, in her 16th season as Lady Hornets head coach, was set to notch her 400th win at Bryant, her 523rd overall in the Friday, Feb. 14, game at home against North Little Rock. It would be her team’s 20th of the season, the 13th time that her Bryant teams have reached 20. Four of them eclipsed the 30 mark with the 1991 team that Loibner mentioned going 39-1. She’s never been a part of a losing season as a player or a coach.
But beyond the winning, Crowder has obviously affected the lives of those that have played for her and competed against her. The ultimate compliment may have come from a rival, Sheridan head coach Rick Treadway who said, “If I hadn’t coached my daughter, Carla would be the first one that I would want to coach her. She’s at the top of the class as far as the way she handles her teams. The work ethic she has and that she expects her players to have. She’s kind of a zero-tolerance kind of person but yet she loves her kids and they always care for her.”
“She’s very dedicated to her players,” said Janice Baeten Edmonson, who played for the Lady Hornets from 1990-93. “She spends much of her personal time at the gym in the evenings or during the summer, takes players to individual and team camps, and tries to find tournaments that are both challenging and fun. Coach Crowder is a great teacher.”
Edmonson, who went on to play at Southeast Missouri State University, is a speech-language pathologist at ACCESS schools. She and her husband Kyle have a 15-month-old future Lady Hornet named Emma.
“I think Carla really loves it and she portrays that to the girls,” said Marla Goshien, who played on Crowder’s first two Bryant teams, teams that amassed a 66-3 record including the biggest portion of a 60-game win streak. “She wants to win and she’s always prepared for practice and when you’re prepared and you really want to win, you portray that to the girls and that makes them want to win even more, makes them want to play as hard as they can every day, in the games and in practice. She doesn’t like to lose so, basically, she’s going to work her tail off and, in turn, try to work the girls so they’ll reach a certain level.”
Goshien and Sally Moore earned scholarships to play at the University of Arkansas, two of the four players on the 1989 team that earned college scholarships. Goshien transferred to Arkansas Tech as a sophomore. Before she was through, she played on a national championship team. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in history and went on to get her masters. She’s worked in sales since, currently for Brown and Williamson Tobacco.
“I have a lot of respect for Carla,” commented Becky Patton Davis, also a key performer those first two seasons. “She was not only our coach but she dealt with things off the court. She brought such unity to the team. I can still call her up today and she would do anything she could. When my father passed away, she was there. She kept in contact with us when we went off to play college ball.
“Here, I have a little girl that’s going to her basketball camps now,” Davis added.
“It’s not like, when we get out, she just leaves us by the wayside. She was always fair, always there to talk with, always there for her players and she still is.”
Davis played at Arkansas Tech for two years before transferring to UALR to complete her degree. She runs her own daycare and has two daughters. “And they’re going to follow into that basketball tradition,” she noted.
“She pushed us as hard as she could possibly push us and, at the same time, she respected everybody and loved us on and off the court,” said Ahna Davis Seabolt, who played for Crowder from 1992 to 1995 and is now a head coach herself at Little Rock Cathedral. “That really made us want to play and work for her and do what we needed to do. She’s very much a player’s coach. I enjoyed playing for her. She really pushed me and even now I can go back to her and she’ll give me all kinds of advise and help me. I very much respect her and care about her as a person and a coach.”
Seabolt played and earned her degree from the University of Central Arkansas. She coached a year at Pulaski Robinson before taking the job at Cathedral three years ago.
“We developed a relationship with her on and off the court,” said Seabolt. “I think the one off the court is the one that we still remember — even though there were times when she would really make us mad, we still respected her and loved her for that.”
“I think when you leave a program — I mean, I always knew I could call and ask for advise about things,” Goshien said. “It’s not like none of us ever had run-ins with her or anything, or didn’t get mad, that’s just normal but I think everybody always knew you could go back to her if you ever needed anything. And I think that’s a good mark of a coach.”
“Focus would be a strong point and team play,” Loibner said of Crowder’s approach to the game. “There are no superstars on a Lady Hornet team. It’s a team sport. The girls are going to work hard and they’re going to be skilled. She incorporated a weight program which, at the time, was kind of innovative for girls athletics.
“She expects to win,” he continued. “That’s a given. Carla is smart enough to figure out where her players’ strengths and weaknesses are. She works to strengthen the weaknesses but she works to incorporate each player so they’re able to use their better qualities.
“Of course, if you’re a Lady Hornet you’re going to have to play defense,” Loibner emphasized. “And that’s smart because your offense comes and goes in cycles but you can always play good defense.
“Several of us went on to go into coaching and I know my main reason was because of her,” said Seabolt. “I learned everything from her. My whole defensive philosophy came from her. I played in college but I learned a lot more from her than I ever did in college. But I adopted quite a bit, not only X’s and O’s, I try to develop good relationships with my players, making them realize that there’s more to life than just being a basketball player.”
Crowder came to an already successful Bryant program in 1987-88 and found a talented team in turmoil. She brought them together and, over the next four years, the Lady Hornets won three Class AAAA State championships and the old Overall State Tournament three times, too.
“I was a junior when Carla first came to Bryant,” Davis mentioned. “We had some good times. We won a lot of ballgames. When she came, of course, Bryant had always been a girls powerhouse but I think she brought to Bryant a sense of unity. At that time, we had a falling out under (Tom) Webb. And she brought back the desire to play.”
“The first thing she did was never mention Tom Webb,” Loibner recalled. “She was able to deliver what Tom wouldn’t have in my opinion, because Becky and Marla had quit Tom.”
“I liked her right off,” Goshien stated. “Becky and I went to the all-star game before she came to Bryant in the summer of ’87. We went to meet her and see what she was like, introduce ourselves. And I remember her from camp when I was 12 but that’s another story.
“We had the talent,” Davis said. “She just more or less got us to jell. She took it off of one player where we played as a team. And we won as a team. Her sense of pride and the work ethic she showed in conducting practice and the games, that carried over to us.
“When I was a junior, we had Salita Farr and if Carla hadn’t come to Bryant, Salita would not have had a senior year like she did. She would not have developed. My senior year, we had four seniors that got college scholarships.”
Farr is now the head girls coach at Little Rock Hall.
“We all had an instinct, a killer instinct, wanting to beat everybody,” Goshien added, “but she came in and gave us some other skills that we didn’t have before. We jelled. We won State and Overall two years in a row and didn’t lose a game from November of 1987 until I graduated. All of that is a great accomplishment and a lot of it had to do with Carla coming to the program.
“Before we all were taught — we pressed the entire game — we were all athletic, but she gave us some fundamentals as far as not pressing all the time and killing people with that. We were also able to set up an offense. There were a lot of drills, and different offensive and defensive things that we’d never done before. We had that attack mentality and I think with her views and her philosophy meshed together with that, I think nobody could really stop us because of that. It wasn’t easy though.”
Edmonson agreed. Of her years at Bryant, she said she most remembered, “Running line drills, running stairs, running laps, running the two-mile loop . . . running, running, running. I will never run again unless someone is chasing me!”
