Carl Johnson, who played on three state-championship teams and won four as a coach under Bridgehampton High School’s banner, a feat that remains unique in state basketball history, was inducted into New York’s Basketball Hall of Fame at Glens Falls during the championship weekend two weeks ago.
The honor was a while in coming — he was a 2020 selection, Johnson said at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton on Sunday, but demurred when asked during the Covid pandemic if he’d like to be inducted remotely.
Just about all the coaches from his playing days, a group that included Roger Golden, John Niles, and Ed Petrie, were gone, he said, save for Bob Vishno of Sag Harbor, a nonagenarian. “I learned something from every one of them,” said Johnson, who this past winter coached Bridgehampton’s junior high girls team, a possible precursor to a revived girls varsity there.
“Roger put the team first, he was organized, disciplined . . . with John Niles, it was ‘believe in yourself,’ he allowed you to be a little more creative. Coach Petrie, who assisted Roger one season, taught me the value of thorough scouting reports.”
“Put all of that together,” his interviewer said, “and you’ve got a pretty good coach and a pretty good team.”
Bridgehampton’s nine state Class D championships — in 1978, ’79, ’80, ’84, ’86, ’96, ’97, ’98, and 2015 — used to be a state record, though Mount Vernon, a much larger school, now has 11.
Niles tapped Johnson, who had been the state’s small schools player of the year in 1980 and who thereafter played the point at Utica and Southampton College, to succeed him at the end of the 1991-92 season. The 1996 team, with Nick Thomas, Terrell Hopson, Nathaniel Dent, Fred Welch, Kareem Coffey, Maurice Manning, and J.P. Harding (who was sidelined that season by a medial collateral ligament tear), won the school’s first state title in 10 years, defeating West Canada Valley 51-37 after having crushed Hermon-DeKalb Junction 69-23 in a semifinal.
The ’97 team, with a roster including Manning, who repeated that year as the state Class D tourney’s most valuable player, Coffey, Welch, Antwon Foster, Ron White, who coaches the Killer Bees now, Matt White, Tat Picott, and Charles Furman, “only lost two games, to Forest Hills, the city’s runner-up that year, in double overtime, and to William Floyd, at the buzzer, in the overall county championship game” — the closest that a Bridgehampton team has come to winning an overall county title.
The ’98 team, with Manning — again the tourney’s M.V.P. — Coffey, Ron White, Nick Letcher, Walker, and Picott, routed Jasper-Troupsburg 67-32 in the state final.
A fallow period — at least fallow insofar as the Killer Bees were concerned — ensued before Maurice Manning’s son, Charles Jr., who moved to Bridgehampton from Riverhead, led the Killer Bees to a ninth state championship in 2015.
The younger Manning, as his father looked on with tears in his eyes, was presented with the tournament’s most valuable player plaque that year. He went on to play at L.S.U. and at the University of South Alabama before turning pro. Johnson said that Manning’s contract was recently bought out by Serbia’s best team.
As for the 17-year Final Four drought, “we kept plugging along, plugging along,” said Johnson. “It got to the point that, in 2008 I think it was, I wondered if that were it for me. We’d make the playoffs, but we weren’t getting off the Island. I decided to go back to basics, to Killer Bee basketball — press on defense, create turnovers, share the ball, and rebound as a team. . . . In 2014-15, I had Josh Lamison, Tylik Furman, Charles’s son, Elijah Jackson, and Matt Hostetter. . . . When Charles Manning came in that was it. We knew we were solid enough to go upstate and win. I was thinking of retiring after that state championship, but Tylik said no, and then Elijah said, ‘Stay for my senior year too.’ I retired in 2017.”
Asked if he was in Bridgehampton’s Hall of Fame, Johnson said, “Not yet.” It was time, now that the pandemic was over, to consider possible inductees again, he agreed. The 1986 team, whose roster included Julian Johnson, Troy Bowe, Tim Jackson, Ronnie Gholson, Chris Parker, and Darryl Hemby, was definitely worthy, he said.
“Though, first, I’d like to get two players in who played in the ’60s, Wayne Rana, who coached at Bridgehampton a little bit, and Ray Charlton. You probably met them when Carl Yastrzemski, Bill Stavropoulos, Billy DePetris, John Niles, and Sandy McFarland were inducted in 2016. I’m going to mention them. We should get the ball rolling again.”
Speaking of the late Billy DePetris, “he used to come down to some of our pickup games in the old gym, to show us how good he was. I was in junior high then. He must have been 40 or 50. We’d be shaking our heads. Actually, he was good!”
And speaking of the old undersized gym, known as the Bee Hive, with a padded wall at one end, a stage at the other, and 3-point lines extending beyond the sidelines, Johnson’s eyes lit up. “I miss that gym, we knew every inch of it . . . we knew how to cushion our falls. . . .”
Yes, he agreed, he had many good memories. As for coaching, he said, “You can always learn, I don’t care what level it is. I’ve learned from my junior high girls. The girls I coached this year were worried that they were going to be horrible. I told them it’s not about being good, it’s about how you work toward getting better. We set team goals. I never talked to them about winning. . . . It was a great journey for me. They came every day with smiles on their faces — they were happy to be there, they gave me 100 percent, and I resolved to give them 200 percent. They won their last game, with Springs, on the 21st.”
As for next year, “we’ve got different options. We could play a junior varsity schedule or play at a higher junior high level. . . . We’ll see what their attitude is. We’ve got until August to decide.”
Coaching the junior high girls, working as a pre-K aide in the school, and playing pickleball in Bridgehampton’s new gym on Sunday mornings from 10:30 to noon were helping, the honoree said, to keep him young.