McKinley Armstrong, D.C. High School Basketball Coach, 81, Washington Post
DGH
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021805734.html
McKinley Armstrong, 81
McKinley Armstrong, 81; D.C. high school basketball coach
By Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post Staff Writer
February 19, 2010
McKinley Armstrong, 81, the coach and athletic director who led the storied
McKinley Tech High School basketball team to three D.C. Interhigh
championships from 1968 through 1971, died of prostate cancer Feb. 11 [2010]
at Washington Hospital Center.
Mr. Armstrong formed and coached a team known as "the Magnificent Seven"
when the McKinley Tech Trainers battled for dominance on the city's high
school courts. Scores of players from his teams went on to college, two were
drafted by the NBA and two others by the NFL. Many others entered the
military, government or business worlds.
"If it weren't for him, I don't know what would have happened to me," said
Micheal Tucker, who was team captain as a senior after he was cut from the
squad the previous year. "If I had somebody to emulate, it would be Mr.
Armstrong. He was a very good coach, but a better man and a better husband.
He was an all-around man."
Quotable to a fault, the coach popped up in local newspaper sports columns
with regularity.
Of the 5-foot-6, 120-pound William "Cricket" Williams, Mr. Armstrong said:
"Cricket to us is like a battery in an auto. If your battery is dead, so is
your car. But when Cricket is rolling, so are we."
But he would not criticize a player publicly, brushing off sportswriters who
asked why certain starters were benched or suspended. When they returned to
the roster, he showed a generation of young men how to let bygones be
bygones.
"Mr. Armstrong kept me occupied and practicing. I had to, because if I
didn't, he wasn't going to play me," Randolph "Apple" Milam said. "I didn't
have anybody to guide me, and stay on top of me, like he did."
Born in Winston-Salem, N.C., McKinley J.H. Armstrong won a football
scholarship to North Carolina Central University, a historically black
school in Durham, where he also played drums in the marching band and
pledged the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.
After graduation, he served in the Army during the Korean War and then began
teaching. He was hired in 1953 at the small, segregated West Southern Pines
High School in Southern Pines, N.C., where he also wrote the official school
song, coached football and basketball, and taught almost every subject. One
student recalled that he even taught his classes how to balance a checkbook.
He took the boys' basketball team to the state finals three times, winning
the title in 1959.
Mr. Armstrong moved to Front Royal, Va., in 1959, when Criser High School
was built to keep African Americans out of Warren County High School during
Virginia's "massive resistance" to court desegregation rulings. At Criser,
he transformed the sports teams into respected contenders in the Shenandoah
Valley.
By 1965, Mr. Armstrong moved to McKinley Tech and started shaping his
athletic legacy.
Kevin Tatum, now a sportswriter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was then a
5-foot-6 sophomore who had been cut twice from the junior varsity team. By
luck, he ended up in Mr. Armstrong's classroom, where the coach, struggling
with a team whose record was 8-9, spotted him.
"He was aggressive and a good ball handler," Mr. Armstrong told The
Washington Post in 1969. "I didn't want to twist his arm too much, but he
was in my gym class and he knew if he wanted a good grade, he'd better come
out."
Tatum said Thursday that when a sportswriter turned up at the team practice
and asked who the stars were, the coach responded, "Sir, stars only come out
at night!" Tatum recalled. "We all just broke out hysterical. He had a lot
of corny sayings, but they were good sayings."
Tim Bassett, who, after graduating from McKinley and the University of
Georgia played for the New Jersey Nets and San Antonio Spurs, told the DC
Basketball Blog: "Demanding. Discipline. Work ethic. That's Coach Armstrong.
He made a young man with no confidence in his ability believe in himself and
that he could compete with the best players D.C. had to offer. I owe him a
tremendous debt of gratitude for his faith in me."
Mr. Armstrong, who received a master's degree in education from George
Washington University in 1971, became athletic director at McKinley Tech and
in 1985 urged his colleagues to quit recruiting across school borders.
"The development of players' raw talent is the greatest thing a coach can
do," he told The Post. "Raise your own. Don't try to take other developed
ballplayers from other schools. That's like cattle rustling."
He retired in 1991. A longtime resident of Brookland in Northeast
Washington, he was a member of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church.
Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Annie C. Armstrong of Washington;
five children, Chip Armstrong and Carolyn Armstrong of Washington, Jenice
Armstrong Turner of Burlington, N.J., Cheryl A. Capers of Dublin, Ohio, and
Marilyn Armstrong of Silver Spring; a brother, Charles Armstrong of Oxon
Hill; two sisters, Louis Powell of Durham, N.C., and Georgia Bass of Temple
Hills; and five grandchildren.