James Hartry leaves legacy as one of Georgia’s top high school basketball coaches
· Yahoo Sports
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Only an elite list of teams makes it beyond Valentine’s Day in high school basketball. Tucker High School Coach James Hartry and his team have dribbled and scored their way past that date for the last two decades.
As head basketball coach, Hartry, 67, took Tucker High’s varsity boys team to 21 consecutive state playoffs, ending nine in the final four, five in the finals and winning one state title in 2007. Hartry coached his last Tucker High School game on Feb. 28 in a nail-biting playoff against Milton’s Cambridge High, with the Tucker Tigers falling short by just two points (58-56).
That playoff upset closed the chapter in one of the most epic Georgia tales of high school basketball coaching. Carter Wilson, his friend and former colleague, could not have imagined what his fellow Clark Atlanta University classmate would accomplish.
“Not only was he good at player development, he was good at connecting with people. He had the ability to make players feel like they were better than they even knew that they could be… You can only teach so much dribble-pass-shoot. It’s the mental part of the game that separates [him].”
His journey to coaching
Hartry, a Milledgeville native, learned the art of the game from his four older brothers. His sister and parents made sure he had the structure and discipline to succeed.
“All five of us played high school and college basketball. That was our ticket to getting out of Milledgeville,” Hartry said. “We didn’t know it at the time, but that was the ticket that offered my parents that worked hard with their third and fourth-grade education a way out.”
Read more at RoughDraftAtlanta.com.
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