Carter's saavy to guide ‘Stang summer camp Dave Lewis with the Meteor

Summer basketball camp is back at Madisonville with former MHS head basketball coach Johnny Carter at the helm.

Carter, who still mentors the MHS cross-country teams each fall, coached high school basketball for 27 years - most of it here at MHS - before retiring from the gym.

“The main purpose of the camp is to give kids a taste of something they can work on,” Carter said, “the repetitive things, the fundamentals, baseline coverage, reading other players, using both hands - things like that.”

A graduate of the University of Houston, Carter enjoyed unprecedented success in his first head coaching job at Kennard, just east of Crockett. “We won three state titles in the four years I was there - 1967, 1968 and 1970,” he said. “I was only 23 years old and I looked like one of the players,” he chuckled. “There was just something special about those team. A sort of chemistry or something.”

All told, at the high school and junior college level, Carter's teams have more than 900 victories to their credit.

He left Kennard to become an assistant at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, then it was on to McLennan County College in Waco, where Carter's teams won six North Texas Junior College Conference titles. One of his stars there was Vinny Johnson, who was drafted by the Seattle Super Sonics in the first round, then traded to Detroit, where he eventually played on the Pistons' NBA Championship teams of 1989-90.

From Waco, Carter took the assistant's job at the University of Oklahoma under Coach Billy Tubbs during the 1981-82 seasons. While at OU, it wasn't unusual for him to attend as many as ten summer basketball camps and clinics each year.

“I've been involved in basketball camps for years and they can be really valuable,” he said.

Carter retired from basketball after the 2005 season at MHS and now one of his former players, Terrance McCloud, heads the Mustang basketball program.

“I was really happy to see him back here,” said Carter. “He's an excellent coach.”

The 2007 Mustang Summer Basketball Camp gets rolling June 25 and will conclude June 29. Hours are from 9 a.m. until noon at Mustang Gym. Participants have until June 20 to register without paying a late registration fee.

Plans are to limit enrollment to ten campers per each instructor. A camp entry form can be found below this story.