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A COACHING LIFE
A Leadership Journey Guided by
The Best-Laid Plans
by Matt Kramer & Randy Montgomery
Coach Randy Montgomery and I have encountered a range of experiences that have created a 2nd edition book containing content relevant to coaches and leaders at every level, from youth up to head high school coach. Randy, who began his coaching career as an assistant on 2022 Naismith Basketball Hall-of-fame inductee Bob Huggins’s first coaching staff at Walsh College back in the early 1980’s, spent 31 of his 35 years as a head coach developing two programs into state of Ohio basketball powers while accumulating over 600 wins. For all of his considerable accomplish-ments as a leader, Randy was inducted into the Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Association in June of 2021. My career journey has been quite a bit different than Randy Montgomery’s. A 200-win coach who has led programs in 2 states (Georgia and Ohio), I have led 5 different programs in two different states. Early in my career (2000-2008) I was able to lead the rebuilding of a struggling program at a small rural school into one of Ohio’s elite Division II programs. Several years later, largely due to the networking that stemmed from the first edition of our book
The Best-Laid Plans of a High School CEO (2012), my career journey took me to Georgia where I had the opportunity to coach at high school basketball’s highest level, navigating a national schedule against NBA lottery picks like Ben Simmons (Brooklyn Nets), Jaylen Brown (Boston Celtics), Collin Sexton and Darius Garland (Cleveland Cavaliers), and countless other players who are currently playing basketball on television. Among other career accomplishments, I was ultimately able to lead my team in Georgia to a Final 4 in 2016, while helping develop 6 players in 3 years into Division 1 College scholarship players. All told, Randy Montgomery and I have combined for 53 years of head-coaching experience, close to 900 wins, 3 Final Fours, 12 Sweet 16’s, 24 conference championships, and countless coach-of-the-year awards while leading a combined 8 different programs at just about every type of school imaginable. All that said, the things we value most about our lives in coaching have very little to do with any of those statistics; instead, we both believe the real value of our coaching lives lies in the ideas and stories that guide the narrative of A Coaching Life.