END OF AN ERA: Norris to leave behind strong LAMP legacy

Anthony Norris will step down as head softball coach at LAMP following the 2022 season. (Tim Gayle)

By TIM GAYLE

Anthony Norris just happened to be in the right place at the right time. 

Or maybe it was the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way, he wouldn’t trade it for anything. 

“The only reason I became a coach at LAMP,” Norris explained, “is I was walking through the office one morning and I heard the athletic director who hired me, Conni Sikes, talking to my principal, Veverly Arrington, and Conni said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to cancel the junior varsity basketball season because we can’t find a coach.’ I did some thinking while I was standing beside my mailbox in the office and I went into Mrs. Arrington’s office and said, ‘Look, as long as you don’t hold wins and losses over my head, I can coach those boys.’ So my goal was to just coach that one season. Here I am, 23 years later, still coaching at LAMP.”

Norris, the longest tenured coach in the history of the Montgomery magnet school, will be stepping down from his athletic role as athletic director and head softball coach at the conclusion of the softball season, ending an era in which he has served as head baseball coach, head boys’ basketball coach and head softball coach over the course of three decades. 

“I feel like I’ve been way more lucky than anything,” he said. “Seems like every sport I coached, I ended up having good players who could do tremendous things on the court or on the field. For whatever reason, these kids worked hard for me.

“The only thing I think I brought to the table was I was very demanding of them. I worked them, but they worked, they didn’t have quit in them. These kids at LAMP, because of their academics, they’ve been groomed that you don’t quit, you work hard, and they carried that over to the court or they carried it over to the field.”

LAMP principal Matthew Monson, who promoted Norris to athletic director four years ago, said the retirement of his athletic director and softball coach will leave huge shoes to fill. 

“It’s sweet and sad at the same time,” Monson said. “Coach Norris has been a huge part of the athletic success at LAMP, first in basketball and then in softball, and he’s also part of the fabric of the school. He just said it’s time for him to take a step back. His children are through with school and he’s got other interests he wants to pursue and all I can do is shake his hand and say thank you for all he’s done for LAMP.

“I’m going to miss him coaching our kids hard every day and doing it the right way. Those are going to be big shoes to fill. Our next softball coach needs to know they’re coming in with a program that’s on a rock solid foundation with great kids who understand the game.”

The magnet school was created on the third floor of Sidney Lanier High School in 1984 by Mary George Jester and called the Lanier Academic Motivational Program. After 15 years on South Court Street, the school moved to a nearby vacant junior high school building in 1999 and was renamed Loveless Academic Magnet Program. (It would later find its way to another vacant junior high facility on Hall Street before finally moving into its new home at the former Montgomery Mall). 

Norris was hired the following year by Arrington and athletics started the next year at the school. 

As a school employee, the J.U. Blacksher High graduate was named the head baseball coach in 2002 while a volunteer, Randy Tucker, actually coached the team, fulfilling the requirements of the school system at the time that required an employee to be the head coach. It was a role he would hold for three years despite adding junior varsity basketball to his plate the following season. 

The boys’ varsity basketball program was coached by Patrick Fenderson, then by Kelvin Lett and finally by Jim Raines during those early years at the magnet school. 

“Coach Jim Raines, who had retired, was in Auburn and got hired on at LAMP as a math teacher,” Norris recalled. “He was the basketball coach for about two years when he passed away (in the summer of 2006) and I became the head basketball coach by default. But I wasn’t the head coach for long, three to four years.”

The Golden Tigers never made it out of the area tournament the first two years under Norris, but the third year was magical as LAMP won the area tournament over Marbury, won the sub-regional game and the regionals, advancing to the state tournament for the only time in school history before losing to Madison Academy in the semifinals.

Norris stepped down at the end of the season to take over the softball program.

“My oldest daughter (Abby) was at Baldwin (Middle Magnet) and she was coming to LAMP to play softball and the softball coach was talking about leaving,” Norris said. 

Like all sports at the magnet school, softball had its share of coaching turnover before Norris took over. 

Michelle Gravatt was the first softball coach at LAMP. After a couple of years, Bobby Smith took over as softball coach and his son Rocky Smith served as an assistant before taking over the baseball program. Ronda Wright took over the program for a year (2006), Robyn Johnson was the coach for three years (07-09) and now Norris has served the last 13 years, guiding the Golden Tigers to the regionals in eight of the last 10 seasons, missing only 2018 and the COVID year of 2020.

“When I became a softball coach, I watched YouTube videos all night long,” Norris said. “I didn’t even know how to do a drill in softball. I didn’t understand the speed of the game. There was a lot I had to learn about that game.”

 By 2015, he had built the Golden Tigers into an annual power as they made the school’s second trip to the state tournament -- Wright made it in 2006 -- and the following year LAMP played Curry in the 4A finals. It was quite an accomplishment for a program that routinely loses players because of its high academic standards. 

“The kids I get have a totally different mindset,” Norris said. “Whatever you ask them to do, they’re going to do. If it’s conditioning and you tell them, ‘we’re going to run three more whatevers,’ they’re going to run three more whatevers. You can’t be as academically sound as these kids unless you’ve got a great support system at home.

“You’ve got kids that are not athletes but I’ve been fortunate enough to get smart kids that are athletes. I’m amazed at how good they were in both (academic and athletic) arenas. That has been what has humbled me over the years, that some of the kids I’ve gotten were tremendous athletes and great, great students, too.”

That includes his daughters -- Abby, Jessie and current senior Gracey -- who have been as much an integral part of LAMP softball as their father Anthony and mother Patti, an assistant who coaches at first base during games.

“I gave up basketball, which I loved, for my daughters,” Norris said. “And it’s kind of funny, over those 13 years, I’ve never not had one of my three playing for me. I’m not sure they would agree that was the best thing for them, but that’s why I did it. Truth be known, I’m not sure I would have coached for 13 years had it not been for my three daughters.”

LAMP struggled early this season but has caught fire in recent weeks, making a surprising run to win the regular season area championship for the second consecutive year, which earns the program the right to host the area tournament that starts today at Lagoon Park. 

Some programs have a wealth of local talent and stability in their program that makes championships and state tournament appearances an annual expectation. Norris has generated some of the same expectations, but every LAMP team has to blaze its own path because of the school’s unique status, making every accomplishment -- such as the trip to the state finals in 2016 -- one that may not be repeated for years. 

“All I knew was I had a team that I wanted to coach to be the best it could be,” he said. “If there’s anything about myself that I can brag about is I could tell how much was in a kid and if they still had something to offer. Most of them would rise to that challenge. That’s what a coach is, a person who can see more in you than you can see in yourself.

“We’ve been fortunate and blessed here, even with the coaches that have come through here. We’ve always had a good coaching staff, but what made them good was they understood the type of kid they were coaching. Not every coach can come in here and relate to these kids.”

That understanding led him to apply for the athletic director’s job when Wright retired four years ago. 

“First and foremost, he took the initiative to come to me and say I can do that job, I want that job,” Monson said. “After watching how he ran his softball program and the success they had, seeing what a good rapport he had with academic faculty and athletic coaches, it became an easy decision for me. I’ve always been impressed with his positive attitude toward everything LAMP and his down-to-Earth sensibility.”

It might have been an easy decision for Monson, but it couldn’t have been easy for Norris, a full-time teacher who used his planning period at the end of the school day for softball during the spring semester.

“That was tough,” he said, “because I’m a classroom teacher. Every day, I had to teach five classes of pre-calculus before I start being an AD. There were a lot of days I would walk off the practice field and walk back into the building to continue to do AD work because I didn’t have time to do it during the day. There’s a lot of paperwork to that job, a lot of timelines and deadlines that you have to stay on top of throughout the year.”

Norris, who resides in the Friendship community in south Montgomery County, will continue to teach at the school for another three years to reach the 30-year plateau with the state retirement system, but plans to turn to the ministry after retirement.

“I’m going to miss it,” Norris said of his coaching career, “but I’ve been in a very unique situation here at LAMP. I was hired to teach math. I’ve been teaching pre-calculus all 23 years I’ve been at LAMP.”

Monson, meanwhile, has named boys’ basketball coach Robb McGaughey as the new athletic director. 

“A lot of those same things that Anthony possesses, Robb possesses,” Monson said. “Robb and I worked together before I came to LAMP and even then I saw how Robb ran a program, what he’s done with the Hoops League and I know his heart’s in the right place.”

McGaughey believes it will be a seamless transition after spending the last year with Norris. 

“I did not know him personally until I started working here at LAMP,” McGaughey said, “but his generosity and leadership to kind of help me as he passed the torch has been great. We’ve had several informal conversations … and we line up with some of the same vision. I saw that from afar and up close, how he interacts with people.”

Monson now has to figure out how to fill the other shoes worn by Norris, the ones that has transformed the Golden Tigers into an annual contender for the state softball tournament.

“Our next softball coach needs to know the game but more importantly, I need them to know our kids and to know and understand LAMP,” Monson said. “It’s the most unique school I’ve ever been a part of. While our kids excel both athletically and academically, we can never lose the focus of our school and that focus is the academics. Winning is expected and it’s nice, but winning takes on many facets here at LAMP and the biggest win we can get is when they win in the classroom.”