Being able to make decisions on the fly is a very important skill for a coach. During a game, coaches have to make hundreds of decisions that play a role in the outcome of the contest, win or lose.
Lamar Rogers, the legendary basketball coach at Clarkrange High School, has been doing that for decades. As he paced the sidelines for the Lady Buffaloes, every decision he made he believed was best for the blue and gold.
Rogers made one of the biggest decisions of his life earlier this spring when he announced his retirement from coaching after 50 years at CHS. That decision was voted as the 2026 Crossville Chronicle Award for Sports Moment of the Year at Clarkrange High School.
Rogers can still remember it like it happened yesterday. He was about to coach his very first game for the Lady Buffaloes.
Clarkrange was set to battle Cumberland County, and the brand new coach was nervous. He wasn’t sure how to react, if his players would play well, and what would happen if Clarkrange didn’t win.
Unfortunately, Clarkrange lost by seven.
“Thankfully, I don’t remember the score. I think we lost by six or seven,” Rogers said. “The girls were really disappointed and I was, too.
The next morning I was ready to quit. It was the end of the world.”
The rookie coach, however, hung on.
“We made it to the regional tournament the next year, and we went to the state tournament,” Rogers said. “We had an undefeated regular season. You’ve got to have good players and you’ve got to do a good job of coaching to be successful. We just kept going.”
And the rest, quite literally, is history.
Rogers, who admits he’s thought about retiring before, said he finally made the decision because he wanted to spend more time with his family.
“It was a real difficult decision,” Rogers said. “I’ve been slipping back and forth. I just finished my 50th year and I thought, ‘well, I could probably do it for 20 more years.’ But the more I thought about it I thought it’s time.”
Rogers grew up in Clarkrange and graduated from CHS in 1970. He went to Tennessee Tech University to study agricultural science, but changed his major to health and physical education his junior season.
“I knew then I wanted to coach,” Rogers said.
Rogers, who is not ruling out ever coaching again, closed out his career at Clarkrange with 1,364 wins and 350 losses. That is an average of 27 wins per year. Just as impressive, 350 losses over 50 years averages out to only seven losses a year.
Probably Rogers’ favorite accomplishment to mention; however, is 55 Clarkrange players have signed college scholarships since he took over as coach.
He’s the winningest high school coach in Tennessee ever, and he leaves as the third winningest coach nationally. Leta Andrews of
Gustine, TX, leads the way at 1,416 career victories. Joe
Lombard of Canyon, TX, is second with 1,379.
Rogers’ teams made 26 trips to the Tennessee state tournament and came away with eight championships and three runner-up titles. Clarkrange had only one losing season under his guidance.
“I told my wife I would do this coaching thing for probably five years,” Rogers said. “It is funny looking back on it.”
When Rogers first started coaching, girls basketball was 6-on-6. In 1980, it changed to 5-on-5. He said there have also been a lot of
changes in how the girls game is officiated.
“There are all kinds of different strategies in coaching, and you have to be flexible in what you do,” said Rogers, who would carry a piece of paper with different offenses on it during games. “We’ve tried to be really flexible over the years. You have to work with the type of players you have.
“We played pressure defense, we pressed full court. We played zone, we played man, triangle-and-2. It all depended on the players we had and who we were playing.”
Rogers’s teams, to the end, were successful. He won the Class A state crown in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2004 and
2009.
“We just had our philosophy of what we wanted to try and do, and then we adjusted a little bit to what was happening in the game,” Rogers said. “I had a coach call me one time and tell me I always seemed like I was one step ahead during a game. I appreciated that.”
Rogers said he’s going to continue to teach and serve as Clarkrange’s athletic director.
The coach said he can’t pick a favorite team or a favorite player because “they’ve all been special.” But Rogers did mention his 2009 team which went undefeated.
“We had everything we needed,” Rogers said. “We had size, dribbling, shooting, smart players, dedicated players. And it was a lot of fun.”
A search for Rogers’ replacement took a very short amount of time. Howard Bristol, a former assistant boys coach at Clarkrange, was tabbed to take over the girls program.