Photo by Phil Stapleton
He commuted daily from Greensboro to Hillsborough, rolling up the school entrance hill inside his trademark Volkswagen Bug.
Such was the dedication of Richard Lyons, who spent much of his life coaching young people in baseball, track and field (which he introduced to Orange County Schools), men’s basketball and in life.
“If he got worn down by all that driving, you didn’t know it,” said Wayne Bynum, one of his former players.
The original Athletic Director at Stanford Junior High School, Lyons passed away last month from pneumonia after suffering a fall at his home.
Lyons was a trendsetter in Hillsborough youth sports during integration. His sacrifices and commitment greatly benefitted northern Orange County, but it came with a heavy price personally.
“As I look back on Mr. Lyons as a coach, I remember him as a guy who could get things out of you that you didn’t know you had in you.,” said Jim Gentry, a member of Orange High’s 1969 3A State Championship team, where Lyons was an assistant coach on the staff of Ken Mauer. “He believed competition brought out the best in a player.”
Lyons was the Athletic Director of Stanford when the school opened in 1969. In the spring of the school’s first academic year, Lyons led Stanford’s baseball team to the conference championship. Gentry was one of the original Chargers.
“I met Coach Lyons for the first time last April at our celebration of the 1969 State Championship Team,” said Anne Purcell, Chairwoman of the Orange County School Board. “I was immediately taken by his wonderful smile and his interaction with the players on the team. Many of the players on the championship team he coached at Central High School and had in Physical Education at Central High. Anyone watching immediately knew that there was a special bond between them. They respected him and he respected each one of them, over 50 years after being their teacher.”
Lyons was the head coach of the Orange men’s basketball team for five years in the 1970s and won several conference championships. He was on the sidelines when Ronnie McAdoo scored 53 points against Durham High School in 1977, still the school record. McAdoo would go on to play at Old Dominion. His son, James Michael McAdoo, suited up for North Carolina from 2011-to-2014 and now plays professionally in Japan.
Yet Lyons referred to his time at Stanford as his glory years. It’s where he was the Athletic Director and coached a varsity of sports.
Lyons had many motivational slogans, one of which was “There is no success without stress.” His words were sired from a lifetime of battling racism, including several instances when innocent situations nearly turned fatal.
His first job after graduating from North Carolina A&T was teaching at Brunswick County in Shallotte. Living in Longwood, he was roommates with a farmer who wore an eyepatch to mask a lost eye and called Lyons “fez,” short for “professor.” He battled the coastal heat and taught inside classrooms that lacked air conditioning but offered plenty of gnats.
After two years in Brunswick County, Lyons arrived to the place where he would build his legacy. He was hired as the junior varsity boys basketball coach at Central High School, the all-Black school during a time when Hillsborough was still segregated. In order to fulfil contractural obligations, Lyons was required to establish a residence in town, so he stayed at a local rooming house.
“He was someone extremely important to Stanford Junior High,” said Nick Walker, who was a physician education teacher at Stanford who eventually coached men’s and women’s tennis at Orange High, Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill. “He did a lot to organize the school athletics and meant a lot to people. His word was his bond.”
In his spare time, Lyons took graduate courses at North Carolina Central and UNC-Chapel Hill. On Saturdays, he would travel to the county prison farm and coached minimum security felons.
“A lot of folks said that I was crazy to do this,” Lyons wrote in his book “From Start to Finish.” “But I knew that there were a lot of folks out there on the street who were worse than the prisoners. My thinking was that they just had not been caught.”
He would take the prisoners to Chapel Hill for basketball and softball games, something that ended when the guards noticed inmates smelling of alcohol after the obligatory search. It turned out that some of the inmates had been drinking when supposedly going to the woods to relieve themselves.
Lyons was elevated to varsity men’s basketball coach at Central High in 1965.
Eventually, he would join the Orange High staff when the school was integrated in the academic year of 1968-1969.
It was a time filled with tension that often spilled into violence.
In his book, Lyons details one incident were his Volkswagen overheated along U.S. 70 in Hillsborough on his way back to Greensboro. After pulling up to a nearby Exxon, he told the station attendant that his fan belt had broken and needed it replaced. The attendant responded he only provided gas. When Lyons asked for an adjustable wrench, the attendant went inside and returned with a gun. Instead of shooting, the attendant attempted to hit Lyons with the gun and it turned into a struggle where the firearm discharged. Ultimately, the attendant told Lyons to leave or else he would kill him.
Lyons reported the situation to police, where he ran into resistance from some skeptical officers. Ultimately, Lyons didn’t pursue charges based on the fear of a public backlash.
Of the five players on Orange’s 1969 3A State Championship team, four were starters on Lyons’ final squad at Central High School–Roosevelt Chavious, Fred Chavious, Johnny Crump and Calvin Wade.
“Coach Lyons treated me like I was his son,” said Roosevelt Chavious. “I used to spend 2-3 weeks during the summer at his home and played summer league basketball through the recreation center where he worked. During my senior year he took me to visit colleges, even though he was no longer my coach, and thought Winston-Salem State University was a good choice. He even came to some of my games and would wait and talk to me afterwards.”
Last May, Lyons returned to Hillsborough for a ceremony to honor the 1969 State Championship team organized by various prominent members of the Orange County community. After the team waited 55 years to receive its state championship rings following its victory over Madison-Mayodan inside Sykes Gymasnium at Durham High School, Lyons and his players got their hardware last spring.
“It was probably best I didn’t get my state championship ring until last year,” Bynum said. “If I had gotten it in 1969, I would have lost it a long time ago.”
