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Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

Floyd County High School girls basketball coach Alan Cantrell, now in his 32nd year as a coach, has won three state girls championships and one boys crown at the school.

FLOYD -- Alan Cantrell has scared the daylights out of people over the years.

A famous perfectionist and competitor, the basketball coach of the defending Group A Division 2 champion Floyd County girls can present a fearsome demeanor on the sidelines.

Sometimes, his dark eyes look as if they're going to burn right through somebody like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight on dry leaves.

He hollers, he growls, he stomps, he spins on the balls of his feet to look away from the action in unguarded disgust when he can't stand what he's looking at any more.

The players are stoic in their silence. As for game officials, well, they have the law on their side and enforcement powers at the ready.

"When we were coming into varsity off the JV team, some of us were pretty nervous," senior Emily Thompson said. "Most of us were scared. That changed pretty quickly. We were working too hard to be scared."

Each new class of incoming girls must have a certain degree of anxiety. They get over it.

Lynette Vest did. She was one of Cantrell's greatest players. Now she's the junior varsity coach. You have to know him, she said.

"He's really very sweet."

There's an official somewhere reading this right now who's getting ready to choke on his whistle.

It's a fact. Alan Cantrell, winner of more than 700 girls and boys basketball games and four state championships, is a prince of a fellow.

"One of the most gentle, nicest human beings you'll ever want to meet," said Barry Hollandsworth, Floyd County principal. "He'd give you the shirt off his back."

Game day feasts at Cantrells

Maybe the doubters ought to drop by Cantrell's house the afternoon of a game. There's always a dinner party going. Pasta, salad, bread, brownies -- and plenty of all of it -- were on the menu before one recent preseason scrimmage. All the girls were there, chatting and eating as they watched the big screen television in the living room.

Gayle Cantrell, the coach's wife and de facto executive vice president of every basketball operation he's ever been a part of, does the cooking.

How much food has that amounted to since he started coaching in 1977?

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "A few pounds I guess."

The players aren't the only ones on hand. There's also a platoon of toddlers who are as much a part of the action as anybody else. Gayle keeps a bunch of them during the day. Included in the gang are Isaiah and A.J. Cantrell. They're the grandchildren, Travis Cantrell's boys. Isaiah just turned 1 and A.J. is a couple of years older.

As sure as the weather can be chilly in Floyd during basketball season, those two will be playing ball before they know it. They're Cantrells. Travis and his older sister Melissa grew up with the game. Among Travis' earliest memories is spending the summer going from camp to camp with his sister and parents.

Now Travis is his father's assistant coach. Alan says that Travis is going to be a no-doubt-about-it dynamite head basketball coach one day. Travis is already Floyd County's golf coach.

Melissa teaches at a school for the deaf in Kentucky. Both were standout ballplayers. Their father coached them both to state championships.

"That's been the best of all," said their father, a no-doubt-about-it hall-of-famer one day.

Coaching during tragedy

The worst was a couple of years ago when another one of Travis and Laura's sons got sick. The entire community pulled together to support the family when little Joshua fell ill. As much love as one small county could put forth went out to the Cantrells and to the family of Brian Harman, the boys' basketball coach whose own young son, Chance, was coincidentally gravely ill during the same period.

Despite all the love, all the prayers and a brave fight, neither Joshua nor Chance could be saved.

It was basketball season for part of the time, and Joshua was having a very hard time. Alan Cantrell offered to do what previously would have been unthinkable.

"I told Travis I was going to quit coaching so I could be with them," he said.

Travis, who went on to play for The Citadel before returning to Floyd, wouldn't let him.

"We need for you to keep coaching," Travis said. "You need to keep coaching."

So Alan Cantrell did. It was the last scrap of normal life the heartsick family had to hold onto.

"It gave us something to talk about," Travis said.

And some people think that sports don't matter.

Joshua had been in and out of the hospital. There was a game to be played and the Floyd County girls coach was on the bench gathering his thoughts before the tip. Then he heard a voice behind him.

"You got any more room on the bench there with you?"

It was Travis.

In basketball came peace, if for only 32 minutes.

When the beloved boy was gone, the Presbyterian minister came to visit. As people do in such circumstances, Alan Cantrell had questions.

"I was mad," he said. "I asked him, 'Why?' He told me that it was all right to be mad because that meant that I believed. He said I wouldn't have an answer right away, but that one day I would.

"And when that answer came, by then, it wouldn't matter any more."

Press, run and shoot

Alan Cantrell, 53, grew up in hilly Buchanan County and played basketball at tiny Whitewood High, now no longer. Like many small mountain schools in those days, Whitewood had a small gym. The style of play was press, run until the opponent drops, shoot first and ask questions later.

Cantrell thrived, scoring monster numbers of points.

Gayle lived on the same mountain as Alan, but she went to Grundy High. They were married the day after he graduated from high school. That was 35 years ago.

Emory & Henry had wanted him to play, but he opted instead to take his chances and see if he could catch on at East Tennessee State.

The playing part didn't work out, but he did get to manage the team. His senior year, he worked for a first-year coach Sonny Smith, who was in the early stages of an illustrious career.

Cantrell learned a lot of basketball from Smith, later the coach at Auburn -- where he coached Charles Barkley and Chuck Person -- and at VCU.

When it came time for Cantrell to graduate, Smith suggested the young man consider coaching and teaching. Smith, who once coached at old Dublin High, had friends in Floyd County who had told him there was an opening for a teacher and coach at the high school.

Cantrell had never heard of Floyd County. He interviewed for the job and was hired.

"Sonny Smith got me my first job," he said.

Floyd County pulls him back

The Cantrell coaching travelogue: Floyd County, Grundy, Whitewood, back to Floyd County, Tazewell, Pound, and back again to Floyd County.

"I'm here to stay now," he said.

Cantrell coached boys and girls, and for a while, both when the girls played in the fall. He's steered track, baseball, football, and volleyball teams. He coached varsity volleyball and JV boys basketball during the same season once at Floyd County, winning the district in his only year as a volleyball coach.

"I didn't know anything about volleyball," he said.

Some of his basketball players also played volleyball. They talked him into it when it looked like there wasn't going to be a coach.

Teaches same pressing style

The first girls basketball game he coached was pretty close to being the first girls game he'd ever seen.

Through it all, it's been Whitewood-style pressure defense and breakneck offense.

"Players love to play that way, fans love to watch it," he said.

The only trouble with that manner of play sometimes is backing off the gas pedal.

"Sometimes we have trouble with the girls when we're trying to kill the clock at the end," he said. "It's hard for them to slow down."

From the youngest recreation league player to the oldest high school senior, that's the way they've played in Floyd County for years now.

"I loved playing for him," said former point guard Harman, who also coached both boys and girls with Cantrell before the girls moved to the winter season. "He challenges you every single day. He's determined to get the best out of you."

That's why Cantrell may seem intimidating at first.

"He couldn't get the most out of his players unless he coached the way he does," Lynette Vest said.

Added Thompson: "I'd rather play for him than anybody."

State titles a reality

Cantrell said when he first started coaching he'd occasionally try to imagine what it would be like to win a state championship.

Now he knows.

The first came with boys basketball in 1996-97, Travis scoring a ton in the last three games. The girls followed with crowns in 1993 and 1994.

The last title came last season with the girls in the new Group A Division 2 classification. Four starters are back from that team including Brittany Avancini, who topped 30 points in both the semifinals and the final.

This is his 32nd year of coaching.

When the boys won it all, the celebration at the Vines Center in Lynchburg was uproarious. Then everybody headed back up the mountain home.

But this being one-stoplight Floyd, people started saying, hey, we've just won the state. What do we do now? Where can we go celebrate?

They went to the most happening place in town, of course, Gayle and Alan's. The house was full and the party went on for a long time.