Lafayette Norwood’s long, successful career included season for the ages

It’s a career in athletics that spans decades, and it’s for his accomplishments as a player and a coach that Lafayette Norwood will be inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame on Sunday at the Crown Uptown.

But there’s one season, one team, one incredible congruence of talent and focus that sets Norwood’s career apart. He coached the greatest high school basketball team in the history of Kansas.

That’s a powerful statement, and a subjective one. Greatness is difficult to quantify. But if you saw Norwood’s 1976-77 Heights team play — watched them destroy — you cannot plausibly have another opinion.

“Remembering that team, I think I’d have to look at them as young men seizing an opportunity to make history,” the 82-year-old Norwood, who lives in Lawrence, said. “And they became aware of that possibility relatively early, from a loss we had late in their junior year.”

That loss was to Kansas City Wyandotte in the first round of the 1976 Class 5A tournament in Kansas City. The Falcons were devastated.

“We made some goals for them and enforced some rules the following season,” Norwood said. “We gave each of the players a piece of paper with those goals and rules and they had to have it in their pockets. We were going to do whatever needed to be done.”

What Heights did during the 1976-77 season has not been done since. The way they destroyed the opposition was relentless and unapologetic. Led by senior point guard Darnell Valentine, whose supporting cast included some of the best players in City League history, the Falcons won all but one game by double digits and won most by 30 or more.

In a rematch with Wyandotte, this time in the state championship game, Heights jumped to a 25-0 lead and was on top 58-17 at halftime before winning 92-52.

“No, not ever,” Norwood said when asked if he had seen a better high school team than the one he led. “We’re dealing here with 1 through 10 as far as players. Where a lot of teams have super players who can do super things, this was an entire team that bought into everything. You just don’t have that too often.”

Norwood was as fierce as his unrelenting players, recognizing that even when he called off the dogs — Heights’ starters included Valentine, Calvin Alexander, Doc Holden, James Carr and sophomore Antoine Carr — the next five were just as hungry. It was often said that season that the next-best team in the City League were five guys who couldn’t crack the Heights starting lineup.

“The highlight for me,” Norwood said, “was seeing 10 people function defensively like a glove. I’ve been around a lot of basketball but I’ve never seen a team with the intensity to play defense like these young men did.”

It started with Valentine, who stood at halfcourt in all his majesty ready to pounce on a fearful ballhandler.

“Our team used Darnell as their example and they were able to build around that attitude,” Norwood said.

Norwood accompanied Valentine to Kansas, where Valentine was a four-time All-Big Eight player from 1977-81. The two have remained close, talking at least three or four times a week. Valentine, who works for an airplane parts manufacturer in Portland, visits Norwood in Lawrence several times a year and Norwood goes to Portland occasionally.

“You can cut Lafayette Norwood into a thousand pieces and you would enjoy every piece,” Valentine said. “He has modeled, for me and many others, what character, integrity and the values of a man should be. The decisions I make today are based on his teachings and the experience of watching him over the years.”

Norwood, a 1952 graduate of East, was the first African-American coach in the Wichita school district when he took over at Heights in 1969. He had a 109-56 record with the Falcons and, after four seasons at KU, was the basketball coach and golf coach at Johnson County Community College. Budget cuts forced him to step down as golf coach in 2014.

“I wouldn’t want to go back to that now, but at the time I think I would have continued to coach until I dropped, probably,” Norwood said. “Coaching was just a way of life for me. I enjoyed it and the enthusiasm was still there.”

Norwood has an open invitation to basketball practices at KU and has developed a close relationship with Jayhawk coach Bill Self. He stopped coaching basketball at Johnson County in 1991, but was a top-flight AAU coach for years after that. Two current NBA coaches, Cleveland’s Tyronn Lue and Earl Watson of Phoenix, played on Norwood’s teams.

“I learned early that I probably wouldn’t reach my goals as a player on the top level,” Norwood said. “But I’ve been able to work with kids and not even being able to imagine how far they would go. Darnell got to the NBA, Antoine got to the NBA, Calvin Alexander became one of the top cruiserweight boxers. Then Tyronn and Earl. You just do what you do and you never know who’s going to come across your path.”

This story was originally published September 30, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "Lafayette Norwood’s long, successful career included season for the ages."