Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
link Portales High assistant softball coach Scott Parker high-fives senior Francis Armijo after a single during a game this spring at Wheeler Park. Parker is retiring after spending 34 years as a coach and instructo at Texico High, Eastern New Mexico University an PHS.
Staff Writer
“Who’s up?” Scott Parker would ask to start every inning for Portales. Lady Rams softball players would respond with that inning’s leadoff hitter.
“Then who?” The players would respond with the second hitter. The process would repeat for the third hitter of the inning.
“Sounds like a winner,” Parker would shout back as he strolled to the first-base coach’s box.
It’s one of many things, either vocal or silent, that players and coworkers had come to expect from Parker as a coach over 34 years at Texico High, Eastern New Mexico University and Portales High.
“I think the biggest thing over all of these years,” said Parker, “is the opportunity to work with young people, work with athletes and watch them grow.”
Parker, who is retiring as a health instructor at PHS, has been an assistant or head coach for every sport except volleyball and tennis, and helped start the current soccer and softball programs at Portales High School.
“When (administration) decided to start the program (in 2000), they asked me if I would coach,” Portales softball coach Robbie Crowley said. “I asked Scott if he would help. The funny thing is we both said, ‘We’ll get it started, we’ll give it a few years.’
“He’s loyal, he will do anything I need him to do. Mainly, Scott worked with the infield. He worked with the defense, and that was his passion.”
Parker was on the sidelines for a pair of championships at Texico, as an assistant on the 1983 Class 1A football champion and the following spring as head coach of the boys basketball team.
With, that is, an assist from another fan base.
“We played right before Albuquerque High when we played Cliff,” Parker said of the 61-35 win over the Cowboys. “Albuquerque High was packing the gym for their game. They wore green, too. All of a sudden, they started rooting for us. You went from about 200 people from Texico to about 5,000 Albuquerque High fans rooting for Texico.”
Athletes that grabbed more attention in Parker’s tenure were Nathan Erdmann and Lee Hilliard of Portales and Brad Stewart at Texico, and he loved getting to coach softball while daughter Sasha was the team’s top pitcher. But he wasn’t one to single players out.
“All of the ones I coached worked hard,” Parker said. “I love them all to death. I think the biggest thing for me is after they graduated, they come back and see you.
They’re well-respected, they’ve got good jobs and a family. Hopefully, the things we tried to teach them carried on into their lives.”
Parker first played sports at Western Nebraska Junior College, where he played baseball and softball before transferring to Chadron State.
He came to Eastern New Mexico University in 1978 as an assistant for Larry Riley, his coach at Chadron State. He did student teaching under Bill Bizzell at Clovis High School while he got his master’s degree from ENMU, then started his five-year run at Texico in 1980.
He came to Portales in 1985, and coached at various levels in various sports. He recalls only getting five technicals in his career, though three of them came in the same junior high game. It was his only ejection.
Part of that comes from an attitude Parker learned as a player: Play hard, be a good sport, know when it’s over.
“That’s the way I played in college,” Parker said. “We’d almost get in fights. But when it was over, we walked out together, we’d go eat. And I carried that on.”
But he had help maintaining that nearly-spotless record.
“I made him get back in the dugout on several occasions, so I saved him from getting tossed.” Crowley said. “Having said that, he pulled me back in the dugout a few times, too.”
While Parker and Crowley will coach together next weekend in the North-South All-Star Series at Cobre, it’s still undecided if Parker will be back as a coach. Crowley said she’d like to have Parker back as a contract coach, and Parker would be agreeable to that, but she noted administration prefers to fill coaching slots with teachers.
Parker hopes to do some more traveling, possibly to some Nebraska college football games, and maybe get to some lakes and beaches to fish and metal detect.
“I’ll probably find a job,” Parker joked. “I’ve been so structured all my life, I don’t know if I can do (retirement).”