Former Catholic Central coach inducted into Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame

Adams, now in his 15th season as the the athletic director at the University of Northwestern Ohio, a NAIA school in Lima, earned the Hall of Fame honor largely because of his 308 victories at Elida from 1985 to 2006. He also won 72 games and two district championships from 1981-85 at Catholic Central. He moved into the college coaching ranks in 2006 and spent 10 seasons as the head coach at UNOH.

“I was taught early in life by my Wittenberg professors that my job as a teacher and a coach was to try to make every student/player that I taught reach their potential,” Adams said in his Hall of Fame speech. “When I retired from coaching in 2016 after 37 years in the business, I have asked myself many times, did I ever accomplish the one very simple task that my college professors asked of me? Did the students and the student-athletes that I surrounded myself with reach their potential? Being here tonight and getting selected to the Hall of Fame at least validated/verified what my peers thought of our attempt to reach that goal, and I truly thank you for that!”

Adams remains thankful to Russ Guenther, who was the athletic director at Catholic Central when he was hired, for taking a chance on a 22-year-old who had never been a head coach. Larry Hunter, who coached Wittenberg to a national championship in 1977, Adams’ freshman season, recommended Adams to Guenther.

“The only thing I knew was the Wittenberg system,” Adams said.

Adams remembers the names of his Catholic Central players well.

“That first season, we had Johnny Dunn at the point,” he said. “Scott Walters was our leading score. Kevin Lohnes and Kevin Zink were in the post. We had a guy named Mike Powers, who was the wing. Then they graduated, and I had the Ridder brothers (Ron and Ric), with Casey Lee, who ended up going to Ohio Wesleyan. Mark Wobbe and Tim Sullivan were key players on those teams.”

Adams, a graduate of Lancaster High School, enrolled at Wittenberg because he wanted to play but was stuck behind another freshman, Agler, as a freshman and never did find playing time. He made the most of his time in college by learning the game from two future members of the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame.

“Steve Moore (Hunter’s assistant) and Larry Hunter called me in,” Adams said, “and said, ‘Not playing is not the end of the world. We want you to help us coach.’ I did, and I loved it. Then they actually let me help them a lot in 1981, which was an extended year for me because I was getting certified to teach. My wife (Jan) had gotten a job at Tecumseh.”

Adams then got a job at Tecumseh himself because Moore’s wife Jane left the school when Moore got his first head coaching job at Muhlenberg in 1981, beginning one of the great coaching careers in college basketball history. Moore spent most of his career at Wooster and retired in 2020 as the 12th winningest coach (846-245) in college basketball history.

“They went from one Wittenberg person to the next,” Adams said. “That’s how it was back then.”

Adams stayed an extra season at Wittenberg because his wife, Jan, was a year behind him in school. He spent three years learning under Hunter, who won 305 games in 13 seasons at Wittenberg and then went on to coach at Ohio and Western Carolina. Hunter died in May of 2018, less than two months after stepping down at Western Carolina.

“Larry Hunter had an incredible desire to push kids to win games,” Adams said. “(Hunter and Moore) were were school teachers first. They obviously wanted to be coaches, but they really knew how to teach skills to kids. It’s one thing when you’re a biology major and you’re sitting there with 85 kids to lecture to versus Steve Moore or Larry Hunter demonstrating how to deny the wing on the left side with your left thumb down in the lane and your left foot pointed exactly here, and you had to execute that. That was new to me. But once I saw them do that, all my players through all those 37 years, they all did the same drill, and they had their left thumb down in the lanes.”

Although Adams was on the junior varsity team in 1976-77, the national championship season, he has great memories of watching his varsity teammates.

“I remember going to practices and just being in awe of how good of a player Rick White was,” Adams said. “He was our star player, and he was just a man among boys back then. He had the ability to catch and score and create space, and that was before the term ‘creating space’ was even thought of. It’s prevalent now. He just had that bulk. He could post people, and he could take them outside and score off the dribble too. I marveled at him. And obviously when you’re rooming with Brian Agler, I was a big fan of his. A whole bunch of us would root for him to do well. Of course, we’d go back to the dorms and go out and get something to eat afterward because we were his buddies.”

Agler is now in his first year as the athletic director at Wittenberg after a long career coaching in the WNBA.

As for the two other prominent Springfield names in Adams’ speech, Wiseman and Henderson, they were coaching at South and North, respectively, at the time, and as a fellow Clark County high school coach, Adams started what would be a lifelong friendship.

Wiseman, in fact, pushed hard for Middletown High School to hire Adams in 1985. He didn’t get that job but did make the final three. Instead, he was hired by Elida. By that point, he was making $8,500 a year at Catholic Central and wanted a higher-paying job because he and Jan had a young son, Drew.

Adams took the job at Elida on the recommendation of Bob Arnzen, the longtime coach at Delphos St. John’s.

“Boy, that was that a good decision,” Adams said in his Hall of Fame speech, “because we fell in love with the community as a family, and I fell in love with the players as coach, And we had the BEST gym!”