ROGERS -- Marty Barnes saw a will to win in the Rogers players even before he came to Northwest Arkansas, despite the fact they hadn't had much on-court success.
The veteran basketball coach was told by a couple of colleagues that he was crazy to take the job as the team suffered through seven consecutive losing seasons before he came. However, Barnes trusted what he saw and it turned out to be right on target.
Rogers Mountaineer Athletic Hall of Fame Induction
When Friday, 5 p.m.
Where Rogers High Performing Arts Center
Notable There will no admission charge. … Inductees will be former boys basketball coach Marty Barnes, Mark Chambers, basketball, Gary Harris, track, football, basketball, Todd Horton, football, basketball, track, Nate Melson, baseball, Holly Horton Treat, basketball, Patrick Woodruff, baseball.
The Mounties made state tournament appearances in seven of Barnes' eight years at Rogers High, including a state finals berth and 162-66 record.
Barnes is one of seven, who will be inducted into the Rogers Mountaineers Athletics Hall of Fame on Friday evening. The ceremony will be held at 5 p.m. at the Rogers High School auditorium prior to the football game between Rogers High and Rogers Heritage.
Even though his Russellville team defeated Rogers late in that 2004 season, Barnes remembered shaking those players' hands and seeing their response when he heard the job was open.
"I liked how those players still had that fire in their eyes," said Barnes, who amassed 605 wins in a 31-year coaching career. "They wanted to win. I think that's the thing that impressed me the most and one of the only reasons why I went for the Rogers job."
Kyle Moix, a sophomore on Barnes' first team at Rogers in 2004, said Barnes changed the culture, but the players were also hungry for success.
"We were kinda at a low point and when it's bad, you need to make a drastic change and that's what he was willing to do and that's what he was able to do," Moix said. "We just wanted to win, so we were happy to do it.
"He was the perfect guy because we had the belief, not only in ourselves but in him that he wasn't going to really let us lose. We just had that confidence and it didn't come from anywhere except for him because it definitely didn't come from Rogers basketball."
Barnes acknowledged the fact that Tom Olsen, his former assistant at Arkansas Tech, applied for the Rogers job, too, gave him pause. But he ultimately took the job and Olsen became his assistant there, too, for four years.
Olsen, who will begin his 10th season as boys basketball coach at Heritage, faced Barnes' teams as a player and coach. But Olsen said he learned many building blocks of coaching from Barnes.
"Marty was a guy who sat a structure in place of this is how you do things," Olsen said. "This is the process of practice. This is how we prepare for games. This is coaching basically. I don't know if there was a better guy for just managing a season than coach Barnes.
"I always thought coach Barnes was great at tailoring what we could do based on the personnel we had. I thought he was a master at putting a kid in the best position to have success."
Olsen pointed out that Barnes was never tied to any one system, even though he played mostly a deliberate offensive style at Rogers. He had teams at Russellville and Arkansas Tech that averaged 80 points per game, while his Rogers teams often averaged in the 40s.
But one thing that was a constant throughout Barnes' career was his focus on defense, particularly the matchup zone. Moix, now Olsen's assistant, said the matchup was drilled constantly to the point he never forgot it.
"I could run the matchup zone in my sleep, 10 years after graduation," Moix said. "We would put seven and eight people out there playing offense against our matchup and if they scored on us we were gonna run or something."
That's the kind of impression Barnes left on his players and the Rogers basketball program.
Sports on 09/28/2017