Legendary basketball coach Pete Carril ‘saw things in people others didn’t see’

Dick Graul says he wasn’t a very good basketball player as a young teen. He’d go down to the courts at 11th and Pike looking for a game but no one would pick him.

“I was terrible,” he said.

Pete Carril would disagree. Years later he would say Graul was the best player he coached at Reading High.

He spotted Graul, then a ninth-grader, at the playground, saw something in him others didn’t, and started to work with him.

“He showed me how to box out,” Graul recalled Tuesday, before a pregame ceremony at the Geigle to honor the memory of the legendary coach. “He showed me how to fake, where to place my feet. That helped.”

Pete Carril did that for a lot of kids, and later for a lot of college players at Princeton. That’s how you become a coaching legend.

That’s the word many around the game use to describe Carril, who died in August at age 92 after a Hall-of-Fame coaching career launched in Reading.

He was the Red Knights’ coach from 1958-66 and laid, as Reading coach Rick Perez would say during Tuesday’s ceremony, the “foundation” for the program’s vast basketball success.

The universally known “Princeton Offense” Carril used to take down nationally-ranked foes had its roots in Reading.

“Everything he did started here,” said Perez, who organized the ceremony before the Red Knights’ season opener and invited Carril’s former players to attend.

Perez and his staff, Carril’s former players and others wishing to pay tribute wore bow ties for the occasion — a regular fashion accessory for Carril during his days in Reading, at Lehigh and for the bulk of his career at Princeton, where he won 13 Ivy League titles and scared the bejeezus out of the likes of UCLA, Georgetown and other NCAA powers he either beat or nearly took out in the Tournament.

“And he did it with non-scholarship players,” reminded Tony Relvas, a Carill assistant coach for seven seasons. “That tells you what kind of coach Pete Carril was.”

Carril won a pair of Central Penn League titles and two District 3 titles with the Red Knights. His last Reading team, in 1965-66, went 25-1, reaching the PIAA semifinals. Overall, he went 145-42 in eight seasons.

“Reading High School was instrumental in putting Dad’s career on the map,” Lisa Carril, Pete’s daughter, said in a statement read during the ceremony.

“I have fond memories of (growing up in Reading) and our life on Fern Avenue,” Lisa Carril wrote. “Tagging along to Dad’s practices and going to all of his games. I remember the players, his summer league at 11th and Pike and growing up with a Dad who did amazing things with the basketball program at Reading.

“He cast a wide net of influence as a basketball coach and as a teacher of the game. His passion and work ethic inspired many. Little did I know as a sixth-grader at Farview Elementary how far he would go.”

To kids like Graul and others who played for him at Reading, he was everything. Graul didn’t know he was working with a basketball savant when he Carril was giving him pointers on his game but he realized it years later, after he became a dominant player in the fierce Central Penn League.

“He was such a fundamentals guy,” said Graul, who averaged a league-leading 18.4 points per game as a senior in 1961-62. “Every day, every night, that’s what he taught you, fundamentals and defense. He made me what I was. I loved him.”

What Graul became is the first Reading High basketball player to be named All-State by both the Associated Press and the United Press International, wire services. He went on to play at the University of Seattle.

“I was so many steps ahead of people who were better than me because of what he taught me,” Graul said of Carril.

At heart, Carril was a teacher. Jim Gano, one of Carril’s assistants at Reading who became Red Knights head coach, asked him to work with a promising player who needed help with his shooting mechanics.

Carril, by then coaching at Princeton, got together with Neil Christel during a summer camp and changed his shooting motion. Christel picked it up quickly, helped the Red Knights win a couple district championships and scored over a 1,000 points. He went on to play for Carril at Princeton and was Tigers captain his senior year in 1981-82.

It was a hard four years, Christel recalled.

“He was very demanding, but he got you ready to play,” Christel said before Tuesday’s ceremony. “His thing was always preparation and practice. The practices were hard; most of the games were easier.”

Christel said Carril saw the game differently than others; that was a big part of his success.

“He could see things in people other people didn’t see,” he said.