Quintessential Coach

Editor’s note: Larry French, a former photographer for Princeton athletics who captured the black-and-white image of Pete Carril that appears in PAW’s September issue, shared this memory of the legendary coach:

I expressed to the Princeton Alumni Weekly that one from this series of eight or nine images could and likely would be the right image for this article — quintessential coach, with rolled program, kneeling, game focus, full fan background, early tournament game.

Usually, I shoot from across the bench, but I knew Pete was much of the story, especially on that day.

This image is of the coach I knew and came quickly to love photographing. “Expressive” would be a word that most certainly applies.

Over pizza and beer, away from the floor, now and then, around town, I and many others talked with him about this and that — life, basketball, in my case photography, and the similarities between basketball and lacrosse (men’s lacrosse coach Bill Tierney told me once he learned from coach Carril much about his lax offenses). But mostly we just laughed and wondered why we didn’t live further south. 

He had infinite stories from a life well lived. Mostly I simply listened and can’t remember a one of them, but know I smiled when around him, except when we were being serious or gulping pizza, and that has stayed with me.