Lack of experience no obstacle for New Hanover coach Kirk Angel

Sun. February 19, 2012 at 8:16 p.m. | By Powell Latimer | StarNews Staff Writer

Kirk Angel coaches the New Hanover High School basketball team during last week's conference tournament. (Photo by Jeff Janowski)

By Powell Latimer
Powell.Latimer@StarNewsOnline.com

There are no X's and O's in Kirk Angel's office. Wilmington's most successful high school basketball coach for the past half-decade has no whiteboard for strategy sessions, no diagrammed plays, and no scouting reports.
Instead, beneath pictures of his two sons, sheets of paper are neatly pinned to the walls and tacked to filing cabinets.
They bear a collection of mantras for overcoming adversity, typed in all-capital letters: "FACE IT," "DO NOT GIVE ME EXCUSES" and "BELIEVE IN YOURSELF."
Angel's faced plenty in his life, and that's a big reason why a man just shy of 40 with no previous head coaching experience has the New Hanover boys basketball team poised for yet another deep postseason run.
‘FACE IT'
Christopher Kirkland Angel has known three last names in his life, but no father.
Angel's biological father left his wife Christine and two young children in the mid-'70s. The youngest, Christopher Thomas Kirkland, was 10 months old. For the next 19 years, the only thing Angel knew of his father was the surname.
"My grandmother and my mom and everybody – he wasn't a real good person, but they never said a bad word about him," Angel said. "They just said, ‘He's not around.' We didn't know where he was."
Angel and his sister grew up in Oriental, a small harbor town in Pamlico County. Christine taught sixth-grade math and science at Pamlico Middle School during the day and waited tables at the Oriental Marina restaurant at nights to make ends meet.
The kids spent most of their time with Maxine Angel, their grandmother.
"It was hard to watch my momma work that way," said Angel's sister, Rachel Manning, the assistant superintendent for Pender County Schools.
Christine and Maxine hammered home a simple message to both children.
"We don't want anybody to make any excuses," Manning said. "There's no excuse for failure. You shouldn't let your circumstances dictate your future."
When Angel was five, Christine remarried. Her new husband formally adopted Kirk and Rachel. They both took the surname Holton, but that marriage didn't work out either.
Angel carried the Holton last name as he played baseball and basketball at Pamlico High School, and onto college, where he started out playing baseball at Mount Olive College and later graduated from UNCW.
While Angel was at Mount Olive, his biological father reached out to both children. He met with Rachel first, then showed up with her at Angel's baseball practice.
Angel shook his father's hand for the first time as a 19-year-old, but didn't welcome back the man who left him as an infant.
"I told him, ‘You're not going to come back and be my father,'" Angel said. "'The best thing you can do is come back and try to be a friend.' And he split."
As soon as Angel graduated from UNCW, he went to the courthouse and changed his name to Christopher Kirkland Angel in honor of the grandmother who helped raise him.
"I never had a dad," Angel said. "Never had one, never needed one."

"BELIEVE IN YOURSELF"

When Angel started as an assistant basketball coach at New Hanover in the summer of 2006, then-head-coach Linc Lyles gave him simple instructions: Don't mention the police work.
Angel said his "first real job" out of college was working for the Wilmington Police Department. For half a decade, he patrolled some of Wilmington's roughest neighborhoods. He even met his wife, Jennifer, on a police call.
But with his marriage and the birth of his first son, Angel became disenchanted with police work and wanted to get into coaching.
He worked from home for months, raising his child and taking online classes to earn a certification in health and physical education. Then he lobbied for months to get on Lyles' staff.
Lyles knew he had a very good, tight-knit team. Adding a former police officer to the mix, especially one who used to patrol some of his players' neighborhoods, could cause problems.
It didn't. Angel was the guards coach for the 2006-2007 season, and New Hanover went on to win its first state title in 40 years. After the season, Lyles shocked his team by resigning to take a position in administration.
In one season, Angel so thoroughly earned the trust of his players that when Lyles told the team he was leaving, the players immediately looked to Angel as the next coach.
Instead, New Hanover brought in a well-credentialed alum named Franklin McMillian to be the next head coach. McMillian's frustrating tenure lasted one disappointing season that ended in the sectional finals instead of the state finals. Angel came close to resigning in the middle of the year, but stuck it out. The thought of quitting on the kids he coached hit a little close to home.
When McMillian left, Angel was named head coach at New Hanover despite only two years' coaching experience.

"DO NOT GIVE ME EXCUSES"

Angel's coaching philosophy echoes the lessons he learned from his mother and grandmother: work hard, don't complain, take responsibility.
It's a message he's pounded into his players, much the same as his family did to him. It's also a large reason Angel's been so successful coaching kids from many of the same neighborhoods he used to patrol in a squad car.
"They also know that if they don't represent their family, themselves and the school and the program, I'm not going to spend my time with them," Angel said. "But if they do what we ask of them, I'm going to bend over backwards to try and provide anything I can for them. And I don't see any way that I could not do that."
In his four seasons as head coach at New Hanover, Angel's teams have won 84 games. The Wildcats have played in two consecutive regionals. A number of Angel's players have gone on to play Division I basketball.
But Angel rarely mentions wins, accolades or the gaudy accomplishments of his players. He remembers different things.
Like the night he rushed to the hospital on New Year's Day 2008 after Rakeem Wilson was shot in the leg at a party. Or the night Freddie Jackson's son was born. Wilson, Jackson, Ty Walker, James Beatty, James Hill, Kadeem Allen - Angel ticks them off on his fingers.
"I could name all these kids," Angel said. "They're like my family. My sons come to practice all the time."
Angel also remembers the face-the-music meetings in his office, talking about academics and making good choices and, above all, not making excuses. Many of Angel's most successful players came from single-parent families.
"You've got to work," said Jackson, now a freshman guard at UNCW. "He installed that into us."
Angel's former players say that, despite his no-excuses attitude, the coach is relentlessly optimistic during games.
"When you make a bad play or a turnover, he's not over there tarnishing you, saying, ‘Oh, that's a bad play,'" Jackson said. "He's over there clapping you up and saying, ‘Get back on D, we'll get it next time.' So as a player, when a coach does that to you, it gives you more confidence."
The results are hard to dispute, especially this year. The New Hanover roster lists only one player taller than 6-foot-5, but the Wildcats enter the playoffs with a 24-1 overall record and their eyes on earning a third straight regional berth.
This year, the New Hanover student section has taken to chanting Angel's name when the team enters.
Little do they know what it means.