By Tanner McCord
Sports Writer
Late last year, long time boys basketball coach Brad Chasteen made the decision to retire from his post as head basketball coach at Coppell High School. Filling job for the 2012-13 and hopefully several seasons after – is coach Kit Pehl.
Pehl, who was the head coach at Keller Central, got the call from Coppell in mid July asking him to take over the Cowboys coaching job, bringing his last season’s momentum with the Chargers to the school that he defeated in last season’s playoffs.
“For me, Coppell is a premier place to be (for basketball),” Pehl said. “It’s got a great basketball tradition and the number of kids that play basketball or are interested in basketball is a great thing.”
Pehl was actually a former assistant coach to Chasteen from 1999-2001 at CHS. The Cowboys made it to the state tournament in 1999, and in 2001 the team went undefeated in district play. From Coppell, he moved on to Keller Central where he helped open the school, and in his years there, he built a district winning squad.
Not only does he have a solid history at Coppell, but at Keller Central as well. And as any history teacher will tell you, history is always repeating itself, so this season’s outlook is looking solid.
Senior forward Everett Schau is going on his fourth year as a member of the basketball program and was able to develop a good relationship with Chasteen, but he looks forward to becoming acquainted with Pehl and learning from his new style of coaching.
“He’s just a little bit of a different coach than what we’ve grown up with,” Schau said. “But he won district last year, so we should have a really good season.”
Junior power forward Simi Socks experienced two years under Chasteen and expects to continue his final two high school years with Pehl, despite the near opposite approaches to their coaching programs.
“Coach Chasteen was more about team play, everything is done as a team,” Socks said. “Coach Pehl emphasizes more on individual work and putting it together as a team.”
Although the foundations of the coaches’ programs are different, the goal of the two is the same: to get the team to reach peak performance and to do so in a cooperative way. By coaching under Chasteen for a couple seasons, Pehl picked up on a few of Chasteen’s methods and put his own way of reaching the goal into play.
“There are a lot of philosophical things from a program standpoint, like what we ran and how we guarded people,” Pehl said. “A lot of those kind of philosophical things that I took with me from Coach Chasteen.”
Given the resumé of Coach Pehl and the positive feedback from the players, this basketball season is expected to be one of great success, and excitement is buzzing around the gyms.
“I think he’s going to bring a new level of intensity to the program,” Schau said. “We’re really focusing on the minute details that will collectively make us really good players.”
Athletics Director John Crawford had an easy time choosing Pehl for the Head Coach position.
“As we raided through the potential candidates, Coach Pehl just seemed to edge his way to the front every time,” Crawford said.
