Mark Price brings Charlotte to Gallagher-Iba
STILLWATER — Without fail, the words stop Mark Price in his tracks.
“Even still,” the former Enid High, Georgia Tech and NBA star said, “I can’t quite get used to hearing one of my players or somebody say, ‘Coach Price.’ I’m looking around for my dad. That was his name my whole life, Coach Price.”
The late Denny Price coached at Shawnee High, as an assistant for John McLeod at Oklahoma and for the Phoenix Suns, at Sam Houston State and finally at Phillips University in Enid, where his sons were prep standouts.
Mark Price, however, never saw himself coaching, not after leaving behind a 12-year NBA career spent with four teams, most with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Yet Monday night, Price arrives as the head coach of the Charlotte 49ers, leading his team against Oklahoma State at Gallagher-Iba Arena.
“Coaching really wasn’t on my radar initially,” Price said. “I grew up with my father as a coach, knew all about that. I played a long time in the NBA and had three small kids after retiring, so I wasn’t really looking to jump right into the coaching thing.
“But as years went by and people wanted me to do some work with players individually, or on teams, things of that nature, one thing kind of led to another.”
Price was first sought after as a shooting instructor, fittingly, considering the form he used to thrive in the NBA as a four-time All-Star. Known as one of the league’s most consistent shooters, he finished his career with a 90.4 free throw shooting percentage and a 40 percent 3-point shooting percentage.
Then his role advanced, as an assistant on five NBA teams, before his hire at Charlotte in 2015.
“Basketball has been a part of my whole life, even as a young kid watching my dad’s teams play to playing myself,” Price said. “I guess in a lot of people’s minds, it’s not a big surprise that I ended up going the coaching route.”
Price is into his third season of a rebuilding project at Charlotte, which had experienced losing seasons in three of the five years preceding his arrival. Who better to oversee such a project, however, than a man who succeeded as an underdog early in his playing days, with critics considering him too small and too slow as a 5-foot-11, 155-pound point guard coming out of Enid High and on to Georgia Tech in the mid1980s.
Now, he’s a member of three state halls of fame — Oklahoma, Georgia and Ohio — and he’s had his No. 25 retired by Georgia Tech and the Cleveland Cavaliers. In Enid, inside Convention Hall, sits Mark Price Arena.
Price doesn’t get back to Oklahoma often, although his mother and brother Brent remain in Enid, and brother Matt lives in Tulsa. So he considers getting OSU on the schedule a highlight.
“We’ll definitely have some family and friends at the game, so there will be a little bit of a Charlotte contingent there,” Price said. “It’s going to be fun to see a lot of faces I don’t get to see anymore and fun for me to get to come back to my home state and show my players where I got my start and play in a really fun environment.”