Heatly had huge impact on girls basketball
LINDSAY — Rhonda Fields never missed her opportunity with Charlie Heatly.
Each time she saw the legendary girls basketball coach, she made sure to remind him of his impact on her career as a high school girls basketball coach.
Without Heatly, girls basketball in Oklahoma and nationwide would not be the same sport today.
“Charlie Heatly opened a lot of our eyes to the possibilities,” Fields said. “He showed me a road that I wanted to take. “He’s a legend.” Heatly, a pioneer for girls basketball as a coach, died early Wednesday morning from a battle with cancer. He was 84.
Services are set for 2 p.m. Sunday in Lindsay High School’s Charles K. Heatly Arena, a building he helped construct and will now close with the school’s new arena opening this year.
Heatly spent decades pushing the sport forward, making Lindsay the epicenter of girls basketball and impacting thousands. Later in life, he became known as the DJ of State Fair Arena for state tournaments and Lindsay basketball games, where his choices of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Rocky Top” highlighted an old-school upbeat collection for nearly 30 years.
“He was there to play music because of what his career was,” Heatly’s son Danny said. “He still wanted to come to the state tournament to do that.
“He was a coach, opposed to playing his outdated music that he loved to play. Believe me, several of us in the family tried to update him and it just never did take.”
Charlie established the Lindsay All-Star Basketball Camp in 1971 and ran it for the next 25 years, pulling in girls from coast to coast into Lindsay and establishing satellite camps as far as Alaska. Around 50,000 girls attended the camps throughout the years.
It focused on fundamentals and led to several coaching careers.
“It snowballed into being a huge success and it was all because of the quality of the instruction and how he elevated the game at that time to be a more watchable, more exciting, more fundamental game for girls,” Danny said.
Charlie was the head coach at Lindsay from 1957-1986, where he won 669 games, two state championships and finished as the state runnerup three more times in the 6-on-6 era.
He also helped found the Oklahoma Girls Basketball Coaches Association.
“Our hearts lean heavily towards the Heatly family during this time with prayers of peace and comfort,” the OGBCA said in a Facebook post. “Our prayers are also with the Lindsay community as well. Coaches all over Oklahoma call him a trailblazer of girls basketball. He was mentor to many generation of coaches and loved and respected by everyone he came across.”
Fields, who is the mother of former Oklahoma State two-sport star Josh Fields, was in high school when she first met Heatly.
She attended his camp as a sophomore, junior and senior. She then remained as a counselor, even becoming the lead counselor for nine years.
She would head to the airport to pick up campers, some from as far as New York and West Virginia. At the height of the camps, they would run each week of the summer, often with more than 300 girls basketball players.
Fields ultimately became a coach more than 30 years ago because of Heatly and the camps. She wasn’t the only athlete to take the path.
And it’s all because of Heatly.
“It just was a light,” said Fields, the girls basketball coach at Wynnewood. “I consider myself a Title IX baby, because I came through just as Title IX was opening doors for girls. But even at that, I knew previous to that that this was something females could excel in because Charles Healty showed me how girls can play basketball.”