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Coach Ken Carter Keynotes GTC West

"Stand up! Raise your hands!" Coach Carter puts the GTC audience through its paces during Wednesday morning's keynote

Computers and government -- the impression is quiet, solemn, hushed, like mainframes in a data center.

So what was all the noise that greeted visitors to GTC 2006 in Sacramento Wednesday morning? Cheering and shouting, a whistle blowing -- it sounded like a basketball game. Well, it was in a sense. Coach Carter was in town, telling his story, the one immortalized by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie "Coach Carter."


"Stand up! Raise your hands!" Coach Carter puts the GTC audience through its paces during Wednesday morning's keynote.
(Photo by Michael Williams)

"Richmond, Calif.," said Carter, "is the most dangerous city in California, where half the students don't graduate from high school, and have an eighty times better chance of going to jail than to college."

When Carter took over as coach, he took over a losing team. "They were losers," he said, "they even looked like losers." There were no basketballs, no shoes, no netting on the baskets. "Luckily the showers didn't work, because there were no towels."

Carter began to change the team one player at a time. He had each player sign a contract. The parents, coach, and grandparents also signed it. The players agreed to keep their grades up, among other things. He took those kids, made them into a team and made them winners.

Then, in the middle of a 16-game winning streak -- headed for the championship, his players becoming community heroes -- Carter locked them out of the gym for skipping school. They broke their contracts, and he made them pay the price. They learned a valuable lesson for life, which Carter maintains turned them not only into great basketball players, but leaders as well.

Carter said his teams have a 100 percent graduation rate, and every player goes on to college. Carter, in his inimitable style, had the technology audience cheering. It was a rousing tale of success against great odds, of how to win by getting up just one more time than you are knocked down.
Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.