Good luck to coaches Rekha, Ray as SEMO season begins

It is always interesting to learn what brought people to the careers in which they find themselves. Some say they knew from their earliest memories, while others say the light bulb unexpectedly illuminated. The latter would describe how Southeast Missouri State women and men's basketball coaches, Rekha Patterson and Rick Ray, respectively, entered their current professions.

One would think that Patterson would have known from her earliest days that coaching was in her future, perhaps even in her genes. Her mother, Eva Patterson-Heath, coached high school basketball for 24 years in North Carolina and is currently the women's basketball coach at Fayetteville State University. Young Rekha kept the score book for her mom's team when she was in junior high, and she was a great player herself. Still, coaching was not something she had considered, despite her skill and competitive nature on and off the court. But others saw it in her.

"When she wasn't on the court, the calmness that she brought while she was on the court, it was evident that it was gone," Patterson-Heath said. When she worked at a supermarket in high school, she'd find friendly competitions to engage in against her co-workers. She carried that competitive spirit with her, but she also carried a desire to be a positive influence. In fact, that is how she came into coaching; she was dissatisfied with a new coach at North Carolina A&T, where she played and knew she wanted to coach and treat her team better.

She has come a long way -- from what she calls "one of the poorest counties in the state of North Carolina" to NC A&T to a graduate assistant position at storied Baylor University, working alongside Kim Mulkey, where she won a national championship and other stops in between.

Now she has the opportunity to take the Redhawks to new destinations.

Rick Ray, too, had not considered a career in coaching -- until a door opened in 1993 toward the end of his playing career at Grand View College in Des Moines, Iowa. It started with a high school freshmen coaching position, progressed to a teaching career, and several stops along the way as an assistant before becoming the head coach at Mississippi State.

From California to Kansas City, Missouri, Ray's story involves many challenges and disappointments. One such disappointment, which turned out to be the "biggest thing that ended up making a difference in [his] life was his enrollment in Sumner Academy of Arts and Science." He loved the game that he now coaches, but ironically, he was not the most coachable of players. "I had a pretty good mind for basketball, but I didn't use it in the right manner," Ray said. "I would use it to kind of like piss off the coaching staff by doing things I knew I shouldn't be doing."

But like Patterson, he was influenced by a coach. For him, it was a coach who came over and turned Sumner around.

Once he became a coach himself, he benefited from the expertise of Coach Matt Painter, whose staff he was on at Purdue, enjoying championship years there. But his coaching journey hasn't been all success. From a high school coach to a Division II graduate assistant to a mid-major assistant, yes, he's had successes, but he's also had hardships. He's been hired, and he's been fired. And now, he hopes all those experiences -- the challenges, the hard work -- will add up to victory as he fires up his Southeast men's team.

Both Patterson and Ray have come a long way to arrive here in Southeast Missouri. They traveled different roads, but they were both fueled by a passion for the game that sort of blindsided them, but caught their attention nonetheless. We wish them and our Redhawks nothing but success this season.