Most people do not know that South High business teacher Randall Crutcher has a long, interesting sports history and is well known in the Omaha community.
Crutcher is a marketing teacher and assistant coach for the boys basketball team. He has a great résumé – from Division I basketball to playing professionally overseas to now teaching. Now let’s take a deeper look at his experience, what he has learned, and how he uses his background to instruct his students and athletes to prepare for life after school.
After high school, he attended Creighton University where Dana Altman was the head coach during his junior and senior years. That really helped the program, but as the program improved, it was too late for Crutcher. Then he went overseas to play in Germany.
When asked about his experience playing overseas, he said he had an exciting time because he got to explore the world around him and see life from the perspective of the people he met while living in Germany.
After playing for so long, he said he went on to coach the same team he played for for about four years before moving back to the United States.
When he came back to America, he was offered an assistant coaching job at Bellevue University and agreed to it. After four years, the team won back-to-back conference titles. Then he retired from coaching for a while. During his retirement, he was a manager at a car dealership, taught young interns and ran an insurance company.
When asked what got him back into coaching, he said it was because of his nephew. When he went to see his nephew’s team practicing, he did not like the direction it was going, so he asked the coach if he could volunteer. The coach said yes, and after a few months, the parents began to see significant improvements. The parents started asking him to coach instead, and that is when he got back into coaching.
At first, he said he never really thought about coaching until South’s varsity head coach, Ben Gilliland, asked him to be part of his staff and said that under one condition, he had to be in the school to make sure his student-athletes were acting right and getting their schoolwork taken care of. That’s where teaching came into play.
Within one year, he helped turn the program around. He had six players go to college – four to play basketball and two to play baseball – and had a winning record for his JV team, going 11-6 and finishing as runner-up in the Metro Holiday Tournament.
When asked what he expected this upcoming season, he said, “This season is going to have its difficulties, but that is not what I am really worried about. I am more worried about the improvement of my players and playing for each other.”
He added that he hopes to send his players to some college camps so they can get recruited by colleges.
Crutcher teaches his players to use basketball as an opportunity for growth, preparing them not just for life after high school but for the future.
