Jayson Lowery said last year when he was hired to coach basketball at Carlisle that he was looking for a place to call home.
After a year of trials both professional and personal, he’s more convinced than ever that Carlisle is that place for him.
“It was a rough ordeal, but we’re through it, and I’ve got some boys who are excited about basketball,” said Lowery, 36, the first returning Bison boys basketball coach since 2013. “We’ve got at least three starters returning, and the junior high team is all moving up. We’ve got a lot of good things happening.
“I’ve got a 7 year-old boy who likes it here, and I really think the community is liking the kind of basketball we’re getting to. More importantly, I think they want someone who loves kids, and I do that.
“I’m not going anywhere. Until they want to get rid of me, they’re stuck with me.”
Jonathan Buffalo, the girls coach who has worked with four boys coaches in his eight years at his alma mater, said Lowery had fit in well.
“He’s brought stability and excitement,” Buffalo said. “People are starting to get excited about boys basketball. We work great together. We’re each other’s assistants; we sit on the bench with each other. We talk things out, and it’s great to have somebody to bounce ideas off. I haven’t had that since Coach (William) Rountree (who left in 2013).”
Lowery grew up in Glenwood, the only child of Jerry and Norma Lowery. He played center/power forward at nearby tradition-rich Kirby, where his team finished 33-4 in 1998, his senior year. Three starters, including Lowery (with an ankle), went down with injuries in the regional tournament, and that year’s No. 1-ranked team failed to reach the state tournament.
He said that crushing disappointment led him away from his love of basketball, and he started at Henderson State University as an aviation major.
“You get depressed, but my old basketball coach (Marty Smith, still coaching at Kirby) is my mentor and my best friend, and he really talked to me about what my love was,” Lowery said. “You don’t want to wake up hating what you do. So after 9-11, they shut down a lot of airports, and I got out of aviation and got my degree in history.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in that field and a Master of Arts in Teaching degree at HSU and now lacks only a few classes to earn his principal’s license.
Smith said Lowery’s passion for basketball had always been obvious.
“He always liked to play, and he sat on the bench with me after he graduated from high school,” he said. “He tried other things, and you could tell he wanted to coach.”
But it was a long and winding road that ultimately led Lowery to Carlisle.
He started his career at Hector, where he coached girls basketball for two years. From there he went to Green Forest to coach boys, but he found after a year that the distance between him and his son in Sheridan was too far, so he went to Mount Ida, where he coached girls for three years.
“We had some good seasons there, and it was 30 minutes from my parents’ home,” Lowery said. “It was perfect. I feel like I can make a home anywhere people want me, but what I really wanted to look for was the right school to build what I want to build. Mount Ida had a great history of winning, but when you have that great tradition of winning, you don’t want to change. So I realized I needed to learn a little more.”
He then went to McGehee, which also had a long winning tradition in boys basketball, as head junior boys and senior high assistant under Jerome Pace.
“We went 27-2 for the year, and it was a great experience,” Lowery said. “It taught me a lot about defense. Coach Pace was wanting to retire and for me to take over. That was the plan, but I had gotten remarried, and my wife got homesick and decided she couldn’t be that far away from her family. So after a year I left.”
While at Mount Ida, he had become acquainted with Buffalo, who alerted him last summer to another boys opening with the Bison.
“I asked a lot of questions, and it looked like it might fit what I was really looking for,” Lowery said.
He arrived in Carlisle last summer and embraced his new home. All was going well until October, when he started having migraines.
“I was at my parents’ in Glenwood,” he said. “We went to eat, and one side of my body went numb. They rushed me to the hospital, and the next thing I know they’re having to pump me with pain medicine for eight days in the hospital.
“This was a guy Carlisle hadn’t known but for two months, but I had so many people from the community come see me, and the kids wrote me get-well cards. The day I got out of the hospital, my wife decided she didn’t want to deal with a sick person, so she left.”
With the separation, he lived for a while in a hotel, and he said the Carlisle administration and community as a whole embraced him during his troubles.
“I finally got into my apartment, and the entire basketball team and their parents came and helped me move,” he said. “I knew then, without a doubt, I’m home.”
But the cluster headaches followed him throughout the season.
“All the way through, I was secretly going home and having to use medicine to go to sleep,” Lowery said. “It was the roughest ordeal of my life.”
The Bison won six games on the floor — the most in several years. But in January, they were forced to forfeit the four wins from the fall semester because of an ineligible player, so they officially finished 2-25.
But now, things are better. He said last week he hadn’t had a headache in two weeks — his longest pain-free stretch since October. He said doctors had told him a lifestyle change was his best bet, so he’s been eating a healthier diet and exercising — running, walking, lifting weights.
“They said if I could change my life, it would probably go away and maybe not come back for decades,” he said.
Last week, he took his Bison to a team camp at McCrory.
“I didn’t know this, but these kids had never been to a team camp,” he said. “Since they were in seventh grade, there’s been a new coaching coming every summer. It’s been really good for them. Last year, we were trying to put in what we’re wanting to do. Now we want to work in the gym and get better and hope in the next few years we’ll be up in the standings. They’re competing.”
Smith said he thought Carlisle was a good place for Lowery’s building project.
“It’s going to take hard work and being committed and working all kinds of different hours, and he’s more than willing to do that wherever he is,” Smith said. “He’s one of those guys, a tireless worker. He’s always been like that as a player. Once he sets his mind to it and gets committed to it, he’s going to get it done.”
This summer, Lowery’s son, Carter, who will be a second grader at Sheridan Elementary, is with him every other week.
“My boy is happy to be here,” Lowery said. “He’s starting to dribble a basketball. Maybe someday he’ll play for me. That’s my dream.”
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