Ex-NBA star takes ‘lesser role’ for Christ By John H. Adams The Presbyterian Layman Volume 34, Number 2 Posted March 26, 2001 Bobby Jones huddles with Charlotte Christian School team. CHARLOTTE – Bobby Jones, 49, still 6-foot-9 and as rail-thin as he was in his playing days, was one of the all-time great defensive players in the National Basketball Association. Six times he was first-team all-defense. Four times he was named to the NBA All-Star team. He won the league’s first Sixth-Man Award. In his 12-year career, his team always made the playoffs. He has an NBA championship ring. But when a reporter arrived for an interview, Jones was sweeping the floor of a small gymnasium. Another professional athlete on hard times? Not at all. This is the same Bobby Jones who combined ferocity and Christian virtue during his 12-year NBA career – the same Bobby Jones who now might be called the John the Baptist of high school coaches. Having recently stepped down as coach of the basketball team at Charlotte Christian School, Jones is now the co-coach. Next year, he’ll be the assistant coach. Jones is decreasing so that his heir apparent, co-coach Bonn Bryson, might increase. This is the demeanor of an athlete who has all the credentials to have become coach of a major college or professional team. But his first priority is his faith in Christ and discipling young people to put their hope in Christ as well. “I can take the lesser role,” says Jones, a native of Charlotte and an All-American at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When they were teammates at Philadelphia, Julius (“Dr. J”) Erving once said of Jones, “He’s a player who’s totally selfless, who runs like a deer, jumps like a gazelle, plays with his head and heart each night and then walks away from the court as if nothing had happened.” And Charles Barkley once said, “If everyone in the world was like Bobby Jones, the world wouldn’t have any problems.” The “lesser role” has been a mark of Jones’ Christian commitment and his substantial contribution to the success of Charlotte Christian School, which has 1,000 students, including 300 in the high school, and, at last report, a 20-2 record against some of the best boys’ basketball teams, public and private, in North Carolina. There’s no basketball recruiting budget at Charlotte Christian. But Jones is a magnet for parents who want their children to excel in faith and basketball. When Jones retired from the NBA in 1985, his children were in a Christian school in New Jersey, but he and his wife wanted to go home to Charlotte. Charlotte Christian School was one of the reasons they did. He began coaching the basketball team at Charlotte Christian in 1987. And he has done some recruiting for the school. When Charlotte Christian needed a business manager, Jones called an old friend, Calvin K. Huge (HOO-gy with a hard “g”), a former lawyer, businessman and missionary. Huge played basketball at Florida State University and he and Jones worked together at Christian basketball camps. When Jones contacted him, Huge was running Godspeed Farms, Inc., in South Carolina, working with at-risk children and coaching a high school basketball team. Huge applied and got the job. He’s now the president. Charlotte Christian was started in 1951 by Calvary Presbyterian Church, now an independent congregation. It received a major boost in 1960 when Billy Graham held a crusade in Charlotte, his home town. The event prompted a number of Christian parents to begin expanding the school from what essentially was a day-care program to a full-fledged K-12 Christian school. Charlotte Christian was not begun as a flight from school desegregation. Ten percent of its students are minorities. The school will spend nearly $1 million this year to help needy families enroll their children. The school is Christ-centered and Biblically grounded with a passion for academic excellence. The average score by students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 2000 was 1,120 – nearly 150 points above the average for public schools in Charlotte. Twenty-five percent of the school’s students scored higher than 1,300. Eighty-five of the eighty-seven 2000 graduates are college freshmen. One is in mission work. The school offers 13 advanced placement courses that enable students to acquire college credits while they are in high school. The acceptance rate of Charlotte Christian students applying to major colleges is high. “They like to get our kids because our kids have good character,” says Dr. Leo Orsino, executive vice president and dean of the three schools on the campus: primary, middle and secondary. Huge realizes that the combination of faith and academic excellence is absent from many private Christian schools, particularly those in the South that were begun to avoid desegregation. “To me, to be Christian, it has to be the very, very best,” Huge says. “I didn’t want to come to a place that was second-rate. Slipshod Christianity is still slipshod.” Jones insists that he plays a small and declining role at Charlotte Christian. He shies away from the accolades he received as an NBA player. Because of his athletic success, Jones says he was not ridiculed for his faith – but that other Christian athletes, not being so successful on the court, were. He sees his work at Charlotte Christian as a way to prepare young people to be able to stand firm in their faith. Huge echoes that sentiment and says it begins with the board. He gave an example of the board’s commitment to maintain Christian integrity – even at a high cost. Two years ago, Charlotte Christian planned a $10-million bond issue for expansion, upgrading and renovating buildings. North Carolina law allowed private schools, under some conditions, to go through the state and issue tax-exempt bonds. But Huge and the board discovered one hitch – Charlotte Christian would have to pledge nondiscrimination in hiring to qualify for tax-exempt bonds. That would have required the school to open its faculty to non-Christians. “The board never gave it a second thought,” Huge said. The school issued bonds that were not tax-free. Asked the difference in cost, Sam K. Sloan, a retired Bank of America executive who is now director of development at Charlotte Christian, ran the numbers without a calculator. “About $1.25 million more,” said Sloan, a Presbyterian elder who until recently was a member of the Presbyterian Foundation board. Huge believes there was an object lesson for parents and students: the Christian faith shouldn’t be compromised when they leave the campus.

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