Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Randy Napier of Perry, Kentucky
For most travelers, the signs on Kentucky Route 15 are just green boards at the edge of Perry County. For people who grew up in the hills around Hazard, they tell a story. The metal markers read “Home of Randy Napier, All Time Winningest Girls’ Basketball Coach in State History,” and they mark a lifetime spent on the same back roads, in the same gym lights, with generations of mountain kids in blue and white uniforms.
From the early 1980s through his retirement in 2019, Randy Napier coached girls’ basketball at M.C. Napier High School and Perry County Central for thirty eight seasons. He built a small county program into a state champion, guided the first girls’ Sweet 16 title for the 14th Region, and finished with 886 wins, the most of any girls’ high school coach in Kentucky history.
Napier’s career is a basketball story, but it is also an Appalachian story. It is about what happens when a coach decides to stay in his home county, when a school consolidation forces people to choose how to carry their heritage forward, and when a girls’ program from coal country walks into a statewide spotlight and refuses to blink.
A hometown coach in a changing game
Randy Napier is a Perry County native who spent his career representing the town where he was born and grew up, first at M.C. Napier High School and later at the consolidated Perry County Central High School. A Hall of Fame nomination filed with the Kentucky High School Athletic Association stresses that he stayed in that same community for nearly four decades, even when other coaching opportunities came along at both the high school and college level.
When Napier first took the girls’ job at M.C. Napier in 1980, girls’ basketball had only recently returned to many Kentucky schools after decades of absence. For much of the twentieth century, the KHSAA did not sanction a girls’ state tournament, and many rural systems offered few formal opportunities for girls to play interscholastic sports. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Title IX, local advocates, and changing expectations were finally opening gym doors again.
In that setting, Napier stepped into a role that did not yet come with a long local tradition. Over the next decade and a half he built one. His teams practiced and played in the Sherman Neace Athletic Center on the banks of the North Fork of the Kentucky River, a gym that served as a community gathering place for the Napier district. Former players and local reporters remember those early M.C. Napier squads as disciplined, deep, and willing to press and run against bigger schools from the cities.
By the early 1990s, the Lady Navajos were regular contenders in the 14th Region. What they had not yet done was bring a state championship back to Perry County. That changed in March 1994.
March 1994: A Sweet 16 title from the coalfields
When the M.C. Napier girls reached the 1994 KHSAA Girls’ Sweet 16, they carried with them more than a school nickname. They carried the hopes of a region that had often watched championship trophies go to bigger programs from Lexington, Louisville, or western Kentucky.
The state tournament record book shows the Napier girls surviving a tight first round against Bryan Station, then rolling through Garrard County and Henderson County to reach the title game. In the final, they ran past Fort Thomas Highlands 88 to 56 at Western Kentucky University’s Diddle Arena, a scoreline that still stands out on the page among closer championship games.
Tournament statistics preserved in The Kentucky High School Athlete and later media guides credit guard Kristie Combs as the most valuable player of that 1994 run. They also show how decisively a team from a small Appalachian county controlled the last night of the season.
In interviews recorded decades later, Napier and his former players have recalled how the town rallied around that team, how local radio carried their games across Eastern Kentucky, and how bittersweet it felt to win a state title for a school that would soon close in a countywide consolidation. A Kentucky Sports Memories podcast produced for the thirtieth anniversary of the championship brought Napier together with players Misty McAlarnis and Kristie Combs to revisit those nights and the emotions that came with them.
That 1994 title did more than hang a banner. It helped fix M.C. Napier and Perry County girls’ basketball in the wider story of Kentucky hoops, and it set the stage for what Napier would do when the school itself disappeared.
From M.C. Napier to Perry County Central
Like many Appalachian counties, Perry County entered the 1990s under pressure to consolidate its high schools. When M.C. Napier and rival Dilce Combs merged into Perry County Central, it was not just a change in mascot and school colors. It was a question of which stories and traditions would survive.
Napier moved across to the new Perry County Central High School and kept coaching girls’ basketball there. The KHSAA Hall of Fame nomination makes clear that for the next two decades he made that gym a continuation of the M.C. Napier legacy rather than a break from it. He coached in the same town where he had grown up, in front of many of the same families, and he stayed under the same county board that had first hired him.
At Perry Central, his teams quickly became fixtures in the 14th Region tournament. Over the combined span of his career, Napier’s squads won twenty two district titles and ten regional championships, an extraordinary level of sustained dominance for any program, much less one based in a rural coalfield county.
Regular season schedules took the Lady Commodores well beyond Hazard, but the core of the program remained local. Newspapers like the Hazard Herald, the Floyd County Times, and a variety of regional outlets documented a style of play built on depth and defense, and on a steady pipeline of players who grew up seeing full gyms on winter nights.
Becoming the all time wins leader
By the early 2010s, Napier’s win totals were attracting statewide attention. In December 2013, coverage in Lexington newspapers and other outlets noted that he had moved past Sacred Heart’s Donna Moir to become the winningest girls’ coach in Kentucky history.
The numbers behind that title are stark. A KHSAA bio and later Hall of Fame write ups credit Napier with a career record of 886 wins against 285 losses over 38 seasons at M.C. Napier and Perry County Central. That mark makes him not only the all time winningest girls’ coach in the Commonwealth, but also the leader in total games coached in the sport, with 1,171 contests on his ledger.
In May 2019, after nearly four decades on the bench, Napier announced his retirement. WYMT’s story on the decision emphasized both his record and his reaction to the community response. In a phone interview he reflected that it had “been a wild couple of days” and said that the calls and messages made him feel good that “right where you live, people kind of care.”
His career totals, already preserved in KHSAA record books and media guides, did not stay confined to Kentucky. A 2023 MaxPreps national survey of girls’ coaches with more than 700 wins listed Napier with 886 victories from 1980 to 2019, placing a coach from Perry County in a conversation that usually features suburban powerhouses and big school programs from around the country.
Taking mountain basketball onto a national stage
If the Sweet 16 put Napier’s teams into the statewide spotlight, the 2014 McDonald’s All American Games placed his name on a national marquee. That year, he was selected as head coach of the West team in the McDonald’s All American Girls Game, held at the United Center in Chicago.
The official game page records that the West squad, featuring future college stars like Brianna Turner, Jordin Canada, and Alyssa Rice, edged the East 80 to 78. Under “Coaches,” it lists Randy Napier of Perry County Central High School in Bonnyman, Kentucky, as the West head coach, alongside assistants Kevin Whitman and Jeff Campbell, also from Perry Central.
In national coverage of the game, Napier’s quotes sound like those of a mountain coach who is still thinking about effort and defense even while surrounded by McDonald’s logos and ESPN cameras. Speaking after his team went 0 for 20 from three point range and still managed to win, he told reporters that if someone had predicted such a shooting night during practice he “would have said you are nuts,” then credited the defense for making the difference.
For players and fans back home, seeing the name “Perry County Central” attached to a McDonald’s All American coaching staff offered a reminder that mountain basketball could belong on any stage.
Hall of Fame honors and hometown tributes
The honors that followed Napier’s retirement help show how his story bridges local, regional, and statewide histories.
In 2016 he was inducted into the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame as part of its Centennial class. The Hall’s official biography describes him as “the winningest girls’ coach in Kentucky high school basketball history,” notes that his teams won more than eighty percent of their games, and highlights the 1994 Sweet 16 title and multiple regional championships at Perry County Central.
A separate Hall of Fame nomination packet prepared for that honor and later updated for the Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame goes into more detail. It explains that Napier’s teams sent at least forty one players on to college basketball, and that over four decades he was honored by his city, county, and school system with visible tributes. Among those are the street in front of Perry County Central, named “800 Randy Napier Way,” the playing floor at John C. Combs Arena, now called “Coach Randy Napier Court,” and the county line signs that proclaim him the state’s all time winningest girls’ coach.
In 2019, Bluegrass Sports Nation featured the ceremony officially naming the Perry Central court in his honor, noting that his 886 win total was inscribed on the floor itself. Images from that night show a packed gym and a script that permanently ties the arena to his name.
Recognition did not stop there. In 2023, Napier joined fellow mountain basketball figures Carolyn Alexander and B.B. King in the Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame. The official class announcement and follow up coverage from WYMT and other outlets repeated his career record, his status as the state’s all time wins leader, his twenty two district and ten regional titles, and his previous service as head coach of the Kentucky All Stars in 2007 and the McDonald’s All American team in 2014.
Local sports halls and social media pages, including the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame, have also celebrated his career as the benchmark by which other Kentucky girls’ coaches are measured.
A legacy written on back roads and box scores
Randy Napier’s story matters for Appalachian history because it refuses an easy narrative. It is not simply a tale of a small town coach who overachieved, nor a story of a talented leader who left for a bigger job. It is about a man who stayed in one county and proved that a program in the coalfields could be as consistent and formidable as any in the state.
The historical record that preserves his career is unusually rich for a high school coach. Official KHSAA record books, Hall of Fame files, legislative resolutions, and national game rosters all document his wins, his championships, and his honors. Local and regional coverage, from WYMT newscasts to county newspapers, add quotes and box scores that show how often his teams were in the thick of the postseason.
For researchers, Napier’s career also opens doors into broader topics. His early years at M.C. Napier intersect with the return of girls’ basketball to rural Kentucky and with the way Title IX played out in small school systems. His move to Perry County Central illustrates how consolidations reshaped community identities and allegiances. His Hall of Fame recognition and highway signs show how modern Kentucky chooses to commemorate educators and coaches who have stayed close to home.
On winter nights, when the gym lights glow through the trees along Route 15, there are younger coaches and players on that floor who never saw the Lady Navajos of 1994 or the early Perry Central teams that built this tradition. What they can still see are the banners on the wall, the script on the court, and the road signs out on the highway that remind them that someone from their own hills once coached his way into state history without ever leaving the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame. “Randy Napier.” Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame. https://khsbhf.com/randy-napier
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame Nomination: Randy Napier.” Nomination documents and letters of support, ca. 2022–23. https://khsaa.org/httpdocs/hof/docs.php?filename=nom1144file2.pdf
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “KHSAA Girls’ Sweet 16 Basketball Record Book.” KHSAA Basketball Record Book – Girls: All-Time State Tournament Records. https://kdla.ky.gov/Library-Support/kits/Documents/Adult/Kentucky%20Basketball/KHSAAGirlsSweet16Records.pdf
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “KHSAA Basketball Record Book: Girls’ Basketball – All-Time Regional Champions.” KHSAA Basketball Record Book – Girls. https://khsaa.org/records/basketball/gbk-recordbook_regionalchampions.pdf
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “KHSAA Basketball Record Book: Girls’ Basketball Coaching Records.” KHSAA Basketball Record Book – Girls. https://khsaa.org/records/basketball/gbk-recordbook_coaches.pdf
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame Reveals Class of 2023.” News release, October 27, 2022. https://khsaa.org/dawahareskhsaa-hall-of-fame-reveals-class-of-2023/
Kentucky High School Athletic Association. “KHSAA Hall of Fame Inductees by Year.” Dawahares/KHSAA Hall of Fame. https://khsaa.org/httpdocs/hof/inducteesbyyear.pdf
WYMT Mountain News. “Longtime M.C. Napier, Perry Central girls’ basketball coach Randy Napier retires.” WYMT, May 23, 2019. https://www.wymt.com/content/sports/Longtime-MC-Napier-Perry-Central-girls-basketball-coach-Randy-Napier-retires-510335551.html
WYMT Mountain News. “Napier, Hicks share best moments at High School Basketball Hall of Fame.” WYMT, July 10, 2016. https://www.wymt.com/content/sports/Napier-Hicks-share-best-moments-at-High-School-Basketball-Hall-of-Fame-386231011.html
WYMT Mountain News. “Three Eastern Kentucky basketball legends named to KHSAA Hall of Fame.” WYMT, January 20, 2023. https://www.wymt.com/2023/01/20/three-eastern-kentucky-basketball-legends-named-khsaa-hall-fame/
WYMT Mountain News. “Three mountain legends inducted into KHSAA Hall of Fame.” WYMT, April 30, 2023. https://www.wymt.com/2023/04/30/three-mountain-legends-inducted-khsaa-hall-fame/
Bluegrass Sports Nation. “Perry Central Names Court for Randy Napier.” Bluegrass Sports Nation, December 4, 2019. https://bluegrasssportsnation.com/perry-central-names-court-for-randy-napier/
Commonwealth of Kentucky. Kentucky General Assembly. “CHAPTER 144 (HJR 7).” Acts of the General Assembly, 2014 Regular Session, Section 30 (signs honoring Coach Randy Napier). https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/acts/14RS/documents/0144.pdf
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Kentucky Basketball” Adult Programming Kit. Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. https://kdla.ky.gov/Library-Support/kits/Pages/Kentucky-Basketball.aspx
MaxPreps. “High school girls basketball: Leta Andrews leads list of coaches who have won more than 700 games.” MaxPreps/CBS Sports, April 26, 2023. https://www.cbssports.com/high-school/basketball/news/high-school-girls-basketball-leta-andrews-leads-list-of-coaches-who-have-won-more-than-700-games/
“2014 McDonald’s All-American Girls Game.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_McDonald%27s_All-American_Girls_Game
Associated Press. “Turner, Jackson shine in McDonald’s All-America Games.” Fox Sports, April 2, 2014. https://www.foxsports.com/stories/other/turner-jackson-shine-in-mcdonalds-all-america-games
Eric Sondheimer. “Girls’ basketball: Jordin Canada sets assist record at McDonald’s game.” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2014. https://www.latimes.com/sports/highschool/varsity-times/la-sp-vi-girls-basketball-jordin-canada-sets-assist-record-at-mcdonalds-game-20140402-story.html
“Manvel’s Turner, HCYA’s Jackson star in All-America games.” Houston Chronicle, April 2, 2014. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/article/around-sports-manvel-s-turner-hcya-s-jackson-5372323.php
Gary Fogle. “The Randy Napier Story: Embracing the Unexpected.” Kentucky Sports Memories (podcast), March 21, 2024. https://open.spotify.com/episode/e2hdc9v
Gary Fogle. “Remembering MC Napier High School’s Girls Basketball Success.” Kentucky Sports Memories, 2024. https://kentuckysportsmemories.com/remembering-mc-napier-high-schools-girls-basketball-success/
Mountain Sports Hall of Fame. “Coach Randy Napier, All-Time Winningest Girls’ Basketball Coach in Kentucky.” Facebook post, 2023. https://www.facebook.com/MountainSportsHallofFame
Perry County Central High School. “Student Handbook.” Perry County Central High School, n.d. (lists Randy Napier among school administrators). https://content.myconnectsuite.com/api/documents/9e41d512f8b3446c9460f691fa4bf1a8.pdf
Author Note: As a historian who grew up watching mountain basketball, I wanted to trace how one coach from Perry County turned a local girls’ program into a statewide benchmark. I hope this piece helps you see those road signs, banners, and box scores as part of a much larger Appalachian story about staying home and building something lasting.