By Josh Beavers
Ladarien Amos has coached in Webster Parish before. One year, 2011-2012, teaching math at Lakeside Jr./Sr. High and coaching the Lady Warriors to a playoff appearance under a principal named Johnny Rowland, who now sits in the superintendent’s chair.
He loved it there. He left anyway.
“Being totally honest, I only left for opportunity,” Amos said. “Not for myself, but for my parish.”
That parish was Claiborne, where he grew up in Haynesville, and where he spent the next eleven years trying to pry open doors for players from an area that college recruiters tend to drive past. By his count, he contributed to twelve scholarship offers in that stretch. Now he is back in Webster, hired to lead the Minden High Lady Tiders, and the reasons this time have less to do with basketball than with a promise.
Last school year, Amos lost his father. He missed practices. He missed games. He missed days at work.
“Nothing can replace the time being with your loved ones,” he said. “I made a promise to my dad that I intend to keep.”
He lives in Minden now. He is working toward his educational leadership certification. The Lady Tiders job opened at a moment when the map of his life already pointed here.
The path started in a place with no gym in it. Twenty-one years ago Amos was an assistant store manager in Natchitoches when the personnel director of the parish school board approached him about the need for teachers.
His answer was blunt.
“I love math and would love to coach basketball, but I don’t see myself in a classroom,” he told her. “I would apply for a principal job.”
She laughed and told him he could get there eventually, but the classroom came first. The conversation stuck with him for a year before he acted on it.
His first job was in Rapides Parish, where he helped with football and basketball. He got a head coaching job early. He was not ready for it.
“As a coach, I was terrible,” Amos said. “We may have won 2 games.”
What followed was a long apprenticeship. Alexandria, then Lakeview High School, then Plain Dealing. He sat in Peabody’s gym with a pen and pad taking notes off Hall of Fame coach Charles Smith. He was mentored by David Bryant at Plain Dealing, and he would listen in on conversations between Bryant and Bossier High’s Jeremiah Williams, borrowing their notes and laughing about it later. Randy Carlisle became another voice he leaned on once he had a program of his own.
Twelve years into head coaching, the record reads four district championships, four district runner-up finishes, eleven straight playoff appearances. He won district at Haynesville and reached the quarterfinals. At Homer he won district in both 1-A and 2-A with multiple quarterfinal runs across seven seasons.
From Haynesville he took the football program’s blueprint even though he never coached the sport. Detailed structure and planning. Discipline. High expectations. Consistency. Those are the pieces he says he is bolting onto the foundation at Minden.
From Homer he took something he ranks above wins, which is the kind of relationship that lets a coach talk with a player about a future that has nothing to do with basketball.
The roster he inherited is young. Two juniors, and everyone else a freshman or sophomore, after a graduating class that took the team’s leading scorer and an all-area player with it. He also lost the summer, so the fall has been about making up ground.
Ask him what a visitor would see at practice and the answer is conditioning, correcting, and the slow work of building trust. Ask him about style of play and he refuses to name one.
“I want us to be known for being pests on defense,” he said.
The team standard has a name, T.I.D.E., for Teamwork, Integrity, Determination and Effort. Amos wants his players to be scholars and leaders who understand that people are watching them whenever they put on a Minden jersey.
He knows what year one is.
“Rebuilding isn’t easy, but these girls are special, and the foundation we are laying is going to make Minden proud,” he said. “We need your energy in the stands, your support at home, and your faith in these young athletes as they grow into leaders.”