Kappa Frater McKinley Armstrong, dies at 81

Mr. Armstrong formed and coached a team known as “the Magnificent Seven” when the McKinley Tech Trainers battled for dominance on the city’s high school courts. Scores of players from his teams went on to college, two were drafted by the NBA and two others by the NFL. Many others entered the military, government or business worlds.

“If it weren’t for him, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” said Micheal Tucker, who was team captain as a senior after he was cut from the squad the previous year. “If I had somebody to emulate, it would be Mr. Armstrong. He was a very good coach, but a better man and a better husband. He was an all-around man.”

Quotable to a fault, the coach popped up in local newspaper sports columns with regularity.

Of the 5-foot-6, 120-pound William “Cricket” Williams, Mr. Armstrong said: “Cricket to us is like a battery in an auto. If your battery is dead, so is your car. But when Cricket is rolling, so are we.”

But he would not criticize a player publicly, brushing off sportswriters who asked why certain starters were benched or suspended. When they returned to the roster, he showed a generation of young men how to let bygones be bygones.

“Mr. Armstrong kept me occupied and practicing. I had to, because if I didn’t, he wasn’t going to play me,” Randolph “Apple” Milam said. “I didn’t have anybody to guide me, and stay on top of me, like he did.”

Born in Winston-Salem, N.C., McKinley J.H. Armstrong won a football scholarship to North Carolina Central University, a historically black school in Durham, where he also played drums in the marching band and pledged the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

After graduation, he served in the Army during the Korean War and then began teaching. He was hired in 1953 at the small, segregated West Southern Pines High School in Southern Pines, N.C., where he also wrote the official school song, coached football and basketball, and taught almost every subject. One student recalled that he even taught his classes how to balance a checkbook. He took the boys’ basketball team to the state finals three times, winning the title in 1959.

Mr. Armstrong moved to Front Royal, Va., in 1959, when Criser High School was built to keep African Americans out of Warren County High School during Virginia’s “massive resistance” to court desegregation rulings. At Criser, he transformed the sports teams into respected contenders in the Shenandoah Valley.

By 1965, Mr. Armstrong moved to McKinley Tech and started shaping his athletic legacy.

Kevin Tatum, now a sportswriter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was then a 5-foot-6 sophomore who had been cut twice from the junior varsity team. By luck, he ended up in Mr. Armstrong’s classroom, where the coach, struggling with a team whose record was 8-9, spotted him.

“He was aggressive and a good ball handler,” Mr. Armstrong told The Washington Post in 1969. “I didn’t want to twist his arm too much, but he was in my gym class and he knew if he wanted a good grade, he’d better come out.”

Tatum said Thursday that when a sportswriter turned up at the team practice and asked who the stars were, the coach responded, “Sir, stars only come out at night!” Tatum recalled. “We all just broke out hysterical. He had a lot of corny sayings, but they were good sayings.”

Tim Bassett, who, after graduating from McKinley and the University of Georgia played for the New Jersey Nets and San Antonio Spurs, told the DC Basketball Blog: “Demanding. Discipline. Work ethic. That’s Coach Armstrong. He made a young man with no confidence in his ability believe in himself and that he could compete with the best players D.C. had to offer. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for his faith in me.”

Mr. Armstrong, who received a master’s degree in education from George Washington University in 1971, became athletic director at McKinley Tech and in 1985 urged his colleagues to quit recruiting across school borders.

“The development of players’ raw talent is the greatest thing a coach can do,” he told The Post. “Raise your own. Don’t try to take other developed ballplayers from other schools. That’s like cattle rustling.”

He retired in 1991. A longtime resident of Brookland in Northeast Washington, he was a member of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church.

Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Annie C. Armstrong of Washington; five children, Chip Armstrong and Carolyn Armstrong of Washington, Jenice Armstrong Turner of Burlington, N.J., Cheryl A. Capers of Dublin, Ohio, and Marilyn Armstrong of Silver Spring.