William Partlow, pioneering basketball coach and administrator, joins SC Hall of Fame

From hiring future Super Bowl champions to dominating local high school and college basketball, William Partlow has done it all.

Partlow was a pioneering coach, an ambitious athletic director and a standout player, and he’s earned a reputation everywhere he’s been since graduating from high school in segregated Gastonia, N.C., in 1952.

Partlow, who gave Andy Reid his first full-time coaching job in 1983 and was a superstar coach around the early Columbia high school basketball scene, is among 10 local legends who will be inducted into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame in a ceremony starting at 5:30 p.m. Monday inside the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

“This one is icing on the cake,” Partlow, now 90, said this week. “My son had worked for years to try and get them to recognize my accomplishments, but they weren’t paying very much attention to it until some other people spoke up.

“During the time of segregation, there was not very much publicity. We didn’t get very much in the newspapers — especially early on. That first team I had, which I think was probably the best one I’ve had, I can’t even find a picture of them anywhere.”

A two-sport standout

Growing up in Gastonia, Partlow always played basketball and football.

Partlow said he liked basketball a bit more, and he achieved All-State honors following his 1952 senior season on the hardwood. He was a high school teammate of Sam Jones, a 10-time NBA champion as the shooting guard of the Boston Celtics, and future Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon.

Partlow was recruited to play college basketball at Johnson C. Smith University, a historically black university in Charlotte, and picked it over N.C. Central. He played both basketball and football at Johnson C. Smith, where he majored in math and minored in science.

Following his graduation in 1956, he began teaching math and serving as an assistant basketball coach at C.A. Johnson High School in Columbia.

Coaching future NBA All-Stars in Columbia high schools

In 1960, Partlow accepted the head coach position at Booker T. Washington. The players embraced his balanced coaching style right away — he would run continuity offenses and zone press defenses, encouraging the team to rotate its playmakers and give everyone a chance.

It worked.

The team dominated in his first season there, going 20-1 and winning the first state championship in the school’s 44-year history.

Among the notable names on Partlow’s roster: Former NBA All-Star Jermaine O’Neal, legendary Eau Claire basketball coach George Glymph and S.C. State Hall of Famer Sam Goodwin.

The biggest accomplishment in Partlow’s eyes? All 12 of the seniors on his roster went to college, and nine graduated.

Partlow went on to win six more state titles over the next nine seasons. He sent his top players to schools all over the country, including Oklahoma, Georgia, Jacksonville, West Virginia and Tennessee State. Kenny Washington, a two-time national champion at UCLA in 1964 and 1965, scored 35 points in Partlow’s second state championship game.

The president of Benedict College had seen Booker T. Washington play in a preliminary game in-person during the 1968-69 season. He liked what he saw and soon hired Partlow.

After coaching at Benedict College for seven years, Partlow moved to California, where he married his then-fiancee. He stayed in the collegiate level of sports, taking an administrative role in the athletic department of San Francisco State University, where he worked for 18 years until his retirement.

Partlow Andy Reid and Mike Holmgren

Partlow spent the final 16 of those 18 years as the athletic director of San Francisco State, a Division II school with roughly 20,000 students.

Vic Rowen, a pioneer of the West Coast offense, was a legendary coach at San Francisco State back then, and Partlow hired future Super Bowl champion Mike Holmgren to Rowen’s staff in 1981.

Holmgren, now a member of both the Green Bay Packers’ Hall of Fame and the Seattle Seahawks’ Ring of Honor, had been coaching in high school. He moved up after just one season at San Francisco State, becoming the quarterbacks coach at Brigham Young, and soon held that same title with the San Francisco 49ers. He was promoted to offensive coordinator before getting the Green Bay Packers’ head coaching job in 1992.

When Holmgren headed to Brigham Young in 1982, there was a graduate assistant at the school in Provo, Utah, whom Partlow brought in.

Andy Reid was on staff with Holmgren at Brigham Young for one season before meeting Partlow, who hired Reid as San Francisco State’s offensive line coach. Reid worked under Partlow for three seasons before bouncing around to the staffs of Northern Arizona, UTEP and Missouri.

When did Reid — the winner of three of the last four Super Bowls — get his first NFL gig?

In 1992, when Holmgren gathered his best assistants from over the years and took them to Green Bay.

Back in Charlotte, Partlow is still ‘Coach’

After initially retiring in California, Partlow and his wife moved back to the Carolinas in 1997 and built a house in Charlotte.

Partlow “got a little bored” when the house was finished in 1999 and returned to coaching. He worked with the girls’ basketball team at Charlotte Country Day for five years, including two as its head coach.

Partlow and his wife eventually lived at Ballantyne Country Club, where he would go for walks with former Charlotte Hornets coach Paul Silas.

“We were the only Black family on our street,” Partlow said. “We had had two Black families, but one family moved away. But the people were so nice. When my wife died, I had a wake for people to come by.

“Everybody on my street came. Must have been about 25 or 30 of them. All the people came to that, and then about 10 or 12 of them came all the way from Charlotte to Gastonia for the funeral. That’s the kind of people we had out there.”

Partlow, now 90, still lives in Charlotte, in an assisted living community.

And he still finds himself quite busy.

He’s the president of the residents’ council, regularly leading meetings with administrators about dining rooms, maintenance, activities and therapy.

Whenever any of his guests come to visit? Partlow says you can tell anyone there: “Ask for Coach.”