Townsend steps down as head basketball coach at LAMP

Marcus Townsend has spent the last 12 years at LAMP but announced that he is stepping down as boys’ basketball coach. (Tim Gayle)

By TIM GAYLE

Just a short year after looking for a replacement for veteran baseball coach Chad Smith, LAMP principal Matthew Monson is searching resumes again after boys’ basketball coach Marcus Townsend announced his retirement.

Townsend coached for 12 years at the Montgomery magnet school and wrapped up a 25-year career as a teacher in the Montgomery County school system.

“I had been in talks with Huntingdon College as an adjunct professor and I ended up getting on full-time with them,” Townsend said. “It was good timing for me, with me having 25 years with MPS. It was the right decision at the right time for me.”

Townsend said he will teach exercise sport and CPR at Huntingdon in a position which officially starts on Aug. 1. While his position as a professor allowed him time to return to LAMP as a volunteer coach, he felt it was time to hand over the reins to another coach. His top assistant, Floyd Mathews, is himself an MPS retiree who coached championship teams at St. Jude and Sidney Lanier and is not interested in returning to a full-time position.

Townsend’s junior varsity coach, Christopher Shomber, just completed his first year with the program and is taking over as interim head coach during summer workouts. Another possible candidate for Monson to consider is Robb McGaughey, the former Catholic boys’ basketball coach who was recently asked to step down as Pike Road’s coach and is familiar with the LAMP program.

Townsend was a standout for Dan Lewis at G.W. Carver in the mid-1980s before going to junior college for two years, then playing for Larry Chapman at Auburn University Montgomery in 1989-90 and 1990-91. A few years later, he got into teaching at Daisy Lawrence Elementary for two years beginning in 1996, then to Martin Luther King Elementary in 1998. In 2013, he went to Baldwin Middle Magnet and then to LAMP in 2015.

He started coaching at LAMP as an assistant coach under Anthony Norris in 2009 when the Golden Tigers advanced to the semifinals of the 3A state tournament. Townsend took over the head coaching duties the following year and led LAMP to three postseason appearances in the last five years.  

Townsend has been connected with all four postseason trips by the boys’ basketball program, either as an assistant or as the head coach.

“My first year, we had some talent but it was the same year BTW Magnet opened and we didn’t get anybody new,” Townsend said. “We ended up losing to Trinity in the area tournament. The next few years, we would get a kid to come in for his ninth-grade year and by the 10th grade he was gone because of the academics.

“So it was up and down. We had some pretty good years, but never got past the regionals. It was awfully tough trying to build something because you could never keep anybody for four years. Or three years, for that matter.”

In his last seven years, with Mathews as his assistant, the Golden Tigers ended their season in the area tournament four times, but advanced to the sub-regional round three times, all as the area tournament runner-up to Catholic.

Townsend’s best season was in 2019 when the Tigers captured the regular-season area championship and was the hottest team in the city before losing to Catholic in the area tournament championship game at LAMP. The following year, the program finished as the area tournament runner-up again, but won the sub-regional game and advanced to the Southeast Regionals at Garrett Coliseum, where they lost to Montevallo.

And while his basketball teams were often hampered by the high academic standards at the school, he had nothing but praise for the program’s 12 teams he coached.   

“It was frustrating, but it was fun,” Townsend said. “I had some good kids and they worked hard for me. That’s all I can ask them to do.”