Longtime girls basketball coach is out at Cardozo

Close to finishing his 25th year as the girls basketball coach at Benjamin Cardozo, Larry Carradine resigned last Tuesday, February 5. He left his post, the longtime coach said, out of pressure from players and parents, who organized a boycott of their game against Boys & Girls February 1, which resulted in a forfeit.
Vincent O’Donoghue, who has coached boys basketball at the now-defunct Power Memorial HS and Wingate HS in Brooklyn, and is also the Cardozo jayvee girls volleyball coach, has taken over on an interim basis.
As Carradine discussed the decision, his voice cracked. Carradine sent five players to Division I schools, won four division titles and reached the PSAL Class A semifinals in 1996.
“I felt so betrayed by that,” he said, alluding to the boycott. “I just couldn’t believe it. I worked so hard with this young team. I was flabbergasted. How could they do something like that?”
“I never did anything but work with these kids and do everything I could do to help them.”
His players and their parents, meanwhile, were smiling despite losing their regular-season finale to Benjamin Banneker, 50-25, last Friday afternoon at the Oakland Gardens school.
Billy Medley, whose daughter Jade is a freshman on the team, complained that Carradine refused to talk to the parents. He benched his better players for taking 3-pointers, during the game or warm-ups.
Last year, Medley, a school aide at Cardozo (3-12, Queens AA) and former assistant coach for the boys basketball team, said Carradine sat Lekesha Harris, now at Adelphi, when college scouts came to see her for taking a shot he didn’t like in the previous game. During practices, he only included the starting five in drills while the others shot on side baskets, Medley said.
“He was holding them back instead of letting them grow,” he said. “The school needed a change.”
“We needed something new,” sophomore co-captain Cici Palmer said. “There wasn’t any communication between player and coach. It wasn’t that he refused to talk to us, but he didn’t have any interest in hearing our opinion on some things.”
“We’re happy he left because we have a chance to experience some real basketball instead of what he was teaching,” Jade Medley added.
Carradine, a physical education teacher at Queens High School for Career Development, said he would not jump back into coaching immediately.
“I just felt like the kids and parents wanted to run the show,” he said. “It doesn’t make me feel good obviously, but they got what they wanted.”