AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) – On August 5th, Perryton’s new head football coach and A.D., Josh Hernandez, put out a tweet that there was an opening for the boys head basketball coach. Two weeks later, they brought in a historic player in Canyon who also ties to the city of Perryton.
David Chavlovich was announced as the new head basketball coach for the Perryton Rangers. Having some family connection to the city, Hernandez knew that might help sway him into the position and Chavlovich says that familiarity absolutely helped in his decision.
“My girlfriend’s from here, so I have a little connection and her family’s here and stuff like that,” Chavlovich said. “But when I saw Coach Huey step down, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m familiar with a lot of the kids here, I’ve worked with them in the past, why not me?’”
“We could use that [family] card a little bit,” Hernandez said. “And Grandma’s living here, and his daughter could come back to Grandma. But when we started it, we interviewed him and we talked, and we could tell right from the very beginning, he was a guy that we liked. To get that sort of hire made at that point of the year, it usually doesn’t happen, but we were lucky. We hit a home run with that guy.”
Before he got into coaching, Chavlovich had a historic run at West Texas A&M, finishing as the #1 all-time scorer, most points in a single season and most steals as a few of the records he holds. WT’s head coach, Tom Brown, says he is very thankful for landing Chavlovich and enjoys looking back at what they were able to accomplish.
“What a great career,” Brown said. “I can remember recruiting him. What a great find for us when we got down here. I just want to thank all the other coaches in Texas and across the country for not recruiting him, because he was one of our first recruits. It’s been a lot of fun looking back, and again, David was the guy that got this whole thing going.”
Chavlovich credits coaches like Brown and assistant coach, Chris Gove, for helping develop him as a player and as a coach, and he says this Ranger team might play similar to the W-T Buffs.
“I was really, really smart and a lot of that is because Coach Brown and Coach Gove,” Chavlovich said. “They really, really did a great job of teaching the game to me, teaching the correct spacing, teaching how to make a pass on time and just little things like that. I’ll say it 100 times, I was so lucky to be around them, my four years playing and then my two years coaching, and we’re going to steal all their stuff.”
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