Chandler High School coach Bryan Herring was inducted into the Oklahoma Slow-Pitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame prior to the All-State Game Saturday.
A graduate of Chandler, Herring has been Chandler’s head slowpitch coach since 2011. His teams have won slow-pitch state championships in 2016 and 2017 and were runnersup once.
“It was pretty cool,: Herring said. “The vice president of the coaches association called when they were doing the All-State teams.
“He’d beaten me a couple of times and he said ‘the next time, I’ll get to beat a Hall of Fame coach.”
That vice president was North Rock Creek coach Chance Griffin, who had nominated Herring for the honor.
“Coach Herring has been a big part of Oklahoma slow pitch history,” Griffin said. “He has built Chandler into a highly respected program in his tenure there and has earned it through hard work and dedication. “This is just a testament to how he has treated the game and how he has treated the people within the game, getting inducted by his peers into the hall of fame.”
Herring graduated from Chandler in 1995 and began his career in education at Jones, where he taught art and coached football and baseball.
He came to Chandler in the fall of 2008 to teach art and coach junior high softball and wrestling His junior high team exceeded expectations that season by going 12-4 and he moved up to be high school fast-pitch head coach in 2009.
He took over as slowpitch head coach in 2011 when Chandler decided to merge fast-pitch and slow-pitch into a unified program.
“In 2011 got beat in the regional finals and the next year went to state for the first time in school history,” he said.
Herring has led Chandler to state five times in slow-pitch.
In the early days, the Lady Lions took some lumps because of Herring’s scheduling approach, which was to play the best competition available.
“We didn’t care about the record,” he said. “I wanted to get better.”
They played Southmoore five times his first season. He said the team was shocked the first game and took a hammering, but steadily improved and lost the last time by only 2.
“You could see the growth and improvement just watching them play that level of competition.
“We went into the state tournament that year with a losing record and ended up getting state runnerup.
“The net year, we played a lot of 6A teams and beat a lot of them and that was the year we won the first one.
Herring doesn’t keep a running total on his coaching record, but guessed his career slow-pitch mark to be about 210-125.
Herring and his wife, Shawnda, have six children: Justin, Desmyn, Lauren, Makalyn, Madison and Korvyn.