Bangor’s Parke lands basketball job at Alabama

Bangor native Matt Parke has been hired as the director of basketball operations for head coach Mark Gottfried at the University of Alabama.

The 1993 Bangor High School grad goes from the cardinal and white Rams colors to the crimson and white of a Crimson Tide team that shapes up as one of the top four in the Southeastern Conference.

Parke graduated from Colby College in 1997 and then earned a masters degree in business administration from the University of South Carolina earlier this year.

“Barry Sanderson is an assistant coach here at South Carolina and his father Wimp was a former coach at Alabama, and my name came up through the pipeline,” Parke explained. “We kept on trying to be persistent, coach Gottfried agreed to meet with me, and that was enough to get the job.”

Parke was head basketball coach at Derby Academy in Massachusetts from 1997 to 1999 and Oak Ridge (North Carolina) Military Academy from 1999 to 2001. He went on to become assistant basketball coach at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., (2001-03) before joining Dave Odom’s South Carolina staff as a graduate assistant in 2003.

“Matt is a very bright young coach who has a tremendous amount of energy,” Gottfried said in a school press release. “He comes to our program highly recommended, and I’m very excited that he has joined our staff. I look for him to be a very important aspect of our program on a day-to-day basis with a wide range of responsibility.”

The 30-year-old Parke takes an all-encompassing job which involves directing camps, academic support, scheduling, day-to-day program operations, and even negotiating game times and scheduling in concert with television networks such as ESPN.

“I’ve been on the job for a month and a half now and directed eight summer camps already,” said Parke. “Now I’m working on filling the nonconference portion of our schedule with teams.”

Parke played basketball for four years at Bangor and was a member of the Rams’ 1993 Class A state championship team.

“I got an economics degree from Colby, so it was one of those things that when I got out of college, I got a teaching job at Derby Academy and the coaching job came along with it,” Parke said. “It seemed like a good job and I decided to take it.”

Parke had run various summer basketball camps in the past, so coaching was not a new thing for him. Everything as far as administrative duties and organizational requirements he learned as he went.

Now he finds himself as the right-hand man for the head coach of a premier Division I program in the SEC, one of the premier Division I leagues in the country.

“Everyone asks me what’s my next step, and I can’t imagine someone being vice-president if they don’t want to be president someday,” he said. “I certainly thought about coaching and stuff when I was in school, but I didn’t know what I’d be doing.

“Right now I’m making a living in college basketball and that’s a dream for a lot of people.”

And right now, he’s happy to be living the dream.