31 Jul 2024 Celebrating Athletic Excellence: Cleburne County’s Keith Cornett

Posted at 8:28 PMh in Sports by

By Dr. Robert Reising

His ties to the Concord/Drasco community of Arkansas’s Cleburne County are strong. They always have been, and always will be. Born in nearby Heber Springs, Cleburne County’s seat, in 1972, Keith Cornett graduated from Concord High School in 1991. He has spent the bulk of his life on native soil, including the last two decades as a successful and popular teacher and head basketball coach at his alma mater.

Photo by Mike Kemp

But the new school year will find him elsewhere. No longer will he lead the Pirates. He plans to accompany his daughter, a rising junior and promising basketball star, to Westside High School, also in Cleburne County, where he will head the program in which Kately is expected to star.

Cornett’s surprising decision of late spring prompted a flurry of discussion and speculation, which invariably featured commentary about his mind-boggling athletic credentials. Probably no one, man or woman, in Cleburne County or beyond, could claim a dossier richer in achievements and awards. He is a rarity, gifted and motivated beyond norms, local or otherwise.

Even as a grade-schooler, thanks to parents who respected the demands of education, Cornett did not neglect books as he moved into organized school athletics. He fared handsomely in all sports at which he tried his hand, but his preferences lay with two of the nation’s most popular: baseball and basketball. 

Before earning his diploma in the spring of 1991, he had proven to be one of the most accomplished two-sport performers in Concord High School history. He came within one victory of taking the Pirates to the state’s baseball title in 1990, and his talent in basketball saw him averaging 28 points per game (PPG) as a junior and 33 PPG as a senior, earning All-State honors in both sports. Retirement of his jersey followed: today, #13 hangs high from the rafters at Concord High. 

Nor did his basketball scoring proficiency end with high school. At North Arkansas College, as a junior-college sophomore, he earned Hall of Fame honors while making 117 three-pointers, the highest total the program had ever recorded. He emerged the nation’s third leading scorer and a coveted basketball recruit of the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).

In Texas he continued his stellar scoring. Starting in every game on UTA’s 27-game schedule during the 1994-95 season, Cornett was the team’s top scorer, averaging over 11 PPG; he also set a UTA program high for free-throw accuracy in a single season–88.6 percent, the highest recorded in the Southland Conference that season and the fourth highest in the nation’s NCAA Division 1 basketball.

But homesickness and friendship intruded immediately thereafter. Arlington was farther from Cleburne County than Cornett preferred, and he and an old teammate who desired one more season together agreed that 1995-96 was ideal. 

The pair reunited at the College of the Ozarks, where he ended his playing career by setting a program record by scoring nine three-pointers in a single game. In the following fall, armed with his baccalaureate, he launched his long multi-sport coaching career. 

Twenty-seven years have passed since Cornett registered his first high school basketball coaching victory; at Pangburn High School, he also placed the school team in its first-ever basketball State Tournament. A year later, in 2003, he led his first Heber Springs High School team to a berth in that same tournament. 

Within two additional years, the coach was at the helm of Concord High’s boys basketball program, holding the teaching and coaching post in which he was to gain his greatest success, the hometown position that most fans assumed he would retain until retirement. As the 2023-24 basketball season drew to a close, he had amassed a mind-boggling 671 wins and only 293 losses in a total of 964 games. In short, he has won almost 70 percent of the basketball games in which he has coached.  

Twelve times between 2006 and 2024, his basketball Pirates made State Tournament appearances. In 2012 they came within two wins of the Class 1A State Championship, and in 2013 closer yet; finally, in 2014, they refused to lose and claimed the first boys Basketball State Championship in Concord High School history. 

En route, the Keith-coached Pirates of 2014 set a school record with 40 wins in a single Class 1A basketball season. Predictably, Cornett gained one of the State’s best respected honors: Class 1A Boys Basketball Coach of the Year.

Nor was his winning confined to men’s basketball. Four times his Concord High School boys golf teams claimed State Championships, in 2012 registering an unblemished 12-and-0 record while capturing the school’s first State Golf Championship ever. In 2014, 2015 and 2016, his Concord High golf contingent delivered a sports rarity: a three-peat, three consecutive State Championships.

That Cornett is a proven winner is indisputable. That he will win at Westside High is another virtual certainty. Two reasons loom as convincing support for such thinking: (1) as a high-school junior, his potential-filled daughter is about to blossom into a star; (2) Cornett’s coaching effectiveness with girls’ and boys’ basketball teams compares favorably: his Concord High girls team of 2019, for example, ended as semifinalists in the 1A State Tournament, the school’s highest finish ever, and in just his second year of returning to the assignment. 

An educated guess would have Cornett, a Christian, a believer in theologian C. S. Lewis’s assertion that “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Hardly fifty years old, he recently noted in conversation that he has “reached 27 years [in coaching]. I could go much more.” Flowing from his lips and in his mind were hints of “another goal” or “a new dream.” Bet on it!

Bob Reising
Latest posts by Bob Reising (see all)