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Get Scouted Scouting CareersNSR scout Ken Carlyle has truly experienced an incredible journey.
A high-school, two-sport phenom from Memphis, Tennessee, Carlyle was highly recruited in both baseball and basketball coming out of Briar Crest Christian High School. If that school’s name rings a bell, rightfully so.
A few years after Ken graduated along came a young offensive lineman named Michael Oher, of The Blind Side movie fame. Incredibly, as you will soon see, Carlyle and Oher followed similar paths to reach the professional ranks in their respective sports.
Carlyle received his first recruiting letter when he was a sophomore. As motivation to keep working hard, he taped it on the headboard of his bed. It worked and in a big way. By the time he graduated, three walls in Ken’s bedroom were covered in recruiting letters from various colleges.
In basketball, Ken, a shooting guard, played on local AAU teams, one of which won the 16-U national title. Incidentally, the point guard playing alongside Carlyle on that team was a guy named Penny Hardaway who went on to a successful NBA career.
“Penny would drive the lane and push it back outside to me and I would hit the three. I could shoot. That was a very good team,” Carlyle exclaimed.
He was recruited by some of the top programs in the country averaging nearly 16 points per game as a senior. Even so, Ken eventually decided to pursue baseball when it became apparent that playing both sports at the D-I level would be nearly impossible. Incidentally, during his senior year at Briar Crest, Carlyle hit .536 and threw harder than any hurler around, so he was a highly sought-after prep prospect.
So talented was Carlyle that a few years back, he was named the best baseball player to come out of Memphis in the past 25 years by the newspaper The Commercial Appeal. Not bad.
Vanderbilt was Carlyle’s dream school for baseball, but with no one guiding him through the recruiting process, he fell behind in one critical, academic area – taking the standardized tests when he should have. Unaware that he should have taken the SAT and ACT much earlier, his first run at the tests as a senior were not high enough to qualify for Vandy. With virtually no time to work on improving those numbers, the Nashville school’s offer went out the window.
“That hurt,” Carlyle said. “No one was there to tell me how it all worked and I got lost in the fray. It cost me the chance to go to my favorite school.”
Still, plenty of good offers remained and as the premier high-school baseball player in a talent-rich area, Carlyle chose Ole Miss.
“I wanted to go to a school just far enough away from home, yet close enough that my parents could come to see me play,” Carlyle explained.
A dual position player at shortstop and pitcher with a great stick, once the coaching staff saw Ken on the mound, his shortstop days were over. He eventually set the Ole Miss record for career wins with 27. That record still stands.
Following his senior season, Carlyle was drafted in the fourth round by the Tigers. He was in Detroit’s farm system for six years before being traded to the Braves.
That turned out to be a tough break, seeing that the Braves were loaded at pitcher and in the middle of a remarkable 14-year run as divisional champions. Nevertheless, Ken thrived and in 1999 he was slated to take John Smoltz’ starting spot in Atlanta after Smoltz suffered a season-ending elbow injury.
Carlyle was the guy the Braves’ bigwigs picked to move into baseball’s top pitching rotation. He would make one more start for the Braves’ Triple-A team and then take the giant step into the Big Leagues.
A week later, Ken was sitting in a hospital’s pre-op room alongside Smoltz waiting to go under the knife for the very same elbow ailment. In the sixth inning of what could well have been his last minor league start, Carlyle threw a pitch and instantly knew something was wrong. His fastball velocity immediately dropped from 93 to 85 and that, for all intents and purposes, was that.
Although Carlyle stayed in the Braves organization for another year, in 2001, at the age of 30, Ken made the decision to leave professional baseball. He would move to Greensboro, N.C. where he would take over the program at Greensboro College as their head baseball coach. So, his first coaching stint was as a college head coach.
Over the next nine years, under Carlyle’s tutelage, the D-III program would make program history with six straight years of 20 or more wins. Ken would become the school’s second all-time wins leader in the process.
Deciding to take on the challenge of operating hitting facilities, over the next few years, Carlyle saw the frustrations of talented young prospects not being recruited.
“I did what I could to help them along and a good number of kids I worked with played in college, but it was hard to watch families, particularly the kids, as their dreams of playing in college disappeared,” Carlyle declared.
“When I found out about NSR, I knew that it was the right, next step for me,” Carlyle said. I had used NSR as Greensboro’s coach, so I was familiar with their effectiveness and the quality of the kids they put out there for college coaches. I started full steam in May and am having a blast.”
When we asked what he enjoyed about the job, Carlyle did not hesitate to say, “The thing I love most about working as an NSR scout is that my kids are being recruited. They are getting their shots at college ball and that is so rewarding to me.”
Today, NSR scout Ken Carlyle is heading up a group of scouts across North Carolina focused on helping all the baseball kids they can. While he will be working in other sports as well, baseball naturally will be a huge part of his NSR business growth.
Know a promising prospect in the Carolinas or Southern Virginia? If so you can reach Ken at kcarlyle@nsr-inc.com. He will arrange for that prospect to be scouted and evaluated.
If you are a successful former coach, regardless of the sport, and want to continue your career by helping high school athletes live their dreams of playing in college, contact NSR today at the button below.
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National Scouting Report is dedicated to finding scholarship opportunities for athletes who possess the talent, desire, and motivation to compete at the collegiate level. We’ve helped connect thousands of athletes with their perfect college.