A second Long Beach high school basketball coach has resigned in the midst of the 2023-24 season citing ongoing issues with parents in their program. Millikan boys’ basketball coach Curtis Boyer, who led the team on a historic state playoff run in 2022 that included the program’s first-ever state playoff win, confirmed on Thursday evening that he had resigned his post with a little more than a week to go in the season.
“It’s a weight off my shoulders,” he said. “It’s a sad state of affairs. It’s just how everyone is being treated.”
Boyer’s Rams have struggled this year after losing two key players to transfers prior to the season. He said that parents have walked by during huddles in-game to yell at players not to listen to him, and recently challenged him about playing time after games, including following him to the team bus.
“I do get the frustration with losing, I’m frustrated too,” he said. “But the way it’s gotten is that the last few weeks I’ve been stressed, I’m not sleeping, it’s really been getting to me. I don’t need it–I poured everything into this program, blood sweat and tears for eight or ten hours a day.”
The Rams are 5-16 overall and 1-8 in the Moore League, with three games remaining on the schedule.
Boyer was hired in December of 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been a walk-on coach for the last four seasons. The Rams’ best season under Boyer was 2021-22, when Kamaury Washington helped lead Millikan to a quarterfinal appearance in both the CIF-SS and the CIF State playoffs, marking their farthest trip into the state playoffs in program history.
While Boyer cited parental issues as the reason for his midseason departure, he also stressed that most of the parents in the Rams program were supportive.
“We’ve got a lot of great parents, a lot of people who have reached out to me upset that I’m leaving,” he said. “I just feel like my hand is forced.”
Wilson girls’ basketball coach Erin Carey resigned earlier this year due to what she called “relentless” mistreatment from parents. Carey’s resignation and willingness to speak out on the issue prompted dozens of local coaches to comment in support and to reach out to her with stories of issues with parents, or with unsupportive school administrations. The story went viral nationally as it was shared thousands of times across the country by coaches and officials dealing with mistreatment. It’s been several years since a local high school basketball coach resigned in the middle of the season, and it’s unprecedented that two would do so.
We’ll have more on this story as it develops.
