Pete Carril never forgot where he came from, and he always made sure his players knew exactly where that was.

One of those players was Gabe Lewullis, a former Allentown Central Catholic star who helped the Vikings win four consecutive District 11 championships in the 1990s. He played on Carril’s last Princeton University team in 1996, and played a big role in Carril’s last, and arguably, most memorable win. It came in the first round of the NCAA Tournament and it was Lewullis’ layup off a backdoor play that gave the Tigers a 43-41 win over defending champ UCLA in one of the most stunning upsets in tournament history.

Carril died on Monday at the age of 92, but will live on in the hearts of his former players and hundreds of college basketball fans who admired Carril’s emphasis on fundamentals and focus on team play in a sport that increasingly became about individual stars.

He will also live on in the hearts of many who got to know the often fiery Carril whether it was in his South Bethlehem neighborhood, his time as a basketball standout at Liberty High School or Lafayette College or his time as a JV and head coach at Easton, the head coach at Reading High School or Lehigh University.

Lewullis, now an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist with the Lehigh Valley Health Network, will never forget him. Neither will former Allen boys basketball coach Doug Snyder who played for Carril at Princeton two decades earlier than Lewullis and was a freshman when the Tigers won the NIT championship in 1975.

“He was very proud of being from the Lehigh Valley and he would point that out to me several times,” Lewullis said. “I remember when he was recruiting me he pulled out this old newspaper clipping that said he was an all-state at Liberty. It might have been just four or five sentences on that clipping, but he was proud of it. My teammates knew about the Lehigh Valley. Maybe they didn’t know where it was, but they knew about it because he talked about the Lehigh Valley. He used the Lehigh Valley as motivation and he was proud of where he came from.”

Princeton forward and former Allentown Central Catholic High School player Gabe Lewullis brings the ball downcourt against Lafayette in Easton on Nov. 18, 1998. Lewullis played for the late Pete Carril during Carril's last season at Princeton in 1996. (Morning Call File Photo)

It’s one of the reasons Carril was a regular at the Lehigh Valley Oldtime Athletes and Friends reunions over the years. Every June he’d hold court with his friends from the old days at the reunion and he would encourage others like Lewullis to come.

“He was a genuine guy,” Lewullis said. “In this day and age where you are what you put on social media, he was black and white, and there was no pretense.”

He was not easy to play for. He expected his players to execute and when they didn’t, he let them know they didn’t.

“If he told you the player you were guarding likes to go to his left and you still let him go to his left, he’d point that out to you in his own unique way,” Lewullis said. “There are just so many things to say about him. He was very influential. He impressed a lot of Division I college coaches and he intimidated a lot of them.”

Lewullis, who played just one season for Carril, believes his genius was his simplicity. He remembers that against UCLA he wanted his team to forget about going for offensive rebounds.

“He wanted us to put up a shot and then run right back on defense,” Lewullis said. “He knew we didn’t have the size to get offensive rebounds, so he wanted us to get back on defense right away because he wanted to limit UCLA’s fast breaks. He wanted us to control the tempo. The strategy worked.”

Simple, but effective. Carril got the best from his players by preaching teamwork, ball movement, and movement without the ball.

“He wanted you to share the ball,” Lewullis said. “You had to know the basic stuff. It was never about turning a kid into a center or a point guard. He wanted to make you a basketball player plain and simple. He had a great influence on me on my way to becoming a surgeon. I’d screw up in practice and he’d use that unique voice of his and yell at me ‘So, you want to be a doctor? You’re going to kill your mistakes!’ And that’s something I never forgot. He had a great influence on me in teaching me about self-accountability that carries over to this day.”

But while he projected a demanding exterior, he had a softer, compassionate side. When Lewullis became a doctor, he sent him a little notice to Carril when he was coaching the Sacramento Kings.

““He sent me a sweatshirt from the Kings and a letter that had the words ‘Congratulations Doc!” Lewullis said. “I still have that letter somewhere. It meant a lot to me.”

Snyder saw the other side of Carril as well and also how much he cared about the Lehigh Valley.

In 1978, while Snyder was part of the Princeton program, Carril was being inducted into the Lehigh Valley Basketball Hall of Fame.

Carril insisted that Snyder go along with him as a representative of the Lehigh Valley.

“We’re driving back to the Lehigh Valley and the banquet at that time was at the Northampton Community Center, so I figure we’re going to Northampton,” Snyder remembered. “But instead, he says we’re stopping at 12th and Hamilton in Allentown first. I said that’s the Brass Rail. I asked him ‘Why are we going to the Brass Rail? Aren’t we going to a banquet?’ He said ‘Yeah, we’re going to the banquet but I have to have a cheesesteak and a beer first.’ So there we were at the Brass Rail before the banquet having a cheesesteak and a beer.”

Snyder said Carril also showed him where he grew up in South Bethlehem.

“It was basically right across the street from the mills,” Snyder said. “He was proud of the neighborhood, which has since been razed and is now the site of a senior citizens home. He told me he was at the Bethlehem Boys Club all the time and he told me all about his Bethlehem running buddies.”

Snyder echoed Lewullis’ sentiments that Carril wasn’t easy to play for, but he had the respect of everyone on campus, including professors who admired his no-nonsense approach.

Allen coach Doug Snyder talks to his team during a game at PPL Center in Allentown in 2019. Snyder played for Pete Carril at Princeton and said he had a great influence on his life and coaching career. (April Gamiz/The Morning Call )

“He was the kind of guy who was tough on the court,” said Snyder, who won 364 games and four league and four district titles at Allen. “You didn’t like him when you were playing for him. But you realized quickly that he was always putting us, his players, in situations where we were competitive and had chances to win against teams that were far bigger, stronger, and quicker. You look at that 1975 team that won the NIT, and the NIT had a lot of good teams at that time because the NCAA Tournament had just 32. Princeton won four straight games and they beat nationally-ranked teams like South Carolina and Providence en route to the NIT championship.”

Snyder, who retired after the 2019-20 season after 23 years at Allen, said he found himself using many of the same phrases Carril had ingrained in him decades earlier.

“I found myself 45 years later in a high school gym using many of the same things I learned from him,” Snyder said. “For instance, he would tell us to go away from the ball to get the ball. You know when kids start playing sports like soccer and basketball, they run to the ball. There’s one ball and everybody runs toward it. But he was saying go away from the ball and your defender is going to overplay you and you’re going to go backdoor and get the ball and the layup. He built an offense around that which was internationally known.”

Snyder said Carril also instilled in him the belief that if you do something good for your teammate, that good will come back to you from your teammate.

“He just didn’t teach basketball,” Snyder said. “He taught us about life. Those phrases work. They still work whether it was at Princeton University or working with kids in Allentown.”

Snyder also remembered the day Carril was late for practice, which was highly unusual for someone who always was the first one at practice.

“He came in and told us he had been on the phone,” Snyder said. “He told us he was talking with the Atlanta Hawks. He said the Hawks offered him the head coaching position. He also told us he turned them down. He said ‘I’m a college coach. I want to coach you guys.’ How do you think that made me, a 19-year-old kid, feel? We had respect for him before that, but it sure grew after he told us that.”

Snyder also remembered a national TV loss on a Saturday afternoon to legendary coach Lou Carnesecca and St. John’s in New York City and Carril was not happy.

“He was ripping into us the entire bus ride from New York to Princeton,” Snyder said. “He said you guys better get some rest. We had never practiced as a team on a Sunday. But that Sunday night at 8 we had a practice.

“We ran the same plays over and over and over. He would leave periodically and come back and he kept saying to us ‘My wife, [a Bethlehem girl whom he called Dilly], won’t let me in the house because I’ve been bad-mouthing you all day. So, we’re going to stay here and we’re going to practice.

“At 12 (midnight) that night, he came back into the gym and said ‘Dilly’s finally letting me back in the house, so we’re done with practice.’ It was a four-hour practice. He might have fabricated the whole thing. Maybe it was true. But he was always finding ways to motivate us.”

Lewullis remembers Carril announcing his retirement in the locker room at Lehigh’s Stabler Arena right after Princeton beat Penn in a playoff game for the Ivy League title and a berth in the 1996 NCAA Tournament.

“He just wrote on the blackboard ‘I’m retiring and I’m happy’ and that was it,” Lewullis said. “We didn’t know what to do, so we just started clapping.”

The Tigers, thrilled to be going to the NCAA Tournament, couldn’t wait to get back to campus to celebrate.

But before they returned to New Jersey, Carril took his team to one of his favorite cheesesteak places in South Bethlehem. Just as he did years earlier with Snyder, he wanted to celebrate with a cheesesteak and a beer.

“That’s what made him happy; that’s how he wanted to celebrate back in his hometown,” Lewullis said. “That was a night I’ll never forget.”

Lewuillis said that whenever he gets together with former teammates over beers, that story comes up, as do many others.

“He toughened us up mentally and physically and made us better people,” Lewullis said. “We all have our share of Carril stories. And when we get together for his funeral service we’re going to have a lot more stories to tell I am sure. He was one of a kind.”

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