Former Chapin coach and administrator Eddie Raines was elected into the South Carolina Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame on March 17.

It was a special moment for the longtime coach, who helped form the organization while coaching at Winnsboro High School.

“We were just doing it to help grow the sport better,” Raines said of being a charter member of the SCBCA. “This is a football state, and a great one at that, but we wanted to promote basketball at a better level. I had no idea that I would be speaking in front of all the people I spoke to. I never dreamed that it would grow to that capacity. It gives me a warm feeling because we were at the beginning of it.”

Looking back at his career, which spanned 21 years as a coach before moving into administration full-time for another 11 years, Raines only had one regret.

“Probably the only regret I have in 32 years of education is I got out of coaching earlier than I needed to,” Raines said. “To be recognized after all that time by your peers – which a lot of them are a lot younger than me – meant a lot to me. It really did. It probably means more to me now than it would’ve been maybe 20 years ago.”

Raines is most well-known for his time coaching at Winnsboro High School, where he led his team to two straight state championship games in 1972-73. After continuing that success, he hoped to get a raise from the school, but it wasn’t in the budget. That’s when he ended up at Chapin for a year.

“After going to back-to-back state championships, went to upper state four times in a row and I asked for a $500 raise because I was starving to death in Winnsboro, South Carolina,” Raines said. “My wife’s favorite expression was, ‘We had more month than check.’ I asked for a $500 raise and they said they couldn’t do it, so I said I had to make a move.”

He ran into football coach Cecil Woolbright, the namesake of Chapin’s stadium, at Todd & Moore Sporting Goods after making that decision. Woolbright made the pitch to come to Chapin, even though the boys basketball job wasn’t open at the time.

“He said, ‘It will be open in a year, just come over and coach football with me and whatever else we can find for you to do,’” Raines recounted.

After football season, the girls basketball coach retired and Raines was asked to step in. He was hesitant at first.

“I said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ And they put an amount before me that was more than I was making in Winnsboro coaching two sports and I said, ‘I’ll do it,’” Raines said with a chuckle.

But the stint at Chapin didn’t last long.

As Raines prepared to make the jump over to the boys team the following year, his old principal at Winnsboro asked him to come back. He stayed there until the district consolidated in 1987.

“My principal in Winnsboro, who was like my second daddy because he was there for me when my daddy died and I loved him to death, he called me up and said, ‘I know you haven’t moved, come over and talk to me,’” Raines recalled. “I did and he said he wanted me to be the assistant principal and he’d get me my basketball job back. I said I didn’t want to be an administrator and he said, ‘Do it for a year and if you don’t like it, I’ll let you go back into the classroom.’”

Just one more year became the message every season until Raines retired from coaching. Once he left Winnsboro, he came back to Chapin, where he worked in the career center before taking a gig in the district office.

While he missed coaching, Raines loved the opportunity to spend more time with his kids as he became a full-time administrator.

“I was a 7/24 basketball coach,” Raines said. “Luckily, my wife saw that and would bring the kids out when they were big enough and they’d run around practice every day and the managers would chase them around and that was their time with daddy.

“I spent 20 years raising everyone else’s kids and helping them and I felt like it was time to do my own thing.”

But Raines didn’t stay out of basketball completely. He’s worked on the committee for the Round Ball Classic, one of the state’s largest annual tournaments. He is also a chairman of the All-Tournament Team selection committee for the event.

Now that he’s away from coaching and administration, Raines is constantly reminded why he got into the business in the first place.

“It’s the relationships with the kids, it’s the effects you have on their lives that you don’t realize until 10-15 years down the road,” Raines said. “I found out probably early on that kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. When they know how much you care, they’ll run through a brick wall for you.”