His time at Sapulpa may not have ended on a sour note, but Ricky Bruner Jr. has landed on his feet in a big way after being named the new athletic director for East Central High School in Tulsa last week.
Bruner, the former Chieftains boys’ basketball coach who resigned in the middle of this past season, is excited about his new position and is grateful for the time he had in Sapulpa. While last season didn’t go as planned, with the team finishing the year 5-18, Bruner oversaw a successful era of Sapulpa basketball during his time here.
After coaching Tahlequah for three years from 2014-17, Bruner returned to Sapulpa in the summer of 2017. In his first year, 2017-18, he guided the Chieftains to a 14-10 record before embarking on a memorable run in 2019, when the squad went 21-5 and reached the Class 5A state quarterfinals for the first time since Bruner himself was a player at Sapulpa in 1999 (when the Chieftains reached the 6A state semifinals for the third straight year). They went 9-15 and lost in the regional playoffs in 2020 and came back for an up-and-down year in 2021. That season, the Chieftains were 9-10 and ended the regular season on a four-game losing streak before rallying to win four straight playoff games, reaching the 5A state semifinals before finally falling to Lawton MacArthur.
And despite a major drop-off after that, when the team stumbled to a 4-19 record in 2022, losing their last 11 games, and then the struggles this past season, Bruner is still justifiably proud of what he and the team accomplished during his tenure.
“I’m just super excited about the new opportunity. I really enjoyed my time at Sapulpa, that being my hometown,” said Bruner, who started on the ’98 and ’99 state semifinal teams and averaged 17.3 points per game as a Chieftain senior in 2000. “I was able to come in and have a lot of good success, coached some good teams, was able to kind of bring the program back. We made a state tournament appearance for the first time in 20 years, since I was a player there, took two teams to the state tournament in my time there, sent about 15 players on to the next level to play college basketball. That makes me proud that I was able to come back home and do some really good things.
“And then, just being able to take the next step in my career, being an athletic director, I’m all about helping people, so just with my experience and opportunities that I’ve been through, I’ll be able to continue to help kids but I’ll also be able to help coaches now.”
There are definitely some things that Bruner will take with him from Sapulpa that he will be looking to implement into the East Central athletic programs.
“I would say the thing that made us so successful, our basketball team at Sapulpa, was just the things we did off the court, from the team-building aspect to getting out in the community,” said Bruner, who won’t be doing any coaching at East Central. “I started a Boys to Men program at Sapulpa, where we didn’t talk about basketball. It was just about helping young men to become men. What does it take to become a successful young man? Even simple things like the better you look – if you feel good, you play good. The uniforms, travel gear, backpacks, fund-raising opportunities, getting out in the community, meeting people. Just building well-rounded athletes. And student athletes first – the study halls, the academic piece is major and just showing them the different avenues that sports can take them to. Those are some of the things that I plan on bringing over to East Central, just to make it the most successful program in Tulsa.”
As for his departure from Sapulpa, Bruner doesn’t harbor any ill will about what happened and views the experience as being all part of God’s plan.
“It was unfortunate the way it ended but I don’t have anything bad to say, my time at Sapulpa was great,” Bruner said. “God just sent me in a different direction. Sometimes God’s hands will move and he will make you uncomfortable and put you where you need to be and I feel like that’s what happened. I have no bad feelings towards anybody, it was just God’s timing for me to move on and do something that he wanted me to do. So that’s what I’m doing, going over to East Central.”
