Pacers coach Rick Carlisle has always had to take the winding road to NBA success

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The drive between the little upstate New York towns of Lisbon and Ogdensburg, by Rick Carlisle's recollection, would take about eight minutes. In that part of the world, in the St. Lawrence valley just a few miles south of Canada, that's like going next door.

That ride is probably a reason why Carlisle — the Indiana Pacers coach — is at the NBA Finals for a sixth time as a player, assistant coach and now a head coach.

The story behind the ride is this: Carlisle went to Lisbon Central, a school where everyone from kindergarten through 12th grade was housed in the same building — that's quite common in that part of the world — and was the first 1,000-point scorer there. But if he wanted to watch NBA games, the family had to hop in the car and head to Ogdensburg.

The reason? There was no cable TV in Lisbon at that time, and the aerial antenna at the family home couldn't pick up any NBA games.

“We had a thing, you turn the rotor in the direction and the antenna would move and it would either go towards Kingston, Ontario, or Watertown, New York,” Carlisle said. And back in those days we only got the CBS affiliate, and they didn’t have the NBA back in those early years. But we got Hockey Night in Canada."

And yes, Carlisle played hockey in those days. He just liked basketball more. That's why that eight-minute drive would get made, over and over, so he could see NBA games.

Fast forward to now, and Carlisle — who won a title with Boston as a player and with Dallas as a head coach — is four wins away from another championship.

“I can’t say enough about him and the respect I have for him,” said Mark Daigneault, whose Oklahoma City team will face off with Carlisle's Pacers when the NBA Finals start Thursday night. "I think the whole is better than the sum of the parts. Almost consistently across every year he’s ever coached, the team is better than their sum. I think that’s a reflection of him.

“His teams play a clear identity, stay in character through all the ups and downs. That identity has changed over the years based on his teams, the league trends. But his teams are always in character. This year is certainly no exception.”

There are parallels between Daigneault and Carlisle. Both are incredibly smart. Both might lean toward a dry sense of humor. And Daigneault isn't exactly a big-city guy, either. His hometown — Leominster, Massachusetts — has a population of about 43,000, which makes it an absolute metropolis compared to Lisbon and its population of about 4,300.

Big city, small town, no matter one's roots, Daigneault said everyone feels the same way getting to the finals.

“Every single person that’s participating in this, whether it’s coaches, players, staff, there was a time in their life when this was just a dream,” Daigneault said. “This wasn’t a foregone conclusion for them. That’s every player that’s participating. There’s a time when they were in their driveway shooting 1-on-0 with a basket counting down the end of the game. That’s what makes it so special to participate in.”

Carlisle was close friends with Hal Cohen, who played at nearby Canton Central and was part of Jim Boeheim's first class at Syracuse. Cohen was one of the first players from that part of the world to play basketball at a Division I level; he showed Carlisle the way. Carlisle went to prep school for a year before starting his college playing career at Maine, his lone Division I offer.

He wound up eventually transferring to Virginia and playing alongside Ralph Sampson. “Changed my life forever,” Carlisle said.

Carlisle got drafted in the third round in 1984 — “a round that no longer exists in the draft,” Carlisle says — and played in the league for parts of five seasons, with a brief stint with the CBA's Albany Patroons thrown in there as well. He was with the Patroons not long after one of their more successful coaches had left; that coach's name was Phil Jackson, who went on to win 11 NBA titles.

The road here, just like that road between Lisbon and Ogdensburg, was more than a bit winding.

“Had great coaching and a lot of things that were very fortunate,” Carlisle said. “I ended up getting drafted by Boston in a round that no longer exists in the draft. A lot of things fell my way. But I worked hard, too.”

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Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle listens during a news conference, Wednesday, June 4, 2025, ahead of Game 1 of the NBA Finals basketball series against the Oklahoma City Thunder in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings)

Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle, right, motions to players on the court as assistant coach Lloyd Pierce, far left, talks with guard Tyrese Haliburton (0) during the third quarter of Game 5 of the NBA basketball Eastern Conference finals against the New York Knicks, Thursday, May 29, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon, left, holds the trophy near head coach Rick Carlisle after the Pacers won Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals of the NBA basketball playoffs against the New York Knicks in Indianapolis, Saturday, May 31, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle stands on the sideline before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals of the NBA basketball playoffs against the New York Knicks in Indianapolis, Saturday, May 31, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)