Darrell Sumpter, dedicated William Floyd basketball coach and beloved mentor, dies at 51

As a teenager, he was undisciplined, his friends and family recalled. But Darrell Sumpter learned from his mistakes and used that experience to become a mentor to kids going down the wrong road, becoming a positive force in the community where he was raised.

An assistant boys basketball coach at William Floyd High School since 2015 and a longtime volunteer who oversaw the district's youth basketball programs and booster club, Sumpter was driving his wife to a doctor's appointment when their 2002 Cadillac collided with a truck Friday on the westbound Sunrise Highway.

Susan Sumpter suffered broken ribs. But Darrell Sumpter was fatally injured in the crash, which occurred at 1:37 p.m. between Horseblock Road and the William Floyd Parkway, police said. The Shirley resident was 51.

Floyd coach Will Slinkosky said he was running practice for the team when school athletic director Brian Babst pulled him aside to tell him the news. Then he had to tell the kids.

"I told the kids, 'There's no college course, there's no lesson that can prepare you for what I've got to tell you right now,' " Slinkosky said Monday. "To them, the gym is their safe haven — and Coach D was their rock — and the hardest part is now that will be different ... It's been difficult to say the least ... Life doesn't prepare you for things like this."

A longtime employee of Stony Brook University Hospital, where he worked in the scheduling department, Darrell Sumpter was born March 11, 1973, and grew up in Mastic, the youngest of four children of Foster and Beaulah Sumpter. His father worked for the Transit Authority, his mother at Pilgrim State. But Sumpter admittedly was a wild child, he later said in a newspaper interview, who'd missed his chance to turn his basketball skills into higher education.

Susan Sumpter, a Floyd graduate who was a basketball cheerleader in high school, first met her future husband while she was working the overnight shift at the 7-Eleven in Mastic.

"He used to be one of the loiterers out in front," she said, "and he kept coming in and asking me, 'Hey, can I get a date?' I'd tell him: 'No, I have a boyfriend.' "

But, Sumpter was charming and charismatic, Susan Sumpter said. "He also said: 'But, I make the best fried chicken.' " So she told him to bring her some — and he did.

"It was," she said, "the best fried chicken."

And though she later learned Darrell hadn't made that meal, she came to love him dearly.

"He was so selfless," she said. "He put everybody above himself — and that won my heart."

The couple had three children: daughters Sierra, a senior at the University of Albany, and Dejiah, of Selden, and son Darrell Sumpter Jr., of Shirley. Sumpter also had two daughters from a prior relationship: Lindsey Ackerman, of Riverhead, and Jenel Colon, of Nassau County.

This week friends told of how Bob Hodgson, the late Floyd boys basketball coach, gave Sumpter his first break with the program, asking him to video the games when Darrell Jr. joined the youth program.

Later, he became a volunteer assistant coach, then a volunteer in charge of the boys and girls youth basketball programs in the district, and in 2015, a paid part-time assistant coach with the varsity team under Slinkosky.

"He'd get up at 4 a.m. to go to work at Stony Brook, then he'd be in the gym from 2:15 to 5 for practice, he'd go home for dinner, then be back in the gym with the youth program until 9 p.m." Slinkosky said.

An avid Knicks fan, Sumpter also ran holiday food drives, helped organize Senior Day, raised donations for the booster club. He even got his kids involved as volunteers.

"He always loved this community — the Mastic area," Darrell Jr. said. "And it honestly went beyond basketball. There's kids who went to Floyd and before my dad got involved in their lives they weren't going to graduate, but he got them on the right track ... Every definition of a bad kid? That'd been him.

"But he owned it, he knew where he'd gone wrong — and as soon as he met my mom, as soon as he'd had kids, it changed his life. It became about making sure his kids — and, the kids he was coaching — grew up to be great people. It was not about the sport, it was about the life lessons ... and, making sure that everybody knew he loved them."

Former Floyd star Anthony White, who played at St. Francis College, was Sumpter's nephew — son of his sister Valerie. And Sumpter helped guide Floyd to its first league title in 11 years in 2022-23, to a 22-0 record before a county championship game loss to Bay Shore in 2023-24 and to a 4-1 record this season — the Colonials in the midst of a 24-game winning streak in their league.

But, Slinkosky and Babst said, the loss of Sumpter will impact far more than basketball.

"I've known him since I was 12 years old," Babst said, noting Sumpter was friends with his sister, Debbie, in high school. "In this district there's a lot of kids in tough situations, who don't have the best home life, and because he was from here, Darrell knew that, knew how to reach them. He spent countless effort with kids who needed help. I don't even begin to know where we go without him."

Besides his parents and his five children, Sumpter is survived by his sister, Valerie White, of Mastic, brothers, Gerald, of North Carolina, and Foster, also known as Leon, of South Carolina, and granddaughter Lo'ren Moore, of Riverhead. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”