South Kingstown boys tennis coach Andy Carr, left, consults with one of his players during Friday’s state title match.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

You can’t plan on becoming a high school coaching legend at 38 years of age.

Legends are built over a period of time, usually a lifetime.

You need to direct a lot of your teams to state championships to become a high school coaching legend and normally there isn’t enough time to do it before your 40th birthday — especially if you’re coaching at a public high school these days.

You can’t expect to develop the type of hometown reputation where, even though you’re still in your 30s, everybody from grammar school kids to grandparents knows you’re the coach.

You can’t, that is, unless you’re South Kingstown’s Andy Carr.

Friday afternoon, Carr, the head coach of the South Kingstown boys tennis team, directed the Rebels to their 10th consecutive Division I state title.

It’s the longest string of undisputed, consecutive state titles by a public high school sports team in the 70-plus years that the R.I. Interscholastic League has been holding state team competition. True, Coventry High has 16 straight state championship wrestling banners hanging on its gymnasium wall, but in 1990, the ninth year of that string, the Oakers shared the state crown with Warwick Vets.

The South Kingstown tennis team has been the only Division I champion for a straight decade.

You don’t win state team tennis titles without some great individual players, and Carr certainly has had some of the best players in Rhode Island in his lineup over the years. In six of the last nine years, a South Kingstown player has won the state singles title. But ask the South Kingstown players, the parents, school administrators, even opposing coaches, why the Rebels keep winning and they will tell you the foundation of their amazing success is Carr.

He’s now in his 13th year as the Rebels’ mentor and has directed his teams to titles in 11 of those 13 seasons. In his first year as head coach in 1996, South Kingstown won the Division II state title. A year later, the Rebels moved up to Division I, and in 1999 they began their record title run.

He takes teenagers who have been playing the individual sport of tennis since they were in kindergarten and gets them to think in terms of team pride, even with some teammates who hadn’t picked up a tennis racket before they reached high school. The star singles players have provided numerous points through the years, but several times the deciding points in state-title matches have come from singles or doubles players who didn’t start playing tennis until Carr, a South Kingstown middle school teacher, introduced them to the sport in either middle or high school.

Carr doesn’t have a name for it, but for a decade South Kingstown tennis players haven’t had any problem understanding his coaching philosophy.

“It’s the expectations he puts on his players. He expects you to excel in school and outside of school. I’m not sure other coaches do that,” said Kyle Burke, the Rebels’ top singles player and the defending state singles champion.

“Everyone is serious at practices because he expects you to behave as an adult,” Burke continued. “That’s what makes the difference in terms of maturity when we come out on the court and are ready for the pressure. We have been put under pressure all season by the team, the coach and the legacy we are trying to fulfill.”

Somehow, a member of Generation X with a Greatest Generation work ethic has convinced New Millennium teenagers to buy into the philosophy that hard work can be enjoyable.

“It’s very important to his kids. They really care,” Terry Lynch, South Kingstown athletic director, said about Carr’s quest for constant improvement. “He does all the little things. You go to one of his practices in the gym when it’s raining out and it’s just like being choreographed. They are doing all kinds of things to get better. He just works at it so hard. It’s very important to him, and his kids really respect him. What he says is gospel.”

In a sense, it’s a coaching career that may have been predestined. After all, he grew up as a coach’s son.

His father, Ray Carr, had a 30-year coaching career that included coaching football, wrestling and tennis at North Kingstown High, as well as a highly successful tenure as the Community College of Rhode Island tennis coach in the 1980s and early 1990s.

“My father has been the biggest influence on me by far, but I first got into it because I love the sport,” said Andy Carr, who started his coaching career as a South Kingstown assistant a year after he graduated from the URI in 1993.

“I had no idea what it was going to be like,” said Carr, an All-State tennis player at Narragansett High. “You get into it because you like athletics, and I like to compete. It’s another way of competing, even though you’re not playing. But I appreciate it so much more now than I did when I first started in the ’90s. The experience and the influence you can have on kids. … It’s definitely worth all the time we put in.”

He never planned it to be more than an athletic exercise, but in the process he and his players have done more than simply put a bunch of championship hardware in the South Kingstown High trophy case. The high school tennis team has become a South Kingstown source of pride.

“Our town rallies around us,’ said Burke. “If anyone mentions tennis in our town they immediately think of our high school team. I think the community should rally around the high school, and I don’t think you get that with private schools.”

“We have good people who support the program and are excited about tennis,” said Carr. “They have a good [recreation] program down in South County. If you can get a few good athletes every year that get into it, you have a good program.”

And, if you have a 38-year-old coaching legend.

jgillool@projo.com