Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle Is Flying High After Earning His Pilot’s License This Offseason

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Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle had a busy offseason. Sure, from a basketball perspective, a lot happened in Dallas, as the team brought in Wesley Matthews and Deron Williams. There was also the entire DeAndre Jordan fiasco, which certainly couldn’t have been easy for Carlisle.

Somehow, while all of this was going on, Carlisle found the time to get his pilot license. According to ESPN, the 2012 Coach of the Year purchased a Cirrus SR22 turbo in July of 2014 and has managed to log around 180 hours of flying while achieving his instrument rating. Carlisle said that he has two reasons for doing this. First, he wanted the chance to visit his parents more frequently, as they live in New York near the state’s border with Canada and getting to fly up there on his own makes the trip a lot easier. Carlisle was also inspired by his younger brother, and said he wanted to have some kind of “midlife mental challenge.”

Carlisle was also motivated to immerse himself in a midlife mental challenge. He was inspired by his younger brother Bill, a father of 13 who retired after a two-decade career as a sheriff’s deputy and undercover detective to attend law school, graduating in two years on an accelerated program and passing the New York bar exam on his first attempt in the spring of 2014. Bill Carlisle then joined the Carlisle Law Firm, founded in 1961 by their father Preston, who at the age of 84 remains the managing partner and goes to the office every morning.

“I just thought that him taking on that kind of challenge midlife was really an awesome thing,” Carlisle says. “I was looking for something similar to do that was challenging, practical and useful. So I did a lot of research on flying.

It’s really interesting to see Carlisle challenge himself with something so unique, especially considering he’s only had the time to fly during the All-Star break and the offseason. Maybe once his basketball career is over, Carlisle will have a second career in aviation.

(via ESPN)

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