High school basketball players are role models whether they want to be or not, a California basketball coach said in an interview with 6News before his speech Tuesday night at Kansas University.

Ken Carter, who in 1999 locked his championship team players out of the gym until their grades improved, spoke to about 500 people in the Kansas Union’s Woodruff Auditorium.

“Basketball is just the hook, education is always the goal,” Carter said in the earlier interview.

Carter was the head coach at Richmond, Calif., from 1997 to 2002. Since then, he has been working as a motivational speaker.

Carter’s coaching experiences inspired a movie called “Coach Carter,” which stars Samuel L. Jackson.