When a winner make - Coach Jackson`s Pages Basketball Coaching

How to Tell a Winner from a Loser
A winner says, “Let’s find out” – A loser says, “Nobody knows.”
When a winner makes a mistake, he says, “I was wrong” – When a loser makes a
mistake, he says, “It wasn’t my fault.”
A winner knows how and when to say “yes” and “no” – a loser says “Yes, but” and
“Perhaps not” at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons
A winner isn’t nearly as afraid of losing as a loser is secretly afraid of winning
A winner works harder than a loser and has more time – a loser is always “too busy”
to do what is necessary
A winner goes through a problem – a loser goes around it and never gets past it
A winner makes commitments – a loser makes promises
A winner shows he’s sorry by making up for it – a loser says, “I’m sorry,” but does
the same thing next time
A winner knows what to fight for and what to compromise on – a loser compromises
on what he shouldn’t and fights for what isn’t worthwhile fighting about
A winner says, “I’m good, but not as good as I ought to be” – a loser says, “I’m not as
bad as a lot of other people.”
A winner listens – a loser just waits until it’s his turn to talk
A winner would rather be admired than liked, although he would prefer both – a
loser would rather be liked than admired, and is even willing to pay the price of
mild contempt for it
A winner fells strong enough to be gentle – a loser is never gentle
A winner respects those who are superior to him and tries to learn something from
them – a loser resents those who are superior to him and tries to find chinks in their
armor
A winner explains – a loser explains away
To Any Athlete
There are little eyes upon you,
And they’re watching night and day;
There are little ears that quickly
Take in every word you say;
There are little hands all eager
To do anything you do;
And a little boy who’s dreaming
OF the day he’ll be like you.
You’re the little fellow’s idol;
You’re the wisest of the wise,
In his little mind about you,
No suspicions ever rise.
He believes in you devoutly,
Holds that all you can and do.
He will say and do, In your way
When he’s a grown up like you.
There’s a wide-eyed little fellow,
Who believes you’re always right,
And his ears are always open,
And he watches day and night;
You are setting an example
Every day in all you do,
For the little boy who’s waiting
To grow up to be like you
Yonder
Once I was afraid of dying,
Terrified of ever-lying,
Petrified of leaving family, home and friends.
Thoughts of absence from my dear ones,
Drew a melancholy tear once,
And a lonely, dreadful fear of when life ends.
But those days are long behind me;
Fear of leaving does not bind me,
And departure does not host a single care.
Peace does comfort as I ponder,
A reunion in the Yonder,
With my dearest who are waiting over there.
Why do optimists prevail?
They focus on how something can be done, not why it can’t be.
They are more confident.
They persevere through difficulties.
They are resilient, cope better with change, and bounce back quickly from
rejection and setbacks.
They set higher objectives and are more committed to their goals.
They are motivated by success to achieve even more.
They expect to influence results and thus try harder.
They are healthier and take fewer days off.
They are less likely to quit.
Two lumberjacks, a younger one and an older one, wanted to see who could cut
down the most trees in a single day. At the end of the day the winner was obvious.
The old lumberjack had won.
The younger man could not believe it! “How could you have cut down more trees
than I did?” he asked. “Every hour you sat down while I kept right on cutting. I
don’t understand. How could you have cut down more trees while sitting so
much?”
“When I sat down, I was sharpening my axe” the older lumberjack said. “Why
didn’t you stop to sharpen your axe?”
“I didn’t have time,” the younger man said. “I was too busy cutting!”
Sir John Templeton is supposed to have said that the four most dangerous words
in investing are "this time is different." Nothing directly comparable to
September 11 and its aftermath has ever happened in America, and so it would be
all too easy for us - advisor and investor alike - to surrender to this four-word
synthesis.
Harry Truman said that the only thing new in the world is the history you don't
know. But at a moment like this, when all seems different in terrible and
threatening ways, we may conclude that the real danger to us and our clients is in
the history we choose to ignore.
All real crisis is new and different in some respects. Pearl Harbor surely appeared
at the time to be something utterly without precedent in the American experience.
So did the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the Cambodian incursion and the
killings at Kent State, the confluence of OPEC and Watergate, stagflation, the
October 1987 stock market event, and even Long-Term Capital Management.
If one sees the current situation as unique, or entirely new - if one regards it
somehow as a break with history - there will be a terrible temptation to make The
Big Mistake. But would anyone, given another chance, sell out of his investments
in the days after December 7, 1941? And was the real challenge to America then
not infinitely greater than it is now?
The one truly unprecedented thing in human history, I think, is the success of the
United States - its institutions, its society, its economy and its markets. This
success is not separable from the crises we have encountered; it is, rather, a
fabric woven out of those challenges, and out of our particular genius for
mastering them.
If history is any guide, you don't "protect" long-term investment capital by taking
it out of the equity market, but by leaving it in, and thereby keeping it exposed to
the healing power of time - to the resilience of the American economy, and of the
markets which reflect it.
Investment decisions based on long-term and even multigenerational financial
goals usually turn out to be right, while current-events-driven speculation on
"what the market might do next" is usually wrong, and many people's lifetime
plans never recover from it.
We advisors can neither control nor be responsible for human nature, and a
predilection to pessimism will consume some of our clients no matter what we
say. But consider asking, "If the World Trade Center were still standing, would
you sell today?" If the answer is no, people are admitting that they're panicking
out of their long-term investments at (so far) cyclically low prices in a market
that's already down 30%. Surely that's a decision they're going to regret, and
sooner than later.
At extraordinary moments like this, when our clients are looking to us for
guidance, we have a fairly simple choice: we can either be part of the solution, or
we will surely be part of the problem. And the essential gift we have to offer our
clients is not prediction, but perspective. For, as Churchill said, the further we
look back, the further we may see ahead.
This time it isn't different.
ENLIGHTENED PERSPECTIVE
I've learned.... That the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an
elderly person.
I've learned.... That when you're in love, it shows.
I've learned.... That just one person saying to me, "You've made my day!"
makes my day.
I've learned.... That having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the
most peaceful feelings in the world.
I've learned.... That being kind is more important than being right.
I've learned.... That you should never say no to a gift from a child.
I've learned.... That I can always pray for someone when I don't have the
strength to help him in some other way.
I've learned.... That no matter how serious your life requires you to be, everyone
needs a friend to act goofy with.
I've learned.... That sometimes all a person needs is a hand to hold and a
heart to understand.
I've learned.... That simple walks with my father around the block on
summer nights when I was a child did wonders for me as an adult.
I've learned.... That life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it
gets to the end, the faster it goes.
I've learned.... That we should be glad God doesn't give us everything we
ask for.
I've learned.... That money doesn't buy class.
I've learned.... That it's those small daily happenings that make life so
spectacular.
I've learned... That under everyone's hard shell is someone who wants to be
appreciated and loved.
I've learned.... That the Lord didn't do it all in one day. What makes me
think I can?
I've learned.... That to ignore the facts does not change the facts.
I've learned.... That when you plan to get even with someone, you are only
letting that person continue to hurt you.
I've learned.... That love, not time, heals all wounds.
I've learned.... That the easiest way for me to grow as a person is to
surround myself with people smarter than I am.
I've learned.... That everyone you meet deserves to be greeted with a
smile.
I've learned.... That there's nothing sweeter than sleeping with your
babies and feeling their breath on your cheeks.
I've learned.... That no one is perfect until you fall in love with them.
I've learned.... That life is tough, but I'm tougher.
I've learned.... That opportunities are never lost; someone will take the
ones you miss.
I've learned.... That when you harbor bitterness, happiness will dock
elsewhere.
I've learned.... That I wish I could have told my Dad that I love him one
more time before he passed away.
I've learned.... That one should keep his words both soft and tender,
because tomorrow he may have to eat them.
I've learned.... That a smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks.
I've learned.... That I can't choose how I feel, but I can choose what I do
about it.
I've learned.... That when your newly born grandchild holds your little
finger in his little fist, that you're hooked for life.
I've learned.... That everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but
all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
I've learned ... That it is best to give advice in only two circumstances;
when it is requested and when it is a life threatening situation.
I've learned.... That the less time I have to work with, the more things I
get done.
Colin Powell’s Rules
1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2. Get mad, then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls,
your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done!
5. Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make
yours.
8. Check small things.
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision. Be demanding.
12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
The following are negative thinking quotes from some very prominent people.
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University,1929.
“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad.”
A president of Michigan Savings Bank advising Horace Rackham (Henry Ford's
lawyer) not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, 1903. Rackham ignored the
advice bought $5,000 worth of stock and sold it several years later for $12.5
million.
“We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”
Decca Records rejecting the Beatles 1962
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H Duell, US commissioner of patents 1899
“Who wants to hear actors talk?”
Harry M Warner, Warner Brothers 1927
“What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”
Western Union president William Orton, rejecting Alexander Graham Bell's offer
to sell his struggling telephone company to Western Union for $100,000.
“Television won't be able to hold on to any market after the first six months. People will
soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
Darryl F Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox 1946
“For the majority of people, the use of tobacco has a beneficial effect.”
Dr Ian MacDonald. Los Angeles surgeon quoted in Newsweek, 1963
God has a positive answer:
You say: "It's impossible"
God says: All things are possible
(Luke 18:27)
You say: "I'm too tired"
God says: I will give you rest
(Matthew 11:28-30)
You say: "Nobody really loves me"
God says: I love you
(John 3:16 & John 3:34)
You say: "I can't go on"
God says: My grace is sufficient
(II Corinthians 12:9 & Psalm 91:15)
You say: "I can't figure things out"
God says: I will direct your steps
(Proverbs 3:5-6)
You say: "I can't do it"
G! od says: You can do all things
(Philippians 4:13)
You say: "I'm not able"
God says: I am able
(II Corinthians 9:8)
You say: "It's not worth it"
God says: It will be worth it
(Roman 8:28)
You say: "I can't forgive myself"
God says: I Forgive you
(Roman 8:1 & 1 John 1:9)
You say: "I can't manage"
God says: I will supply all your needs
(Philippians 4:19)
You say: "I'm afraid"
God says: I have not given you a spirit of fear
(II Timothy 1:7)
You say: "I'm always worried and frustrated"
God says: Cast all your cares on ME
(I Peter 5:7)
You say: "I don't have enough faith"
God says: I've given everyone a measure of faith
(Romans 12:3)
You say: "I'm not smart enough"
God says: I give you wisdom
(I Corinthians 1:30)
You say: "I feel all alone"
God says: I will never leave you or forsake you
(Hebrews 13:5)
Believe God is there just for you..
Defining toughness in college hoops
By Jay Bilas
ESPN.com
I have heard the word "toughness" thrown around a lot lately. Reporters on television, radio and
in print have opined about a team or player's "toughness" or quoted a coach talking about his
team having to be "tougher" to win.
Then, in almost coordinated fashion, I would
watch games and see player upon player
thumping his chest after a routine play, angrily
taunting an opponent after a blocked shot,
getting into a shouting match with an opposing
player, or squaring up nose-to-nose as if a fight
might ensue. I see players jawing at each other,
trying to "intimidate" other players. What a
waste of time. That is nothing more than fake
toughness, and it has no real value.
I often wonder: Do people really understand
what coaches and experienced players mean
when they emphasize "toughness" in basketball?
Or is it just some buzzword that is thrown
around haphazardly without clear definition or
understanding? I thought it was the latter, and I Playing against the likes of Ralph Sampson, Jay Bilas
learned the value of keeping his hands up to deny
wrote a short blog item about it a couple of
and discourage a pass.
weeks ago.
The response I received was overwhelming. Dozens of college basketball coaches called to tell
me that they had put the article up in the locker room, put it in each player's locker, or had gone
over it in detail with their teams.
Memphis coach John Calipari called to say that he had his players post the definition of
toughness over their beds because he believed that true "toughness" was the one thing that his
team needed to develop to reach its potential. I received messages from high school coaches who
wanted to relay the definition of toughness to their players and wanted to talk about it further.
Well, I got the message that I should expound upon what I consider toughness to be. It may not
be what you think.
Toughness is something I had to learn the hard way, and something I had no real idea of until I
played college basketball. When I played my first game in college, I thought that toughness was
physical and based on how much punishment I could dish out and how much I could take. I
thought I was tough.
I found out pretty quickly that I wasn't, but I toughened up over time, and I got a pretty good
understanding of toughness through playing in the ACC, for USA Basketball, in NBA training
camps, and as a professional basketball player in Europe. I left my playing career a heck of a lot
tougher than I started it, and my only regret is that I didn't truly "get it" much earlier in my
playing career.
When I faced a tough opponent, I wasn't worried that I would get hit -- I was concerned that I
would get sealed on ball reversal by a tough post man, or that I would get boxed out on every
play, or that my assignment would sprint the floor on every possession and get something easy
on me. The toughest guys I had to guard were the ones who made it tough on me.
Toughness has nothing to do with size, physical strength or athleticism. Some players may be
born tough, but I believe that toughness is a skill, and it is a skill that can be developed and
improved. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo always says, "Players play, but tough players win."
He is right. Here are some of the ways true toughness is
exhibited in basketball:
Set a good screen: The toughest players to guard are the
players who set good screens. When you set a good screen, you
are improving the chances for a teammate to get open, and you
are greatly improving your chances of getting open. A good
screen can force the defense to make a mistake. A lazy or bad
screen is a waste of everyone's time and energy. To be a tough
player, you need to be a "screener/scorer," a player who screens
hard and immediately looks for an opportunity on offense. On
the 1984 U.S. Olympic Team, Bob Knight made Michael
Jordan set a screen before he could get a shot. If it is good
enough for Jordan, arguably the toughest player ever, it is good
enough for you.
Set up your cut: The toughest players make hard cuts, and set
up their cuts. Basketball is about deception. Take your defender
one way, and then plant the foot opposite of the direction you
Stephen Curry's effectiveness
not from his strength or
want to go and cut hard. A hard cut may get you a basket, but it comes
size, but because he's constantly in
may also get a teammate a basket. If you do not make a hard
motion trying to find an open look.
cut, you will not get anyone open. Setting up your cut, making the proper read of the defense,
and making a hard cut require alertness, good conditioning and good concentration. Davidson's
Stephen Curry is hardly a physical muscle-man, but he is a tough player because he is in constant
motion, he changes speeds, he sets up his cuts, and he cuts hard. Curry is hard to guard, and he is
a tough player.
Talk on defense: The toughest players talk on defense, and communicate with their teammates.
It is almost impossible to talk on defense and not be in a stance, down and ready, with a vision of
man and ball. If you talk, you let your teammates know you are there, and make them and
yourself better defenders. It also lets your opponent know that you are fully engaged.
Jump to the ball: When on defense, the tough defenders move as the ball moves. The toughest
players move on the flight of the ball, not when it gets to its destination. And the toughest players
jump to the ball and take away the ball side of the cut. Tough players don't let cutters cut across
their face -- they make the cutter change his path.
Don't get screened: No coach can give a player the proper footwork to get through every screen.
Tough players have a sense of urgency not to get screened and to get through screens so that the
cutter cannot catch the ball where he wants to. A tough player makes the catch difficult.
Get your hands up: A pass discouraged is just as good as a pass denied. Tough players play
with their hands up to take away vision, get deflections and to discourage a pass in order to allow
a teammate to cover up. Cutters and post players will get open, if only for a count. If your hands
are up, you can keep the passer from seeing a momentary opening.
Play the ball, see your man: Most defenders see the ball and hug their man, because they are
afraid to get beat. A tough defender plays the ball and sees his man. There is a difference.
Get on the floor: In my first road game as a freshman, there was a loose ball that I thought I
could pick up and take the other way for an easy one. While I was bending over at the waist, one
of my opponents dived on the floor and got possession of the ball. My coach was livid. We lost
possession of the ball because I wasn't tough enough to get on the floor for it. I tried like hell
never to get out-toughed like that again.
Close out under control: It is too easy to fly at
a shooter and think you are a tough defender. A
tough defender closes out under control, takes
away a straight line drive and takes away the
shot. A tough player has a sense of urgency but
has the discipline to do it the right way.
Post your man, not a spot: Most post players
just blindly run to the low block and get into a
shoving match for a spot on the floor. The
toughest post players are posting their defensive
The first player to get to the floor is usually the one
man. A tough post player is always open, and
to come up with any loose ball.
working to get the ball to the proper angle to get
a post feed. Tough post players seal on ball reversal and call for the ball, and they continue to
post strong even if their teammates miss them.
Run the floor: Tough players sprint the floor, which drags the defense and opens up things for
others. Tough players run hard and get "easy" baskets, even though there is nothing easy about
them. Easy baskets are hard to get. Tough players don't take tough shots -- they work hard to
make them easy.
Play so hard, your coach has to take you out: I was a really hard worker in high school and
college. But I worked and trained exceptionally hard to make playing easier. I was wrong. I once
read that Bob Knight had criticized a player of his by saying, "You just want to be comfortable
out there!" Well, that was me, and when I read that, it clicked with me. I needed to work to
increase my capacity for work, not to make it easier to play. I needed to work in order to be more
productive in my time on the floor. Tough players play so hard that their coaches have to take
them out to get rest so they can put them back in. The toughest players don't pace themselves.
Get to your teammate first: When your teammate lays his body on the line to dive on the floor
or take a charge, the tough players get to him first to help him back up. If your teammate misses
a free throw, tough players get to him right away. Tough players are also great teammates.
Take responsibility for your teammates: Tough players expect a lot from their teammates, but
they also put them first. When the bus leaves at 9 a.m., tough players not only get themselves
there, but they also make sure their teammates are up and get there, too. Tough players take
responsibility for others in addition to themselves. They make sure their teammates eat first, and
they give credit to their teammates before taking it themselves.
Take a charge: Tough players are in a stance, playing the ball, and alert in coming over from the
weak side and taking a charge. Tough players understand the difference between being in the
right spot and being in the right spot with the intention of stopping somebody. Some players will
look puzzled and say, "But I was in the right spot." Tough players know that they have to get to
the right spot with the sense of urgency to stop
someone.
Get in a stance: Tough players don't play
straight up and down and put themselves in the
position of having to get ready to get ready.
Tough players are down in a stance on both ends
of the floor, with feet staggered and ready to
move. Tough players are the aggressor, and the
aggressor is in a stance.
Finish plays: Tough players don't just get
fouled, they get fouled and complete the play.
The toughest players never shy away from taking a
They don't give up on a play or assume that a
charge.
teammate will do it. A tough player plays
through to the end of the play and works to finish every play.
Work on your pass: A tough player doesn't have his passes deflected. A tough player gets
down, pivots, pass-fakes, and works to get the proper angle to pass away from the defense and
deliver the ball.
Throw yourself into your team's defense: A tough player fills his tank on the defensive end,
not on offense. A tough player is not deterred by a missed shot. A tough player values his
performance first by how well he defended.
Take and give criticism the right way: Tough players can take criticism without feeling the
need to answer back or give excuses. They are open to getting better and expect to be challenged
and hear tough things. You will never again in your life have the opportunity you have now at
the college level: a coaching staff that is totally and completely dedicated to making you and
your team better. Tough players listen and are not afraid to say what other teammates may not
want to hear, but need to hear.
Show strength in your body language: Tough players project confidence and security with
their body language. They do not hang their heads, do not react negatively to a mistake of a
teammate, and do not whine and complain to officials. Tough players project strength, and do not
cause their teammates to worry about them. Tough players do their jobs, and their body language
communicates that to their teammates -- and to their opponents.
Catch and face: Teams that press and trap are banking on the receiver's falling apart and making
a mistake. When pressed, tough players set up their cuts, cut hard to an open area and present
themselves as a receiver to the passer. Tough players catch, face the defense, and make the right
read and play, and they do it with poise. Tough players do not just catch and dribble; they catch
and face.
Don't get split: If you trap, a tough player gets shoulder-to-shoulder with his teammate and does
not allow the handler to split the trap and gain an advantage on the back side of the trap.
Be alert: Tough players are not "cool." Tough players are alert and active, and tough players
communicate with teammates so that they are alert, too. Tough players echo commands until
everyone is on the same page. They understand the best teams play five as one. Tough players
are alert in transition and get back to protect the basket and the 3-point line. Tough players don't
just run back to find their man, they run back to stop the ball and protect the basket.
Concentrate, and encourage your teammates to concentrate: Concentration is a skill, and
tough players work hard to concentrate on every play. Tough players go as hard as they can for
as long as they can.
It's not your shot; it's our shot: Tough players
don't take bad shots, and they certainly don't
worry about getting "my" shots. Tough players
work for good shots and understand that it is not
"my" shot, it is "our" shot. Tough players
celebrate when "we" score.
Box out and go to the glass every time: Tough
players are disciplined enough to lay a body on
someone. They make first contact and go after
the ball. And tough players do it on every
team can be great defensively without
possession, not just when they feel like it. They No
communication and concentration.
understand defense is not complete until they
secure the ball.
Take responsibility for your actions: Tough players make no excuses. They take responsibility
for their actions. Take James Johnson for example. With 17 seconds to go in Wake's game
against Duke on Wednesday, Jon Scheyer missed a 3-pointer that bounced right to Johnson. But
instead of aggressively pursuing the ball with a sense of urgency, Johnson stood there and waited
for the ball to come to him. It never did. Scheyer grabbed it, called a timeout and the Blue Devils
hit a game-tying shot on a possession they never should've had. Going after the loose ball is
toughness -- and Johnson didn't show it on that play. But what happened next? He re-focused,
slipped a screen for the winning basket, and after the game -- when he could've been basking
only in the glow of victory -- manned up to the mistake that could've cost his team the win. "That
was my responsibility -- I should have had that," Johnson said of the goof. No excuses.
Shouldering the responsibility. That's toughness.
Look your coaches and teammates in the eye: Tough players never drop their heads. They
always look coaches and teammates in the eye, because if they are talking, it is important to them
and to you.
Move on to the next play: Tough players don't waste time celebrating a good play or lamenting
a bad one. They understand that basketball is too fast a game to waste time and opportunities
with celebratory gestures or angry reactions. Tough players move on to the next play. They know
that the most important play in any game is the next one.
Be hard to play against, and easy to play with: Tough players make their teammates' jobs
easier, and their opponents' jobs tougher.
Make every game important: Tough players don't categorize opponents and games. They know
that if they are playing, it is important. Tough players understand that if they want to play in
championship games, they must treat every game as a championship game.
Make getting better every day your goal: Tough players come to work every day to get better,
and keep their horizons short. They meet victory and defeat the same way: They get up the next
day and go to work to be better than they were the day before. Tough players hate losing but are
not shaken or deterred by a loss. Tough players enjoy winning but are never satisfied. For tough
players, a championship or a trophy is not a goal; it is a destination. The goal is to get better
every day.
When I was playing, the players I respected most were not the best or most talented players. The
players I respected most were the toughest players. I don't remember anything about the players
who talked a good game or blocked a shot and acted like a fool. I remember the players who
were tough to play against.
Anybody can talk. Not anybody can be tough.
Paul Westhead: Never slowing down
by David Friedman / January 15, 2008
No professional basketball coach is a bigger believer in fast break basketball than Paul
Westhead. “I know what all the pundits say: everyone says that you can run for a while but
when you get to the playoffs that you have to slow down and that strong, beat ‘em up
defensive teams always win,” Westhead says. “I never believed that and I still don’t. My only
advice is if you are a speed team that gets into the playoffs, play faster—that’s what you do,
so crank it up another notch, rather than leveling it off and playing the way that everyone
else thinks that you are supposed to play.”
Westhead is known for his out of the box thinking but that was not his mindset at the start of his coaching
career. “I came in as a 30 year old Division I head coach at LaSalle. I played for Jack Ramsay at St.
Joe’s,” Westhead recalls. “We were all taught to be fundamentally sound and I probably was more of a
defensive minded guy than an offensive minded one. In the early 1970s, two things happened. One, I
went to Puerto Rico and coached. I would pick up a team and I observed that they were going up and
down the court and making on the fly 22 foot jump shots. I said to myself that it takes my guys six passes
and five good screens to shoot that open 22 foot shot—and then my guys miss! These guys are running
down the court, catching the ball and shooting an open 22 foot shot without any problem."
"That said to me that if they can play fast and score, why do we have to do all this hard work on offensive
schemes? Within a year, I met up with Sonny Allen, who had won a Division II championship at Old
Dominion University, and he showed me his fast break system. I put that together with what I had seen in
Puerto Rico. When I was leaving, he said, ‘Coach, you have to be a little bit crazy to do this’ and I said, ‘I
don’t have any problem with that.’”
Westhead led the LaSalle Explorers to a 142-105 record in nine seasons, including two trips to the NCAA
tournament and one NIT berth. He became an assistant to LA Lakers Coach Jack McKinney in 1979
but was named the head coach just 14 games into the 1979-80 season after McKinney suffered a serious
head injury as a result of a bicycle accident.
The Lakers went 60-22—including 50-18 with Westhead at the helm—and then they won the 1980 NBA
Finals four games to two over Julius Erving’s Philadelphia 76ers. Game six of that series will always be
remembered for the heroics of Magic Johnson, who jumped center for the injured Kareem AbdulJabbar, played guard, forward and center and had 42 points, 15 rebounds and seven assists in a 123107 victory.
Johnson suffered a knee injury that caused him to miss 45 games in the 1980-81 season. The Lakers still
finished second in the Pacific Division but they lost two games to one to Houston in a first round miniseries, suffering both defeats at home. The Lakers started out 7-4 in 1981-82 but owner Jerry Buss fired
Westhead and replaced him with assistant coach Pat Riley, who guided the team to a championship that
season and three more titles over the next six years.
“Yeah, that was difficult,” Westhead says of his sudden dismissal. “I don’t think that was so much about
pace or style of play. Even though I was an experienced basketball coach—I had been in college for a
dozen years, nine as a head coach—and I knew the game, I knew how to coach basketball, I didn’t
understand the professional game. I didn’t understand the intricacies of not just how professional athletes
like to be treated but how you have to project to them and the only way that you find that out is
by experience."
"I don’t think it was necessarily my fault or their fault but that I just didn’t understand it that well. It involved
players being paid, players and their agents, owners and general managers and how they want to deal
with players because of trade possibilities—that is a whole new world to a college coach who recruits and
brings in new players and then the others graduate. I learned a lot from looking back at that experience
so that when I went back into the NBA I was more prepared to deal with those issues.”
Johnson publicly expressed displeasure with the team and had asked to be traded just prior to
Westhead’s firing, so it is commonly assumed that Johnson orchestrated Westhead’s ouster.
“I think that was an easy one for one (connection to make) when that happened,” Westhead says. “I don’t
think that Magic was responsible for that. I think that there were a bunch of other things that were
spinning around.” Westhead speaks without rancor about his brief time as Lakers coach: “I will say about
my Lakers experience that up until a few months ago it was my one and only championship, so I am
happy for the Lakers experience.”
Westhead’s next stint as a NBA coach was even briefer, as he guided the Chicago Bulls to a 28-54
record in 1982-83. After that, he returned to the college game, coaching at Loyola-Marymount from 198590. He quickly turned the team into a powerhouse by employing a non-stop fast break offense combined
with a relentless full court pressing defense. From 1988-1990, Westhead’s LMU teams went 27-3, 20-10
and 23-5 respectively, earning NCAA tournament berths each year.
LMU’s Hank Gathers led the NCAA in scoring and rebounding (32.7 ppg, 13.7 rpg) in 1989 and Bo
Kimble led the NCAA in scoring in 1990 (35.3 ppg). Tragically, Gathers collapsed and died during a
game near the end of the 1990 season. LMU dedicated the rest of that season to his memory, and Kimble
shot the first free throw of each NCAA tournament game left handed to honor Gathers. LMU defeated
defending champion Michigan and made it to the Elite Eight before falling to UNLV, who went on to win
the 1990 national title.
The LMU years provided some of Westhead’s fondest basketball memories, foremost among them being
what he calls “the overall thrill of watching a team that knew that they could play as fast as the wind and
defend full court for 40-plus minutes—they would show up in the toughest situations and have smiles on
their faces because they could look at the other team and say, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to win tonight,
but you’re going to be tired.’ They knew that the pace was dictated by them—by our team. Any time that
you can coach a team that you know—not that you’re hoping but you know—that the game is going to be
played your way, win or lose, that is fun.”
Westhead says that those LMU teams completely bought into his system more than any other team he
has ever coached: “No question. They bought in and then what happens once you get it is the next
season with the new players that you bring in is that they buy in or they’re pushed aside: ‘This is the way
we play. When you come here, you play this way.’ I never had to say a word. You need players to buy in,
whether you are talking about guards, forwards or centers. For me, I need midrange players who can run
and who can shoot—a player who can play the forward position, who can play inside or outside. You
need players who are committed to run. I have always had players—when I have had good fast break
teams—who on other teams would be outside perimeter players but when playing for me they thrived
going inside. Because of the speed of the game, they can get inside before defenses lock down. If you go
slowly then you need a terrific 6-10 post player because he is going to be double teamed and triple
teamed. If you go fast, you can have a 6-3 player playing inside because he will beat the thrust of the
defense.”
Speaking of defense, critics snipe that Westhead’s system ignores that part of the game, citing what
happened after Westhead’s success at LMU paved the way for him to return to the NBA as a head coach,
this time in Denver. His 1990-91 Nuggets averaged 119.9 ppg, the most points an NBA team scored
since Doug Moe’s run and gun 1984-85 Denver team put up 120.0 ppg—but while Moe’s Nuggets gave
up 117.6 ppg, Westhead’s squad surrendered 130.8 ppg, shattering the all-time record, and they won just
20 games.
“The team that I had, the guys played about as hard and well as they could,” Westhead says. “It was one
of those transition teams where all of the established great players had just left or retired—Alex English,
Fat Lever, they all left prior to my arrival. We had a young nucleus on the team that really probably wasn’t
experienced enough to win at any pace. If we would have played at a slow pace, the differential probably
would have been that we scored 70 and gave up 80.”
The results of Westhead’s second season in Denver support that analysis. The Nuggets drafted
defensive stopper Dikembe Mutombo, who made the All-Star team and finished fifth in the league in
blocked shots. Westhead pulled back the reins and Denver scored just 99.7 ppg but the Nuggets only
improved to 24 wins and Westhead was fired. “Ultimately, to win—fast or slow—you need to have a talent
level on your roster that is a cut above at least half of the teams,” Westhead concludes. “You have to give
yourself a chance. Ultimately, there is no disputing talent.”
In the past decade and a half, Westhead has literally traveled around the coaching world, working as a
head coach in Japan, in the new ABA and also for four years at George Mason University. He also was
an assistant coach for Golden State and Orlando. Westhead took his fast break style to the WNBA in
2006 when the Phoenix Mercury hired him. Perhaps for the first time since his LMU days, Westhead had
a team that really bought in to what he was teaching. The 2006 Mercury smashed the WNBA singleseason scoring record by averaging 87.1 ppg. In 2007, they broke the record again by scoring 89.0 ppg.
True to his philosophy, rather than slowing the game down in the postseason the Mercury sped things up,
scoring 95.8 ppg in the playoffs en route to the franchise’s first championship.
Westhead very much enjoyed coaching in the WNBA and would have continued doing it if not for the fact
that his friend P.J. Carlesimo became Seattle’s head coach and offered him a job as an assistant coach,
which Westhead accepted. Carlesimo has called Westhead the best assistant coach in the NBA and he
believes that Westhead deserves another shot at being an NBA head coach.
Gable gaining?
Tailbacks Joe McKnight and Allen Bradford did not participate in most of practice because of
knee soreness, so C.J. Gable and Curtis McNeal shared first-team snaps.
Despite starting every regular-season game in 2008, Gable has been buried on the depth chart since
fumbling in the regular-season finale against UCLA and the Rose Bowl against Penn State.
If McKnight or Bradford remain sidelined, Gable could finally get an opportunity.
"He's been waiting and he's done a great job of being patient," Carroll said. "I don't mind him being
frustrated, I think he should be, the kind of guy he is and the kind of competitor that he is.
"I hope he gets the chance to jump in there and play some more in really critical situations because
he can answer that call. He's done it for years and I know he can now."
"Basketball is a game of habits," Howland said. "In order to get good at something, you need a lot of
different opportunities to get repetitions."
During a recent practice -- the one session each year that outsiders are allowed to watch -- the coach
put that philosophy into action.
Shooters were lectured on keeping their balance, jumping straight up and down, holding form. Big
men were coached on setting the double-screen, shoulder-to-shoulder, timing it just right.
An inveterate worrier, forever sweating the details, Howland overlooked nothing.
"What do you say in the post?" he called to center Anthony Stover. "Ball, ball, ball."
The freshmen had been warned by older players to expect a lot of coaching, not always delivered in a
gentle tone of voice.
"He's tough," Reeves Nelson said of Howland. "He'll definitely get in your face."
The big forward, accustomed to working inside, is learning to defend on the perimeter. His
classmate, Mike Moser, faced a tough week after allowing Concordia players to penetrate repeatedly,
thereby breaking a tenet of UCLA's defense: Stay in front of the ball.
The coach was not happy, saying, "We've got to have better practices and understand how hard it's
going to be."
Seniors such as Michael Roll and Nikola Dragovic are not exactly thrilled about the remedial work,
but they see value in it, even for themselves.
"Maybe none of us have really done it over the summer, you know, the close-out drills or box-out
drills," Roll said. "They just kind of sharpen up your skills."
This is not the first time Howland has encountered a dearth of experience -- he recalls a similar
squad during his early coaching years at Northern Arizona.
It was suggested that, as a teacher, he might actually enjoy the task.
But mentoring a young team in Flagstaff isn't like undertaking the same job under a microscope in
Westwood. And, given last Wednesday night's performance, all the work yet to be done, Howland is
hardly jubilant.
"It's different, it's not fun," he said. "I wouldn't describe it as fun."
Four Characteristics of a Winner
Introduction
How many of you guys enjoy the feeling you get after you win a football game? We all want to
be winners, don't we? It makes us feel good. Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay
Packers, summed up the way most of us feel about the subject when he proclaimed: ‘Winning is
not everything; it is the only thing.'"
What I want to do in the next few minutes is share with you a few things that I have learned
about what it takes to be a winner.
Four Characteristics
1. A Winner Knows What it Means to Be a Winner
Let's define the term "winner":
The most common definition is "the person or team with the best score (i.e. points, goals, runs,
time, etc.)."
There is nothing wrong with keeping score; competition would be pretty meaningless without it.
However, winning involves more than just beating your opponent on the scoreboard.
A better definition of a winner is "someone who gives 100 percent of their effort in preparation
for and during competition."
An Example: Gabriella Anderson-Schiess
Let's go back to the Women's Marathon at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It was a
very hot day. Women had to run a course through the streets of Los Angeles. The finish line was
inside Olympic Coliseum. Runners entered the stadium on one side and had to run a lap around
the track before crossing the finish line. Spectators had witnessed numerous runners enter the
stadium and cross the finish line before the Swiss runner, Gabriella Anderson-Schiess, came into
view. Something was very wrong. The woman was staggering back and forth between lanes and
dragging one of her legs as if partially paralyzed. She was obviously suffering from an acute case
of exhaustion and heat stroke. Within moments of entering the stadium, a paramedic team
spotted her, and rushed over to her to administer first aid. Then an amazing thing happened.
Rather than allowing the paramedics to help her, she motioned. them to stay away from her.
Despite her intense pain, she was determined to finish the race. After dragging her tortured body
around the track, she crossed the finish line, and she collapsed in a heap. The crowd gave her a
standing ovation.
Even though Gabriella did not come in first place that day, I would argue that she was very
definitely a winner. I believe those who saw her would say the same. Why is she a winner?
Because she pushed herself to the very limit of her abilities in spite of the obstacles, and she
refused to give up.
Being a winner involves giving everything you've got regardless of the circumstances you may
be facing (i.e. pain, winning, losing, etc.).
Notice that by this definition, a person can be a winner without necessarily beating the opponent,
as long as he or she performs to the full potential throughout the game.
Notice, too, that by this definition you must be considered something less than a winner if you
beat your opponent on the scoreboard but fail to give 100 percent of what you've got.
2. A Winner Must Set High Goals
An old adage says, "If you are aiming at nothing, you'll hit it every time."
People who set goals may not always reach them, but they will almost always achieve more than
those who set no goals at all.
Example: Glen Cunningham
Glen was the world record holder in the mile back in the 1920s and 1930s, running a 4:06-minute
mile. But what few people know is that he was never supposed to walk, let alone run. When he
was a child, he was severely burned in a household fi re. He lost all of the toes on his left foot as
well as much of the muscle tissue in his legs. Doctors said he would probably never walk again.
Refusing to give up, Cunningham decided that he would not only walk again, but that he would
run. And now you know the rest of the story.
Glen overcame incredible obstacles and accomplished what he did because he set high goals and
worked hard to achieve them. There's no telling what we could do if we did the same.
3. A Winner is Disciplined
Setting high goals is a waste of time if you aren't willing to work hard to achieve them.
Example: Emil Zatopek
He was one of the stars of the 1952 Summer Olympic Games, winning three gold medals. He
held almost every world record for distances over 5000 meters. And he trained more than six
hours each day. When asked what the key to his success was, he replied, "I run until I hurt. That's
when I begin my training program ... I've learned that if I can just get beyond fatigue, there is a
reserve of power that I never dreamed I had, and then I go on to run my best races."
Now you aren't in a sport where you are required to run 10,000 meters, but the same principle
still applies:
You must discipline yourself to work hard during practice and during the game.
4. A Winner Has Strong Motivation
If you are not highly motivated, you are not going to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary
to reach your full potential as an athlete.
Now, there are different sources of motivation.
What motivates you to push yourself?
Some examples could include:




The thrill of winning
It makes you feel good about yourself
To impress others, such as friends, parents, or a girlfriend or boyfriend
To gain recognition
Some types of motivation are stronger than others, depending on the person and the situation.
Potentially one of the strongest sources of motivation is a spiritual one and comes from having a
personal relationship with God – the One who gave you talents and abilities in the first place.
Many well-known athletes claim that their faith in God provides them with their strongest source
of motivation to be the best they can be. These include:





David Robinson
Orel Hershiser
Reggie White
Michelle Akers (U.S. Women's Soccer)
Jackie Joyner-Kersey
Conclusion
Review
Let's summarize the four characteristics of a winner:
1. A winner knows what it means to be a winner.
2. A winner must set high goals.
3. A winner is disciplined.
4. A winner has strong motivation.
Wrap Up
Tell the team you would like to get their feedback and find out what they thought about what you
said. Ask that each person take a comment card and pencil, which you (or your assistant) will
pass out to them. Ask them to complete the top portion of the card (name, address, etc.). Wait
until most of them have completed that section before moving on.
Inform them that it would be very helpful if they would comment about what you said to them:
Was it helpful? Why or why not?
When most have finished writing, briefly describe an article related to your sports topic that
would like to offer them. Ask them to put an "x" in the upper right hand corner of their card if
they want a copy of the article. Then tell them that you will make arrangements with each one
who responds to get copies to them. Be sure to remind those who want an article to include their
phone numbers on the card.
Ask them to fold their cards in half and pass them (and the pencils) to the front of the room or to
the outside of their aisles so you can collect them.
Thank the coach for the opportunity to talk to his team.
Follow-Up
In the next day or two, call the students who wanted the related article and arrange to meet with
them at a McDonald's or other location after school one day (preferably with two or more
students at a time).
After spending some time getting to know them, ask them what they thought about the team
meeting (specifically what you said about the spiritual motivation for competition), and then
transition into an explanation of the gospel.
Max Good, the Loyola Marymount Lions' roarer
The coach makes himself heard loud and clear as he helps LMU to
improve sharply, with victories over Notre Dame, USC and Long
Beach State.
Coach Max Good has led Loyola Marymount to nine wins this season, more than the last two seasons combined.
(Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times / January 7, 2010)
All Max Good ever promised his players was a pair of sneakers and a hard time.
He has roused his teams before 5 a.m. for practice and challenged young men one-third his age to
fight. The only thing he runs harder than his players is his mouth, which tends to spew words that
would have made George Carlin uncomfortable.
When the late Sister Peg Dolan, one of the matriarchs of Loyola Marymount, met the Lions
basketball coach, she told him her seat was behind the team bench. Good suggested she move
elsewhere because of his colorful language.
"Max," Dolan said, "I grew up in Brooklyn and there's nothing you can say I haven't heard before.
You just be yourself."
Good being Good has been magnificent for Loyola Marymount's long-suffering basketball program.
The Lions (9-9) have already won more games than they did the last two seasons combined, going
into a West Coast Conference game tonight at Gersten Pavilion against Santa Clara (8-12). With
victories over Notre Dame, USC and Long Beach State, LMU might be one of the better teams in
Southern California.
Not that Good could ever bring himself to utter that.
"I just want to be the best team in Westchester," said Good, 68, who took over the LMU program last
season after Bill Bayno resigned because of depression.
That would be good enough for players tired of walking through airports with LMU gear on only to
draw inquiries from people unfamiliar with the Jesuit school near Los Angeles International Airport.
Twenty years after the Lions' stirring run to the NCAA tournament's Elite Eight, this team might
finally give the school's fans something to be proud of besides Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble.
They committed only eight turnovers during an 87-85 triumph over Notre Dame last month at South
Bend, Ind., while using a starting lineup composed of three sophomores, a freshman and a junior.
The team does not have a senior on its roster.
That's not to say there are not moments when they still need training wheels. The Lions faltered late
in losses against Pepperdine and San Francisco to open conference play, sapping some of the
momentum from a recent six-game winning streak.
But there is promise in a group that includes transfers Drew Viney and Larry Davis in addition to a
solid freshman class and a core of returners from the team that was 3-28 last season.
If the Lions seem fundamentally sound, it's because Good stresses taking pride in every pass, catch,
shot, block-out and screen. But the coach also believes coachability and toughness are as important
as physical skills, and those traits are put to the test every day.
Forward Ashley Hamilton compared Good's practices to a war zone. They can be painful just to
watch. Phyllis Good once buried her head in her hands and sobbed during one of her eventual
husband's practices at Maine Central Institute, a New England prep school.
She felt so bad for the players that she baked cookies for them in the apartment she shared with the
coach in the players' dorms. But Good was so miffed when he returned that he raked the cookies off
the table.
Caron Butler, the Washington Wizards swingman who played for Good at the time, later confessed
that players waited for the coach to slam his door before racing out of their rooms to dust off the
cookies and gobble them up.
Good's current players say there is something oddly endearing about his rants.
"It's weird because even though he's yelling and he's cussing, you can still feel that he wants us to get
better," said Viney, the Lions' leading scorer. "It's not the yelling where you're like, 'Man, just shut
up. I don't want to hear you right now.' You can tell he cares."
Maybe that's why Cuttino Mobley considers Good a friend nearly 20 years after tussling with the
coach when he played at MCI.
"Me being from Philadelphia, I thought I was tough," the former Clippers guard said. "I got smart
with him and he came up to my face and kind of grabbed me by my shirt."
Was it a moment he'd rather forget? "I wouldn't change a thing," said Mobley, who played in the
NBA for 13 seasons. "He made me who I am."
The last thing Good tells his players every Friday before releasing them for the weekend was
something his father, a recovered alcoholic who became director of alcohol rehabilitation for the
state of Maine, used as a mantra: Prisons and cemeteries are full of people who make bad fivesecond decisions.
"Kids don't care what you know until they know you care about them," Good said.
The coach traces his stubborn resolve to growing up in Maine, a state where voters are known to
prefer independent governors. During one of his many asides about his home state Good joked that
he digresses a lot "because I have ADD [attention deficit disorder] and Alzheimer's combined." But
he wouldn't have made it through 40 years of coaching and six stops ranging from the high school to
major-college level without a sharp basketball mind.
Good doesn't seem to mind that his biggest coaching jobs -- at Nevada Las Vegas and LMU -- were
the result of another coach's failures. He took over for Bayno at UNLV in 2000 after Bayno was fired
in the wake of NCAA violations, and he again replaced his friend last season when Bayno took a leave
of absence associated with the stress of coaching an undermanned team. "I didn't go either place to
be the head coach," said Good, who had been an assistant at each school before the promotions.
Maybe Good has softened over the years in his own special way. The coach no longer challenges
individual players to fight; he offers to take on the whole team, perhaps realizing that a dozen
college-age kids are unlikely to rush someone of his advanced age.
"He might make you feel kind of small sometimes, but anything he says is out of love," said
Hamilton, the freshman forward. "He just expects so much from you. That's why he gets so mad."
Not inside the Jets' locker room. When Ryan handed out the practice schedule for the first-round playoff
game against the Bengals it wasn't for that week only. He planned out the next week, too. And the AFC
Championship Game. And the Super Bowl, right down to the date of the victory parade through the
Canyon of Heroes -- Feb. 9 if you want to make plans.
Coach Steve Sarkisian, Washington Huskies building
solid recruiting base
Huskies landed three of the top four high-school football players in the state, missing out only on Skyline quarterback Jake
Heaps, who chose BYU.
By Mason Kelley
Seattle Times staff reporter
Steve Sarkisian
Tom Lemming thinks Washington Huskies coach Steve Sarkisian is on the verge of creating something
special.
"If he stays there for the long term and develops a program, he could be the next Don James, because
he's got the recruiting smarts, which a lot of people don't have," said Lemming, a recruiting analyst for
CBS College Sports. "To me, he learned under Pete Carroll just the way (Lane) Kiffin and (Ed) Orgeron
did. It's all about recruiting, not coaching."
In his first full recruiting season, Sarkisian has taken a large stride toward locking up the Northwest's top
talent. The proof is evident in The Seattle Times' annual blue, red and white chip list, which sorts the
state's top 100 senior football recruits. National signing day is Feb. 3.
The Huskies secured three of the four blue-chip prospects — Sione Potoa'e (Lakes), Chris Young
(Auburn) and Colin Porter (Bothell) — and five of 18 red chips. Blue chip Jake Heaps could be considered
the one who got away, but he chose to follow his faith to Brigham Young instead of sticking with the team
in his backyard.
"Washington could be on the verge of entering another really good era," Lemming said.
Last year, Washington State made a splash by locking up seven of The Times' 25 blue- and red-chip
recruits. One year later, Washington seems to have regained an edge in in-state recruiting, which
Lemming said is necessary for any school outside of Florida, Texas or California.
"If you don't lock up your own state, you're not going to stay around very long," Lemming said. "It reminds
you of Wisconsin, Minnesota, where there's talent, but not enough to sustain a program."
This year the Cougars secured six red chips, while Oregon State snared Bethel defensive lineman Happy
Iona and UCLA landed Bellevue defensive lineman Julious Moore.
"I think it's stacked up pretty well overall," said Chris Fetters, a recruiting analyst for Scout.com,
describing the talent in Washington. "You look at the fact that you have the No. 1 quarterback in the entire
country, I think that's pretty impressive. Any time you have that kind of situation, it's always a nice feather
in your cap for a state that isn't necessarily known for producing a ton of D-I talent."
Coaching trees part of hoops fabric
Comment Email Print Share
By Dana O'Neil
ESPN.com
Archive
Courtesy University of Kentucky AthleticsAt one point, Rick Pitino's Kentucky staff included Herb Sendek,
Tubby Smith and Billy Donovan.
They sat on the bleachers in Augusta, Ga., this past July, trading war stories while evaluating the
talent at the Nike Peach Jam.
John Pelphrey wore his Arkansas colors; Travis Ford sported his Oklahoma State orange; Steve
Masiello and Walter McCarty represented Louisville red.
There was no shortage of battle scars to share. Pelphrey, Ford and McCarty played for Rick
Pitino; Masiello and McCarty are on his staff currently.
"It was a 'can you top this' for awhile there," Ford said. "And after a little while, I just stopped
and said, 'Yeah, but you know what? We're all sitting here because of him, plain and simple.'"
In a business rife with pressure and paranoia, where a head coach's contract can be extended or
terminated thanks to his assistant's recruiting talents, altruism would seem about as likely to
flourish as sincerity.
To kiss a good assistant goodbye is to kiss away your recruiting legs, your scheduling arms and
your scouting eyes.
Yet in a refreshing twist, coaches can be downright philanthropic when it comes to helping their
own.
A tree can grow not only in Brooklyn; it also can sprout to life in the most surprising of locales, a
place where the glare can be blinding and the ground smoldering: on the basketball court.
AP Photo/Susan RaganBilly Donovan (right) played and coached under Rick Pitino and now has coaching
influence of his own.
"From a pride standpoint, it's more significant for me than the players I put into the pros," Pitino
said. "When your assistants go on to become head coaches, it speaks volumes to what you're
doing in your program."
Coaching trees stretch back across the generations, with Henry Iba and Jud Heathcote, guys who
haven't prowled the sidelines in decades, still impacting this season's top 25 (Bill Self is an Iba
disciple by way of Eddie Sutton; Tom Izzo a direct descendant of Heathcote).
The usual suspects build the trees: the Hall of Famers (Jim Calhoun and Mike Krzyzewski), the
future Hall of Famers (Izzo and Pitino) and the ones with staying power (Mike Montgomery and
Gary Williams).
And then there is Herb Sendek.
Just 46 years old and not exactly the first name to slip off the tongue when one thinks of an
established coaching legacy, Sendek has eight former assistants serving as current head coaches,
more than any active coach in the business.
"I don't think a lot of people spend a lot of time wondering about Herb Sendek's coaching tree -and if they do, we need to worry about them -- but if anyone ever found out, they'd probably be
surprised," Sendek said. "I think I've been really fortunate to have talented people, guys who like
to work."
Coaching trees tend to be built unintentionally and intentionally all at the same time. Head
coaches follow Sendek's recipe of hiring smart assistants or recruiting savvy players in the hopes
of stabilizing their own programs, while smart assistants and savvy players piggyback off the
success of their bosses for lead gigs of their own.
And while the trees seem fun and frivolous to research (or in the case of this story, painstakingly
tedious), they also have legit teeth. People writing the paychecks care about a coach's pedigree,
hoping that perhaps some Hall of Fame brilliance will float through a gym and seep via osmosis
into a young assistant or former player's brain.
"Sure, it came up. It came up at Campbellsville and it came up at Eastern Kentucky and it came
up at UMass and it came up at Oklahoma State," Ford said. "It's like, if you played for Coach
Pitino or coached with him, some of it had to rub off."
When Anthony Grant bolted for Alabama this summer, Virginia Commonwealth athletic director
Norwood Teague didn't waste time searching for a new coach. He went right back to Gainesville,
where he once had found Grant, plucking Shaka Smart from Billy Donovan's Florida staff.
"It's a risk, I admit that," Teague told ESPN.com this summer. "There were a number of head
coaches interested in this job, but we've had a model here and I really didn't want to break away
from that."
So strong are the values placed on a coaching tree that they almost serve as identifiers. Brian
Gregory has been the head coach at Dayton for seven years, but in hoops parlance he's still
considered an Izzo guy (he worked alongside Izzo at Michigan State for four years).
The fact is, there is a little osmosis going on. Guys do pick up tips from their mentors, the trees
extended not just by hiring practices but also by coaching styles.
Or on occasion by baptism by fire.
In 1989, Kentucky lost to Georgia and returned to campus around 3 a.m. Furious with the loss
and not bound by any NCAA practice limitations, Pitino held practice immediately, finishing up
around 5 a.m.
[+] Enlarge
Courtesy of VCU AthleticsWhen VCU went looking for a coach this past offseason, the school went right
back to where they got Anthony Grant.
"When we were done, he turned to me and said, 'Who has the first set of individuals?'" recalled
Ralph Willard, in his first season as Pitino's associate head coach at Louisville (after 10 years as
head coach at Holy Cross). "I didn't even know what day it was. I said, 'Let me go run up to the
office and check,' and he screams, 'That's why we got beat -- because you don't know who has
the first set of individuals.' The next day, I got the list and taped it under all the seats in the
practice arena. I would never not know again."
Good head coaches aren't just demanding -- they're unafraid of delegating authority. Smart said
that when he took over at VCU, he was overwhelmed by the ancillary demands, but in terms of
actual coaching, he was ready. That's because Donovan treated him and his entire staff as head
coaches, giving them big responsibilities and incorporating their own suggestions into his plans.
Teaching and mentoring is the easy part.
Letting go is where things get tricky.
No one wants to hang on the vine past their good years. Hot, young assistants quickly become
lifers if they aren't careful. In the rung-climbing world of today, rare is the Bernie Fine. The
associate head coach at Syracuse has contentedly worked alongside Jim Boeheim for all of his 31
years in the business.
But for a head coach, a chronic revolving door of assistants serves no purpose, either. Constantly
hiring and growing assistants is not only tiresome, it breaks down the critical relationships with
recruits.
"Mick [Cronin] and Marvin [Menzies] were only here two years," Pitino said. "That's too onesided. They get a lot out of you, but you don't get a lot out of them. I couldn't blame them for
leaving, of course. You have to go where there's opportunity, but the perfect scenario is four
years. That's a great two-way street."
That the parting rarely plays out like a messy divorce is nothing less than stunning when you
think of it.
Underneath what is a cutthroat and frequently flat-out dirty business, a seed can actually grow.
A seed of good will.
"There are times that stability is important in your program. There's no question, it's more
difficult to lose people at some times than others," Sendek said. "But if you're going to be selfish
and hoarding and not help people create their own opportunities, you're less likely to get that
talent to come work for you. You won't get the superstars, and you need the superstars."
Otherwise, a tree dies in Louisville and Gainesville and East Lansing and Tempe and …
Dana O'Neil covers college basketball for ESPN.com and can be reached at
[email protected].
These trees have many branches
By no means is this list comprehensive -- that would probably require a book. Plenty of current
coaches have just as prolific of a legacy as these six. This is simply meant as a snapshot look at
different coaching trees in different parts of the country.
Jim Calhoun, Connecticut; former head coach Northeastern
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George Blaney (asst., Connecticut 2001-present) Associate head coach, Connecticut; former
head coach, Rhode Island, Seton Hall, Holy Cross, Dartmouth
Howie Dickenman (asst., Connecticut 1982-96) Head coach, Central Connecticut State
o Karl Hobbs (asst., Connecticut1993-01) Head coach George Washington
 Steve Pikiell (asst., George Washington 2001-05) Head coach, Stony Brook
Dave Leitao (asst., Connecticut 1996-02, 1986-94; asst., Northeastern 1984-86; played at
Northeastern); former head coach Virginia, DePaul, Northeastern
Glen Miller (asst., Connecticut 1986-93) former head coach Penn; former head coach Brown,
Connecticut College
Tom Moore (asst., Connecticut 1994-07) Head coach, Quinnipiac
Steve Pikiell (asst., Connecticut 1991-92, played at Connecticut) Head coach, Stony Brook
Ted Woodward (asst., Connecticut 1986-89) Head coach, Maine
Tom Izzo, Michigan State
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Jim Boylen (asst., Michigan State, 2005-07). Head coach, Utah
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Tom Crean (asst., Michigan State, 1995-95) Head coach, Indiana; former head coach, Marquette
 Tim Buckley (asst., Marquette, 1999-00, 2006-07). Asst. coach at Indiana;
former head coach, Ball State (2000-06)
 Darrin Horn (asst., Marquette, 1999-03) Head coach, South Carolina; former
head coach, Western Kentucky
 Tod Kowalczyk, (asst., Marquette, 2001-02) Head coach, Wisconsin-Green Bay
 Buzz Williams (asst., Marquette, 2007-08). Head coach, Marquette
Brian Gregory (asst., Michigan State, 1999-2000) Head coach, Dayton
Stan Heath (asst., Michigan State 1996-01) Head coach, South Florida; former head coach, Kent
State
Stan Joplin (asst., Michigan State, 1990-96) Former head coach, Toledo
Doug Wojcik (asst., Michigan State 2003-05) Head coach, Tulsa
Mike Krzyzewski, Duke; former head coach, Army
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Tommy Amaker (asst., Duke 1988-97, played at Duke) Head coach, Harvard; former head coach,
Michigan, Seton Hall
o Fred Hill (asst., Seton Hall,1998-01) Head coach Rutgers
Mike Brey, Notre Dame (asst., Duke 1987-95) Head coach, Notre Dame; former head coach,
Delaware
o Gene Cross (asst., Notre Dame, 2006-08) Head coach, Toledo
o Sean Kearney (asst., Notre Dame, 2000-08; asst., Delaware, 1991-00) Head coach, Holy
Cross
o Anthony Solomon (asst., Notre Dame, 2000-03) Former head coach, St. Bonaventure
o Robert Brickey (played at Duke) Former head coach, Shaw
o Jeff Capel (played at Duke) Head coach, Oklahoma
o Johnny Dawkins (asst., Duke, 1998-08, played at Duke) Head coach, Stanford
o Mike Dement (asst., Duke, 1982-83) Head coach, UNC-Greensboro; former head coach,
Cornell, SMU
o David Henderson (asst., Duke, 1997-00) Former head coach, Delaware
o Quin Snyder (asst., Duke 1993-99; played at Duke ) Former head coach, Missouri
Mike Montgomery, California; former head coach, Stanford, Montana
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Barry Collier (asst., Stanford, 1986-1989) Former head coach Butler, Nebraska
o Jay John (asst., Butler 1989-97) Former head coach, Oregon State
o Thad Matta (asst., Butler, 1991-94) Head coach, Ohio State; former head coach Xavier,
Butler
o Todd Lickliter (asst., Butler 2000-01) Head coach, Iowa; former head coach, Butler
o John Groce (asst., Ohio State, 2004-08, Butler, 2000-01) Head coach Ohio University
o Brad Stevens (asst., Butler 2001-07) Head coach, Butler
Jeff Jackson (asst., Stanford 1994-97) Head coach, Furman
Trent Johnson (asst., Stanford, 1997-99) Head coach, LSU; former head coach, Stanford, Nevada
o David Carter (asst., Nevada, 1999-09) Head coach, Nevada
o Mark Fox (asst., Nevada, 2000-04) Head coach, Georgia; former head coach, Nevada
Ernie Kent (asst., Stanford, 1990-91) Head coach, Oregon
o Jay John (asst., Oregon 1997-98) Former head coach, Oregon State
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Stew Morrill (asst., Montana, 1979-86) Head coach, Utah State; former head coach Colorado
State
o Terry Dunn (asst., Colorado State 1994-96) Former head coach, Dartmouth
o Randy Rahe (asst., Utah State, 1998-04, asst., Colorado State 1991-98). Head coach,
Weber State
o Don Verlin (asst., Utah State, 1998-08; asst., Colorado State 1994-98). Head coach,
Idaho
Eric Reveno (asst., Stanford 1997) Head coach, Portland
Blaine Taylor (asst., Stanford, 1998-01; asst., Montana, 1986-91; played at Montana,) Head
coach, Old Dominion; former head coach Montana
Wayne Tinkle (played at Montana) Head coach, Montana
Willis Wilson (asst., Stanford, 1992), assistant at Memphis; former head coach, Rice
Rick Pitino, Louisville; former head coach Boston University, Providence,
Kentucky
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Winston Bennett (asst., Boston Celtics, 1997-98, asst., Kentucky 1995-97, played at Kentucky)
Head coach Mid-Continent University; former head coach, Kentucky State
Delray Brooks (asst., Kentucky 1992-97, played at Providcence) Former head coach, UT-Pan
American
Bill Burke (asst., Louisville, 2002-06, asst., Boston University, 1978) Former head coach Loyola
Gordon Chiesa (asst. Providence 1985-87) Former head coach, Providence
Mick Cronin (asst., Louisville 2001-03) Head coach, Cincinnati; former head coach, Murray State
Scott Davenport (asst., Louisville 1996-05) Head coach, Bellarmine
Billy Donovan (asst., Kentucky, 1989-94; played at Providence) Head coach, Florida; former head
coach Marshall
o Anthony Grant (asst., Florida 1996-06, asst., Marshall 1994-96) Head coach, Alabama;
former head coach, VCU
o Donnie Jones (asst., Florida 1997-07, asst., Marshall 1994-96) Head coach, Marshall
o John Pelphrey (asst., Florida, 1997-02, asst., Marshall 1005-96, played at Kentucky)
Head coach, Arkansas; former head coach South Alabama
o Shaka Smart (asst., Florida 2007-08) Head coach, VCU
Travis Ford (played at Kentucky) Head coach, Oklahoma State; former head coach UMas,
Eastern Kentucky, Campbellsville
Stu Jackson (asst., New York Knicks 1987-89, asst., Providence, 1985-87) Former head coach
Wisconsin, New York Knicks
Sean Kearney (asst., Providence 1986-87) Head coach, Holy Cross
John Kuester (asst., Boston University 1981-83) Former head coach George Washington, Boston
University
Bernadette Mattox (asst., Kentucky 1990-94) Former head coach, Kentucky women's basketball
team
Marvin Menzies (asst., Louisville 2005-07) Head coach, New Mexico State
Jim O'Brien (asst., Boston Celtics 1997-01, asst., Kentucky 1994-97) Head coach, Indiana Pacers;
former head coach Philadelphia 76ers, Boston Celtics, Dayton, played at Kentucky) Head coach,
Arkansas; former head coach South Alabama
Herb Sendek (asst., Kentucky 1989-93, asst., Providence 1985-89) Head coach, Arizona State;
former head coach NC State, Miami (Ohio)
o
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Jim Christian (asst, Miami, 1994-96) Head coach, Texas Christian; former head coach,
Kent State
o Geno Ford (asst., Kent State 2002-05) Head coach, Kent State
o Charlie Coles (asst., Miami 1994-96) Head coach, Miami Ohio, former head coach
Central Michigan
o John Groce (asst., NC State 1996-98) Head coach, Ohio University
o Larry Hunter (asst., NC State, 2001-05) Head coach, Western Carolina; former head
coach Ohio University, Wittenberg University
o Geno Ford (asst., Ohio University, 1998-01)
o Ron Hunter (asst., Miami 1993-94) Head coach IUPUI
o Thad Matta (asst., Miami 1993-94,) Head coach, Ohio State; former head coach Xavier,
Butler
o Todd Lickliter (asst., Butler 2000-01) Head coach, Iowa; former head coach, Butler
o Brad Stevens (asst., Butler 2001-07) Head coach, Butler
o John Groce (asst., Ohio State, 2004-08, Butler, 2000-01) Head coach Ohio University
o Sean Miller (asst., Butler 2001-04) Head coach, Arizona; former head coach Xavier
o Sean Miller (asst., NC State 1996-00, asst., Miami 1993-95) Head coach, Arizona; former
head coach Xavier
o Chris Mack (asst., Xavier 2004-09) Head coach, Xavier
o Mark Phelps (asst., Arizona State, 2006-08, asst., NC State 2000-06) Head coach, Drake
Tubby Smith (asst., Kentucky, 1989-91) Head coach, Minnesota; former head coach Kentucky,
Georgia, Tulsa
o Ron Jirsa (asst., Georgia 1995-97, asst., Tulsa, 1991-94) Former head coach, Georgia and
Marshall
Reggie Theus (asst., Louisville 2003-05) Former head coach, Sacramento Kings, New Mexico
State.
Jeff Van Gundy (asst., Providence 1987) Former head coach, New York Knicks
Kevin Willard (asst., Louisville 2001-07) Head coach, Iona
Ralph Wilard (asst., Louisville, 2009-present, asst., Kentucky 1989-90, asst., New York Knicks,
1987-90) Former head coach Holy Cross, Pittsburgh, Western Kentucky
o Tom Crean (asst., Western Kentucky 1990-94) Head coach, Indiana; former head coach,
Marquette
o Tim Buckley (asst., Marquette, 1999-00, 2006-07). Asst. coach at Indiana; former head
coach, Ball State (2000-06)
o Darrin Horn (asst., Marquette, 1999-03) Head coach, South Carolina; former head
coach, Western Kentucky
o Tod Kowalczyk (asst., Marquette, 2001-02) Head coach, Wisconsin-Green Bay
o Buzz Williams (asst., Marquette, 2007-08). Head coach, Marquette
o Darrin Horn (asst., Western Kentucky, 1995-97) Head coach, South Carolina; former
head coach, Western Kentucky
Sean Woods (played at Kentucky) Head coach, Mississippi Valley State
Gary Williams, Maryland; former head coach Ohio State, Boston College,
American

Rick Barnes (asst., Ohio State, 1986-87) Head coach, Texas; former head coach Clemson,
Providence, George Mason
o
o
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Frank Haith (asst., 2001-04) Head coach, Miami
Dennis Felton (asst., Clemson 1994-98, asst., Providence (1992-94) Former head coach,
Georgia, Western Kentucky
o Fran Fraschilla (asst., Providence 1990-91) Former head coach St. John, Manhattan,
New Mexico
o Ken McDonald (asst., Western Kentucky 1998-03) Head coach, Western Kentucky
o Larry Shyatt (asst., Clemson 1994-97) Former head coach, Wyoming, Clemson
Dave Dickerson (asst., Maryland 1996-04) Head coach, Tulane
Fran Dunphy (asst., American 1981-85) Head coach, Temple University; former head coach Penn
o Steve Donahue (asst., Penn 1990-00) Head coach, Cornell
o Gil Jackson (asst., Penn 1989-2005) Head coach, Howard
o Fran O'Hanlon (asst., Penn 1989-95) Head coach, Lafayette
Fran Fraschilla (asst., Ohio State) Former head coach St. John, Manhattan, New Mexico
Billy Hahn (asst., Maryland 1989-2001) Former head coach, LaSalle, Ohio University
Mike Lonergan (asst., Maryland 2004-05) Head coach, Vermont; former head coach, Catholic
Jimmy Patsos (asst., Maryland 1991-04) Head coach, Loyola
Making his mark
Two months later, there is no question that O'Neill has made his mark on this team. Case in point: the
UCLA game on Feb. 2.
[+] Enlarge
Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty ImagesLute Olson still stays in touch with players and coaches.
Arizona was down 20 at the half. The Bruins were embarrassing Arizona.
When O'Neill met his assistants in the hallway underneath the stands at Pauley Pavilion, he
turned to them and said, "This isn't our basketball team."
The anger was still permeating for the next few minutes as O'Neill stormed into the locker room.
He blew through the door as the entire team hung their heads, lifting them up to look blankly at
O'Neill.
O'Neill turned to a free-standing grease board, kicked it and broke it apart into four pieces as a
few managers struggled to no avail to put it back together.
He then rattled off stream of consciousness statements, his voice rising with each one:
"Remember what name is on the front of your jersey."
"Maybe I was too soft in practice. It's my fault. These guys are good, but they're not the San
Antonio Spurs. I hope someone in here is as mad as I am and was as embarrassed as I was."
After he blew out his anger, O'Neill collected himself and started to break down Arizona's game
plan for the second half. He told the players they had to cut the lead to 10 points at the 10-minute
mark to have a chance.
Instead, Arizona started the second half as lethargic as the first and watched the lead balloon to
32 points with six minutes left. UCLA eventually won by 22.
But instead of being angry as the team walked into the postgame locker room, O'Neill was calm.
He knew this was no time ot beat the players down any more, that the beating they took on the
court was enough for the night. He made sure the players knew that they should say to the media
that they were out-coached, out-played, out-hustled.
He also reinforced the positive to his team.
"We'll have our day," he told the team. "For two or three years, the knock on Arizona was that
we're soft. Until today, we weren't. We softened up. We have to move on, learn from it and
move. 4:30 p.m. practice Monday."
Coaching differences
The on-court differences between the two coaches are clear: O'Neill likes to run plays -- a lot of them -and plays only man-to-man. Olson would run a lot of motion offense and some zone defense.
"[O'Neill] likes to grind teams out," Budinger said.
It was a very confusing time. We didn't know if it was coach O's way or Coach
O'Neill's way. It was hard for us to practice and have two voices coming at us.
--Arizona sophomore Chase Budinger
Discipline is another matter. Budinger said O'Neill instituted discipline as soon as he arrived in
the summer. If someone was late to a workout or slacked during it, then he would be running. If
a player was late for a class or a study hall in the fall, then he would be running, usually between
3 and 4:30 in the morning.
It took just two months, but the program is as much about O'Neill's personality as it once was
about Olson's.
O'Neill is in control, offering levity at times, demanding discipline and accountability whenever
they step on the court for practice or a game.
"I've got two rules: Don't be late and don't be a jerk," O'Neill said as the team bus fought L.A.
traffic en route to USC for a game-day shootaround.
O'Neill has always been quite a character in college basketball. He took his intense style
wherever he went, from Arizona where he was an assistant from 1986-89 before going to
Marquette, Tennessee and then Northwestern before going to the NBA for six years.
"I'm way more mellow," said O'Neill. "When I was in college the first time, I don't mind
admitting it, I was plain stupid some times."
"He's pretty self-assured and self-confident now," said his wife, Roberta, who traveled with
O'Neill's 20-year-old son Sean and the team in the Los Angeles road swing.
"He doesn't take things so seriously. He doesn't," Sean O'Neill said on the bus following the USC
win. "He's matured a little bit."
"I'm at a good place, not just in coaching, but where I am as a person," Kevin O'Neill said. "I
used to be wilder than wild. I'm sure you've heard that. I still love to have a great time and don't
get cheated. But I'm happy what I'm doing personally."
It starts with the end of the bench. Los Angeles likes sideline fire. Jackson just sits there.
"In my generation, you didn't show any exuberance, there was no physical display of emotion on the
court, you're supposed to be out there like a warrior, emotionless and totally self-contained," said
Jackson, 64, in a recent interview. "To show emotion showed a weakness."
In Chicago, where he coached one fewer season but will always be more appreciated, he was viewed
as a rock. Here, that same demeanor is viewed as aloof.
"The way I act is very much how I coach," he said. "Poise and self control are the keynotes of what I
like to practice and teach."
In other words, we want him to be strong and disciplined enough to control Kobe Bryant, but crazy
enough to entertain the rest of us, and it just doesn't work that way.
We want Jackson to show he likes us. But such displays, whether it be mixing with the fans or
shaking hands in the community, also go against his nature.
"I'm shy, I'm a shy person," Jackson admitted. "I don't like to touch people before games, I don't
high-five people before games, I get away from all that."
When I asked whether he even considered himself an Angeleno, he said no.
"I really don't," he said. "I'm a guy who sits on the beach, then drives to Staples Center for the game
and looks down at that huge expanse of metropolitan area as you drive onto the 110 from the 105, it's
unbelievable, so many millions of people."
Jackson is so un-hip, he has had surgeries on both of his hips. Jackson is so un-L.A., he abandons the
beach for the summer, preferring to spend his free time in his Montana home.
"I get claustrophobic in cities if I've been there too long," Jackson said. "I still have that country
bumpkin kind of thing, I need some open spaces between me and people."
But, no, he loves it here. He knows who he is. He knows what this town is. He's fine with where he
fits in. He's feeling better than ever after his two surgeries, and, even though his contract expires this
year -- he's making $12 million -- he sounds as if he wants to come back.
"I have no regrets, people are very respectful, I receive ovations in restaurants, people treat me very
warmly," he said.
There is talk that, in this shrinking NBA economy, owner Jerry Buss would not want to pay him.
Buss made that mistake once. His name was Rudy Tomjanovich. Here's guessing that if the Lakers
win another championship, Buss will not make that mistake again.
Phil Jackson doesn't wow, but he wins, with a certain grace and dignity that is stronger than any
smile and warmer than any hug. It is not Showtime. But it is enough.
Tough defense gives USC basketball team something to hold onto
First-year Coach Kevin O'Neill has preached the importance of
defense from day one, and it's paid off: His Trojans are fourth
nationally in scoring defense, and in the thick of the Pac-10 race.
USC senior guard Dwight Lewis tries to block a shot by
UCLA guard Jerime Anderson during their game on
Sunday. (Lori Shepler / Associated Press / February 14,
2010)
Reporting from Pullman, Wash. - Coaches sell their idea on how to win all the time. If players
believe, they buy. If not, they move on.
When USC hired Kevin O'Neill last June as its basketball coach, his pitch was clear: "We're going to
be a great defensive team," he said.
Not "try to be." Not "strive to be."
But "going to be," as if no other option existed.
"He demands it," USC guard Mike Gerrity said. "And if you want to play, you're going to buy into the
system. If you're not playing defense, you're not going to be on the floor."
His players have bought in, no doubt:
* Entering Saturday's game against Washington State, the Trojans own the nation's fourth-best
scoring defense, giving up 56.6 points a game.
* Five Pacific 10 Conference teams have tied or set season lows in points against the Trojans,
including California (63), Washington (61), Stanford (49), UCLA (46) and Arizona State (37).
* USC has allowed 1,416 points through its first 25 games this season, its fewest during that span in
nearly 60 years.
"There's times we've been as good as any team I've ever coached, and we don't have great individual
defenders," O'Neill said. "We have a great feel for team concepts."
Arizona State Coach Herb Sendek said USC is "engineered" to give up almost nothing with its athletic
and long lineup.
UCLA Coach Ben Howland said the Trojans' veterans are the key, along with the defensive
techniques they learned from former coach Tim Floyd.
But O'Neill said his defensive concepts were "totally foreign" to the current players compared to what
Floyd taught.
"Tim was a big hands-off guy," he said. "I'm big into hands-on, foul, keep fouling and they'll quit
calling it. I'm big into physical play."
O'Neill's overall style is simple: Aggressive man-to-man defense with players contesting every shot,
pass and drive, knowing if they get beat, a teammate is there.
"We always talk about, one guy is guarding the ball and four guys are helping him guard the ball,"
O'Neill said.
Playing up to O'Neill's demands can be trying.
In practice, where the focus is on defense 75% of the time, if one player isn't up to par, O'Neill stops
everything to remind the player what he wants. "I want you to be perfect," he'll often say.
In a game, O'Neill will pull a player for the same reason, as he did with Dwight Lewis against Georgia
Tech: "I didn't think he was guarding well enough," O'Neill said.
Said Lewis: "He'll get on you when he needs to get on you and he'll talk to you when he needs to talk
to you. He's got a good way of showing us."
Another O'Neill tactic is telling his team that because it's "offensively challenged," defense is USC's
only hope to win.
"It looks like every possession is important to them," Washington State Coach Ken Bone said.
With five games left, USC (16-9 overall, 8-5 in Pac-10) is sitting a half game out of first place in the
conference.
But for O'Neill, a lot of it comes back to the selling. He sells recruits on the tough defense they'll learn
that will help them win and maybe make it to the NBA. He sells this team that defense will keep them
in any game and in the hunt for a league title.
He believes his pitch because he has to.
"Players aren't dumb," he said. "They know whether you know what you're talking about or not. If
they don't respect what you're talking about, you can sell them all day long. They better be able to see
some results."
This year, they are. Just like everyone else.
[email protected]
Sheriff Kiffin lays down the law at USC
By Ted Miller
LOS ANGELES -- This winter, Lane Kiffin was handed his second plumb college head coaching job just
three years after becoming the youngest head coach in NFL history. Yet his record is 12-21. How the
heck did he get the cardinal and gold keys to USC's Heritage Hall? His most notable achievement is
manufacturing controversy with both his words and actions. Substance? Kiffin's critics will tell you
"there's no there, there."
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Jae C. HongLane Kiffin knows the only way to prove himself is by winning.
No there? We can tell you Kiffin was there, in his office at 3 a.m. PDT on April 15 watching frenetic
defensive line coach Ed Orgeron scarf down a super-sized Red Bull -- No. 2 or 3? -- while presiding over
his bleary-eyed staff. Why 3 a.m. on April 15? Because programs are allowed one call to a junior
prospect during the spring recruiting evaluation period from April 15 to May 31, and Kiffin had decided
that the first voice elite East Coast recruits would hear would be from a Trojan coach.
"We decided we were going to beat everybody in the country," Kiffin explained. "But we're on the West
Coast. So if we're going to beat everybody, we're going to have to get up early and we're going to have
to wake up East Coast parents."
At 4 a.m, the calls hit the central time zone. At 5 a.m., they hit the mountain time zone. And at 6 a.m.,
Kiffin and Orgeron, perhaps the best recruiting combination in the country, woke up the prospects in Los
Angeles.
"The best part about it is Orgeron thinks everybody is going to be real excited about coming in at 3 a.m,"
Kiffin said. "He's so different. He goes, 'Hey guys, it's going to be great! I'm going to buy you guys donuts
and Red Bull!'"
But donuts and Red Bull, and insanely intense recruiting, probably won't surprise you about Kiffin, who
turns 35 on May 9. This might, though.
"It's more tightly run now. Businesslike, more serious," linebacker Malcolm Smith said. "We have to
clean the locker room -- seriously -- now. They run us if you miss a class. There's no room for error.
They've tightened the ship up."
If a player is "even one minute late" to a class, study hall or a session with a tutor, they have to meet
Orgeron at 5 a.m. for extra running.
Smith's tone and expression makes the following line superfluous: "That is something you don't want to
do."
When one coaching staff replaces another, the stories that immediately follow are predictable: The new
staff is doing things better. More rules or more freedom? Players' coach or disciplinarian? Longer
practices or shorter practices? Old is bad, new is good. Then there are the harder workouts, better
schemes (attacking defense!), more coaching of fundamentals, etc.
Yet Pete Carroll's program was so open and observable that it's not speculative, or unfair, to note that
things were a bit, er, loosey goosey at times. When the Trojans were regularly winning national and Pac10 titles, that was a celebrated characteristic -- dancing with Snoop Dogg in the meeting room,
wheeeeee! When the Trojans were getting manhandled by Oregon and Stanford and going -- disaster! -9-4, it was the root-cause of the fall of a football dynasty.
So if a basic contrast is to be drawn between the Ways of Carroll and the Ways of Kiffin as spring
practices come to a close with Saturday's spring game, the early returns might be surprising: Kiffin
seems to be closer to channeling Woody Hayes than Carroll, his old mentor.
There's a new sheriff in town and his name is Lane Kiffin. Y'all be cool.
"It's going to be done our way, which is the productive way of doing things right -- on and off the field,"
Kiffin said. "We feel that is how you are successful on Saturday and how you're disciplined on Saturday:
How you are Monday through Friday? We are very hard on our guys. We have extremely high standards.
We want it to be difficult to be a USC Trojan football player. They're never late to football meetings. So
why are they late to other stuff? I believe it's emphasis."
Gary A. Vasquez/US PresswireMalcolm Smith says Kiffin's staff is running a tighter ship.
Kiffin is aware he's in a bit of a pickle. Reporters repeatedly ask him about the team he inherited. If he
notes shortcomings and concerns, he's seen as criticizing Carroll, who put Kiffin's career on the fast track
when he handed him the keys of the Trojans offense in 2005. But Kiffin isn't good at not telling folks
what's on his mind.
"It's not what it was when we left here," he said.
Kiffin sees sloppy play, noting the Trojans ranked 114th and 88th in the nation in penalties the past two
seasons. He sees a lack of toughness when players skip practices and workouts because of minor
injuries. He sees the "USC way" of players leaving early for the NFL draft only if they are first-round picks
being abandoned -- see Everson Griffen, Damian Williams and Joe McKnight.
He sees a team that got its butt kicked last fall, posting the two worst losses of the Carroll Era.
"We have to figure out what went wrong because all of the sudden something really changed," Kiffin
said.
The Kiffin Way means publicly calling out players, as he did when he stripped cornerback T.J. Bryant and
receiver De'Von Flournoy of their No. 1 jerseys because they were under performing. Or when he said
the running backs "don't have a clue right now on what we need to do to be a championship running
team."
It means digging out players who fell out of favor with the old staff, such as defensive tackle DaJohn
Harris, or challenging returning starters to fight for their jobs, such as linebacker Chris Galippo. It means
repeatedly telling reporters that more than a handful of incoming freshmen will immediately compete
for playing time.
The final one, actually, was a standard of Carroll's "culture of competition" that may have fallen off a bit
the past couple of seasons.
No "there there" with Kiffin? Let's just say Kiffin seems to know exactly where he is.
He landed his dream job. And it will remain a dream job only if he wins -- and thereby proves himself a
coach of substance.
Said Kiffin, "You can't come to this job with a rebuilding plan. You've got to win."
Originally Published: October 3, 2007
Coaches prove you didn't have to play to win
Either you get the game, or you don't. It's not a matter of pedigree or personal experience. It's
about understanding the game and teaching it to the players. You don't need to have a 15-foot
jumper to do it.
While the NBA tends to look more at former players like Sam Vincent (Charlotte Bobcats) and
Reggie Theus (Sacramento Kings) to fill its coaching vacancies, the college game seems to be
much more diversified. Take a look at some of the most recent hires (New Orleans' Joe
Pasternack and San Diego's Bill Grier) and successes (Illinois' Bruce Weber, Marquette's Tom
Crean, Tennessee's Bruce Pearl and Gonzaga's Mark Few), and you'll find that they either didn't
play Division I ball or chose not to play at all in college.
There is a long list of former players who weren't successful coaches (Clyde Drexler anyone?).
Now a handful of coaches are proving that even without a Division I assist or point to their
credit, they're winning on the Division I level.
AP Photo/Terry GilliamBruce Pearl got his start as a student manager at Boston College. Now he's in
charge of the Tennessee Volunteers, the favorite to win the SEC this season.
There is no one perfect career path. While some coaches may look at it as an advantage if they
did play, coaches who didn't play in college don't think one second about their lack of playing
experience, or if they'd be better-suited as coaches if they had that on-court playing experience.
"I don't think you have to have been a great player [to coach]," Pearl said. "You just have to
understand the game, and how to teach the game."
"You just have to have a great understanding of basketball and teach it and enjoy dealing with
young guys," Few said. "The proof is in the pudding. There have been a lot of great players out
there that haven't turned out to be good coaches, too."
Few said he could have played in Division II or walked on at a D-I school. But he wanted to go
to Oregon, and stay in-state for college. So he eventually got his start at his high school in
Creswell, Ore., and moved up by working Don Monson's camps at Oregon and then by working
for Dan Fitzgerald at Gonzaga.
"I certainly played a ton well into my 30s until I blew out both knees," said Few, who is is 21152 in eight seasons at Gonzaga.
Crean said he never regretted that he didn't play.
"If anything it drives you to study more to just get out and learn more," he said. "Whether you
played or didn't play, it all comes down to passion."
Crean worked at Mount Pleasant (Mich.) High before he was a grad assistant at Michigan State
under Jud Heathcote. He went to work as an assistant coach at Western Kentucky for Ralph
Willard, and then followed Willard to Pitt, before returning to MSU as an assistant under Tom
Izzo in 1995. He later landed the Marquette gig and eventually took the team to a Final Four, 14
years after his first stint with the Spartans.
"I remember a long time ago that Fran Fraschilla [now an ESPN analyst and another former
coach who didn't play] told me that when you're starting out as a coach, you're two laps ahead
from the guys who are [still] playing," Crean said.
Crean is a sponge, constantly looking for different angles. He has studied the organizational
structure of the Montreal Canadiens, Tony La Russa's style in baseball and has quite a support
system since he married Joani Harbaugh, the daughter of former Western Michigan football
coach Jack Harbaugh and the sister of former NFL quarterback Jim Harbaugh.
"Whether you played or not, you don't want to fail," Crean said. "I always wanted to be ahead of
the game in as many areas as you can be. The only way to do that is to study and learn it."
Grier learned how to teach the game and fundamentals from Donn Pollard, his coach at Cottage
Grove High in Oregon. And then, like Few, he worked for Fitzgerald and Dan Monson at
Gonzaga before being Few's top assistant.
"You work with three head coaches who put a lot of responsibility in your hands as an assistant
outside of recruiting," said Grier, who was named San Diego's coach this spring. "You're
expected to teach and develop guys and that has helped my growth as much as anything. Some
guys grow up to be coaches. I didn't. I fell into it and figured out that's what I wanted to do."
Pasternack went to Indiana specifically to learn from Bob Knight.
"Since the fifth grade I was obsessed with college basketball and looked at what career path I
should take," said Pasternack, a former Cal assistant who in July landed the head coaching job in
his hometown of New Orleans. "I wanted to study from the best. If I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd
go to Harvard. I wanted to be a basketball coach. The best class I ever took was every day at
2:30. I went to practice and took notes on everything."
Since the fifth grade I was obsessed with college basketball and looked at what
career path I should take. I wanted to study from the best. If I wanted to be a
lawyer, I'd go to Harvard. I wanted to be a basketball coach. The best class I
ever took was every day at 2:30. I went to practice and took notes on everything.
--Joe Pasternack
Pearl's mentor was Tom Davis. Pearl realized he wasn't talented enough to play at Boston
College. So he went the managerial route to stay involved in the program. Eventually he latched
on as an assistant, following Davis to Stanford and Iowa before Pearl got his head coaching start
at Southern Indiana, a Division II school.
"The one thing that I knew I have had to learn is to keep guys happy offensively and be able to
get guys the ball in certain situations as a coach," Pearl said. "I want to get the ball to the best
player in the best situation."
Coaching is in the Weber family. His father was a coach. His younger brother, David, is a high
school coach in Illinois.
Just out of high school, Weber went to Louisville to work at a basketball camp, when a run-in
with a basketball legend convinced him to take the same career as his father.
"I was a note taker," Weber said. "I was 18 or 19 years old. I still remember walking with coach
[John] Wooden in Louisville at 6 a.m., walking with him to the parking lot, and that's where I got
the whim to try the college thing."
Weber's plan was to play baseball at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But the school dropped the sport.
He tried to walk on the basketball team, but realized that wasn't going anywhere.
So he started coaching, beginning with a junior varsity team at a local high school. He watched
at Marquette and learned at clinics under Rick Majerus and Al McGuire.
Weber went to Western Kentucky for grad school in 1979, worked under Gene Keady as a grad
assistant, and stuck with Keady when he moved to Purdue. Weber spent nearly two decades with
Keady, studying plenty of other legends in the Big Ten, like Knight and Heathcote.
"Sure, it's good to have a former player on your staff, and I did rely sometimes on [former
Purdue player Matt Painter] and ask him how did you feel about certain things and when to back
off," said Weber said, who landed his first head coaching job at Southern Illinois in 1998.
There is no one way to become a head coach. But the reality is that athletic directors don't need
to be and haven't always been swayed by the glitz and glam of the former player. The student of
the game, whether that tutorial was held on the court or in a scouting session, is getting an equal
shot.
Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
USTIN, Texas -- Mack Brown has asked for a show of hands.
It's Sunday afternoon, Sept. 5. He is standing in front of his Texas football team on the day
after its 34-17 season-opening victory over Rice. Brown and his assistants have just run
through game video with the players, offering commentary on all phases of the Longhorns'
performance. Positives are sprinkled in among the critiques. Brown has congratulated his
team on being 1-0, and called for the players to applaud themselves.
But the clapping was brief, and now it's time for the man in charge of arguably the biggest and most
valuable brand in college football to drop some hard, big-picture truth on his players.
"Raise your hand if you played with as much passion and emotion as you ever have in a football game,"
Brown says, then looks out and counts the hands.
There were six.
"How much do you like being at Texas and like being a football player?" Brown continues. "Some of you
like being at Texas more than you've earned the right to be here.
"I was embarrassed for myself. I was embarrassed for some of my coaches, not all. I was embarrassed
for some of you players, not all. … It was kind of embarrassing.
"Boy, I'm scared. I'm worried about this team. I'm worried about it.
"We've got some entitlement in this room. Got to get that fixed. Got some selfishness in this room. Got to
get that fixed. This isn't Texas football.
"What concerns me, we've got guys in this room who have won too easy. … You're ranked the fifth-best
team in the country, and we just played OK. We have not earned that ranking."
Kiffin went after coaches like Orgeron with the same intensity that he went after his players. In
addition to Orgeron, he spent nearly two months persuading Baxter to leave Fresno State to join
him at USC and recently (and somewhat notoriously) pried USC alum Kennedy Pola away from
the Tennessee Titans.
"He has a plan, and he sells that plan and makes you believe in that plan," Orgeron said. "He has
a vision, and he makes you see that vision."
When Kiffin sits with recruits in his office, he makes them see that vision by showing them how
he sees them becoming a big-time player on his team. He'll show them former players he's
coached who they remind him of and show them his track record of playing freshmen and giving
them the best opportunity to not only play early but also get drafted early when they leave
school.
The vision was just a pipe dream when Kiffin was a 26-year-old tight ends coach at USC,
coming off a 6-6 season and a Las Vegas Bowl loss to Utah in 2001, but Kiffin was still able to
go out-of-state and make players buy what he was selling.
"He's a young guy who knows how to recruit," said former USC wide receiver Mike Williams,
who left his Tampa, Fla., home to come to Los Angeles after Kiffin recruited him in 2001. "He
got me to come there from Florida, Keith Rivers to come from Florida, Dwayne Jarrett to come
from New Jersey, LenDale White to come from Colorado, Patrick Turner to come from
Tennessee, and the list goes on. From a recruiting standpoint, he's certified. He's a big reason
why USC did so well recruiting nationally."
"I always try to find better ways to do things," Kiffin said. "Whether it's a game plan, a practice,
a meeting, an interview, whatever it is. I'm going to find a way to find a way to analyze it and
find a better way to do it. That's my mindset. I've never been satisfied with anything. That's just
my mindset. I'm always trying to find a better way to do things. I could write a book of things I
would do differently. Everyday there's stuff I look back at and try to grow from and improve on."
"You always recruit the person who's going to help make the decision, and that's what he was
doing," Orgeron said. "But he was doing it to me."
Originally Published: August 2, 2010
Agony of defeat trumps thrill of victory
By Pat Forde
Welcome to the House of Pain
"The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans." -- George C. Scott, playing the Academy
Award-winning lead role in the 1970 movie "Patton."
Gen. George Patton spoke from a wartime perspective. But the words apply to American society
in general -- college football fans, players and coaches prominently included.
For a remarkable number of people who have an emotional stake in the sport, losing is more
hateful than winning is joyful. The agony of defeat outweighs the thrill of victory. Perhaps ABC
understood that concept when it coined those phrases as part of its famous introduction to "Wide
World of Sports": the video of Yugoslavian ski jumper Vinko Bogataj's spectacular wipeout
remains far more memorable than whatever B-roll accompanied the thrill of victory.
It feels unhealthy to expend more emotional fuel on disappointment than enjoyment. And it
certainly seems futile -- because unless you are Knowlton "Snake" Ames, defeat is unavoidable.
Ames was the coach at Purdue in 1891 and 1892, rolling up a perfect 12-0 record in that time.
His two teams scored 512 points and surrendered 24. And then he got out while the getting was
good, forever undefeated as a college football coach. According to the records at College
Football Data Warehouse, he is the only coach in college history to retire unbeaten after more
than one full year on the job.
Tommy Tuberville led Auburn to an undefeated season in 2004, but an overtime loss to LSU in
2005 still delivers pain.
In the century-plus of football since Snake Ames hung it up, we seem progressively more wired
to wallow in the misery of loss. Whether that's truly human nature or a byproduct of our blamecentric modern society is debatable. Whether it's true or not for a large percentage of college
football fans and participants -- perhaps even a majority -- seems beyond debate.
"Losing stays with you longer," Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville said firmly. "It probably
shouldn't, but the preparation you put into it -- the hours and late nights, all the work in the
offseason -- when you come up short, it's hard to forget. It keeps affecting you. You can't get that
out of your gut."
Tuberville went 13-0 at Auburn in 2004. But he can also remember vividly the agony of losing
20-17 at LSU the next season, when his team missed five field goals.
That's just how it works.
"A lot of athletes I have worked with compete to avoid losing, because the losing is so bitter,"
said Dr. Joel Fish, sports psychologist and director of the Center for Sport Psychology in
Philadelphia. "They not only want to win, they want to avoid losing. The highs are high, but the
lows are really, really low."
Dave Czesniuk, director of operations at Northeastern University's Center for Sport and Society,
said that's part of the impact of defeat: Athletes and teams devote so much preparation time to
winning -- and avoiding losing -- that the emotional investment becomes that much greater. And
given the football axiom that victory is tied to preparation, teams that work copious hours in a
week can be devastated by a loss.
"The loss is such a surprise to the system," Czesniuk said, "and it ends up taking such a
destructive toll."
If you are accustomed to success, the negative effect of losing outweighs the positive effect of
winning "100 percent," said Texas coach Mack Brown. After capturing his first and only national
title in an epic upset of USC in January 2006, Brown said the feeling didn't match his
expectations.
"I thought, 'I've been trying for 54 years to win this game, and in some ways it feels like another
game,'" he recalled.
But after losing the national title to Alabama this past January, in a game in which the Longhorns
were significant underdogs even before star quarterback Colt McCoy was injured in the first
quarter, the effect was debilitating.
Mack Brown had trouble getting past Texas' loss to Bama in the 2009 title game.
"I had trouble with it for about a month," Brown said. "I had to go back to recruiting to get it off
my mind."
But Brown isn't alone. That lingering sting of defeat has become a reality for fans as well -especially college football fans.
At many schools, home football games have become three-day events. And the days in between
games are spent rehashing the last game and forecasting the next game -- on message boards, on
talk radio, on Twitter and in the office.
"The whole thing is a spectrum of perspective," Czesniuk said. "Some think being a fan is for a
couple hours of enjoyment. Others think it's a livelihood. For those fans, it becomes a little
unhealthy. The pendulum of emotion swings so strongly based on the outcome of a game."
And with seven days between games and only 12 a year, every result is amplified.
"The intensity of the schedule leads to fans wanting to squeeze a year's worth of fun into maybe
six home dates," Czesniuk said. "What fans are investing, it's got this grandiose feel to it."
Everyone reading this story has at least one crushing defeat still gnawing a spot in his or her
stomach. Same with the guy writing it. Top-ranked Nebraska's kicked-ball touchdown to beat my
alma mater Missouri in 1997 -- at the time the 19th straight loss to the Cornhuskers -- would be
the one for me.
But in the final analysis, learning to live with the agony of defeat might be a character-building
necessity. Take Snake Ames, for instance.
In 1931, Ames committed suicide, shooting himself with a .38 caliber revolver as he sat in his
car. For the undefeated coach, winning them all clearly wasn't the key to happiness.
One of the methods that former college football coach Bear Bryant used to settle positional
battles early in his coaching career was the "challenge system." This allowed any player to call
for a one-on-one battle with a starter. The two would go head-to-head in a variety of areas
(blocking, tackling, receiving, etc.) to see who was the best at executing the key responsibilities
of the position. The winner would claim the prize as starter.
July 26, 2010
Thumbing His Way Back Home
Retirement is calling, and Bobby Cox has the Braves in first place (again). How
has he managed to win so many games? Maybe by getting ejected so often
THOMAS LAKE
Before we talk about sacrifice, or phantom blackbirds, or the Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn Hypothesis,
let me tell you about the time Bobby Cox demolished a toilet with one bare hand.
It happened at Shea Stadium. Braves shortstop Darrel Chaney slid into home, and the plate umpire called
him out, and Chaney raised enough Cain to get himself ejected. Cox was so furious on his player's behalf
that he went to the bathroom by the dugout and visited justice upon the toilet. Chaney saw the shattered
tank, the gushing water, and he loved the skipper for what he had done.
Chaney decided he would do anything for Bobby Cox, even ride the bench without complaint, which he did
for most of the 1979 season. He played so seldom in the dusk of his career that he basically forgot how, and
by mid-September his average had fallen to .111. Cox called him into the office.
They're not renewing your contract, he said. They're gonna release you. But I'll play you as much as I can
these last two weeks, so other clubs can see you.
Chaney was a career .217 hitter. He went out those last two weeks and hit .333 for Bobby Cox. And then he
retired.
ACCORDING TO the Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn Hypothesis, first posited years ago but never
rigorously tested until now, the ejection of Bobby Cox from any baseball game imparts a certain heat and
energy to his players, who respond by playing better. Thus the momentum turn and, perhaps, victory.
Sunday is the best day on which to study this phenomenon. July is the best month. If you want to see the
Braves manager explode, you would do well to check the schedule for an afternoon game on a Sunday in
July, preferably in Miami. (In other words, circle this Sunday on your calendar.) This is not to say that Cox
never gets angry at night in October; he does. No one else has been thrown out of two World Series games.
But the numbers show a correlation. Heat has a way of lighting the fuse.
Jones, who has played his entire 17-year career for Cox, gathered new evidence for his hypothesis on a
Tuesday night in August 2007, when the temperature at Turner Field was 97°. The heat wave had killed
cattle in South Carolina, buckled a highway in Mississippi and pressed down so hard on Texas that a
playground caught fire. In Atlanta more than 36,000 people ventured from their personal refrigerators to
boo Barry Bonds for the home run record he had just stolen from their beloved Hank Aaron. The Giants took
a 3--0 lead into the fifth inning. With two on, two out and a roaring sunset behind the Downtown Connector,
Jones came to bat for the Braves.
The 2-and-2 pitch ran inside, above the white line of the batter's box. It looked like a strike to Ted Barrett,
the home plate umpire, who called Jones out. Jones cursed and flung his helmet. Bad idea: Barrett is an
ordained minister. The reverend removed his mask, cheeks burning sunset pink, sweat on his upper lip
reflecting the floodlights. But before he could finish with Jones, a sound came from the home dugout. Bobby
Cox was creating a diversion.
You can't tell from the video what Cox said to Barrett, or vice versa. No matter. The mere act of arguing
balls and strikes is enough to get a manager ejected. Cox knew this better than anyone else. It had
happened to him nearly 50 times.
The umpire reared back and made a grand sweeping motion with his right arm, as if to hurl Cox out of the
stadium. Cox ignored the gesture. He hobbled toward Barrett, reconstructed knees and all, to finish the
conversation. This was a mild eruption for Cox: no screaming, no bumping, no flying tobacco juice. He held
up both hands, index fingers outstretched, as if to demonstrate the gaping chasm between the pitch and the
plate. Then he returned to the dugout, limped down the steps and disappeared into the tunnel.
The Braves woke up. Mark Teixeira led off the next inning with a 408-foot home run. The fans stirred. A
tribal drumbeat filled the stadium. Shortstop Yunel Escobar smoked a two-run double to right, and outfielder
Matt Diaz drove in another run with a pinch-hit single to give the Braves a 4--3 lead. In the bottom of the
ninth, after the Giants had tied it at four, the first two Braves reached base. That brought up Jones, the man
Cox had saved from ejection. Jones bashed a low fastball into the left-center gap, and the winning run
ambled home.
Reporters surrounded Cox in his office after the game, and Cox did what he always does. He praised the
players who had done well and found nice things to say about those who hadn't. The reporters listened
politely, waiting for an opening to discuss the real story of the evening. According to an unofficial tally by
David Vincent of the Society for American Baseball Research, Cox had just broken the alltime ejections
record, with 132. (Since then, four previously overlooked ejections have surfaced, meaning he had actually
broken John McGraw's mark more than three months earlier.) "What happened with Barrett there?" a
reporter finally asked.
"Who?"
"Barrett, the umpire."
Slowly, with no expression, Cox responded: "I don't know."
He did know, of course, but he was ashamed. Fifty-two days had passed since his last ejection—nearly
double his average interval—as he held his tongue and tried to forestall this moment.
"Bobby," a reporter said, "I know you don't love to talk about it. Can you speak to breaking the—"
"Well—"
"—the ejection record?"
"—no," he said. "I, I, it, it is absolutely no factor. It's nothing, so. Just been around a long time, that's all."
FEW HUMAN endeavors have been studied so closely by so many people with such fascination for such a
long time as the game of baseball. Historians, economists and statisticians scrutinize everything that
happens and compare it with everything else that already happened, going back to 1871. This ocean of
numbers can tell us a lot about Bobby Cox. For example: He makes pitchers better. J.C. Bradbury, author of
the 2008 book The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, looked at pitchers who had thrown for
multiple teams and compared their performances for Cox with their performances for other teams. Using a
sophisticated technique called multiple regression analysis, Bradbury factored out variables such as hitterfriendly ballparks, league ERA differences, team defense and pitchers' ages. What remained was a
meaningful Cox Effect, worth about a quarter of a run every nine innings. (True, the Leo Mazzone Effect was
even larger, but the Cox Effect existed even in the 14 years Mazzone wasn't Cox's pitching coach.)
But this story is about ejections, and the ocean of numbers can answer many questions there too. For
starters we have Cox's quote: Just been around a long time, that's all. Does this explain why he had been
tossed 156 times through Sunday? No. Cox, who will retire after this season, has managed 4,438 games,
fourth-most in baseball history, for the Braves (1978--81), Blue Jays (1982--85) and Atlanta again (1990
until now). But Tony La Russa has managed more games than Cox and has barely half the ejections. Joe
Torre has managed almost as many games and has fewer than half the ejections. Connie Mack managed for
53 years, and he's not even among the top 10 ejectees. Bobby Cox hasn't just been around a long time.
He's been getting thrown out a lot for a long time. The previous record holder—McGraw, the New York
Giants' manager from 1902 to 1932—was known for kicking umpires with his cleats and getting ejected on
purpose so he could go bet on horses. Bobby Cox has gotten booted at a rate about 50% higher than
McGraw's rate as a manager.
The mystery, then, is why. Why would a man who hates attention draw it to himself so frequently? More to
the point: Why would the same man become one of the most successful managers of all time? Is there a
connection?
The Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn Hypothesis implies one. But it has not been accepted as scientific fact.
"People think you can spark teams by [getting ejected]," Nationals manager Manny Acta told The
Washington Post in 2007. "It's just not true. [The Braves] never won any of those games because he got
thrown out of the game."
For this story we examined all 156 of Bobby Cox's ejections, from the first, in 1978, to the most recent, last
Saturday in a loss to the Brewers. Can a manager make his team better by frequently leaving the game?
This is a good question. But you won't understand the answer until you start to understand Bobby Cox.
THE FIRST ejection came on May 1, 1978, and although the Braves did come back to beat the Mets 6--5
after Cox's departure, something else in the newspaper account was even more intriguing. The Atlanta
Constitution reported that Braves pitcher Tommy Boggs found a sick blackbird before the game and nursed
it back to health. The article said the blackbird "seemed to attack plate umpire Nick Colosi at the top of the
seventh inning," after he had thrown Cox out. "Nobody knows for sure if Boggs gave the command to
attack."
Boggs now coaches at Concordia University Texas in Austin. When asked if the story was true, he recalled
something about a bird but denied using it as a weapon of vengeance. Then again, he said, "Sometimes I
have a hard time remembering last week."
He was sure of one thing: "I'll be loyal to Bobby Cox for as long as I live."
THERE ONCE was a young Atlanta pitcher named Mike Stanton who failed to hold a lead against the
Cardinals. A hitter tapped the ball toward first, but Stanton hesitated for an instant before racing to cover
the base. The hitter beat out a single. The Cardinals scored a run. And Stanton knew he had lost his team
the game.
When Cox called him into the office that night, Stanton braced himself for a violent tirade. Cox was silent.
He shuffled some papers on his desk. He sighed a few times. Finally he said, "We can't have that."
That was all. We can't have that. Stanton didn't sleep that night. It was as if he had disappointed his father.
Bobby Cox never called Mike Stanton into the office again. And for the rest of his seven seasons with the
Braves, Stanton was never again beaten to the bag on a grounder to first.
THE OCEAN of numbers is clear on this point: Bobby Cox wins baseball games with nearly unprecedented
frequency. Only three managers in the game's history—Mack, McGraw and La Russa—have more wins than
Cox's 2,467 through Sunday. And Cox's career winning percentage (.556) beats La Russa's (.535) and
Mack's (.486). Moreover, Cox holds a record that stretches across all major U.S. professional sports.
Starting in 1991 his Braves won their division 14 times in a row.
The ocean of numbers is just as clear about this: When Cox is ejected, his team usually loses. In those 156
games, his winning percentage is .385. But he often gets thrown out when his team is already losing.
What happens after he's gone?
THE WORST THING Bobby Cox ever did to an umpire took place after the seventh ejection, and he swore
it was a combination of accident and self-defense. On Aug. 6, 1980, Jerry Dale ruled that Braves shortstop
Rafael Ramirez had not stepped on second base while turning a double play. Cox got in Dale's face, cursing,
and when Cox threw his cap, Dale threw him out. But Cox kept flapping his mouth, and before you knew it—
ping!—he'd anointed Dale with tobacco juice.
Cox later said the initial stream was an innocent side effect of trying to yell and chew tobacco at the same
time, but he admitted to firing another salvo on purpose because he believed Dale spat back at him. The
umpire was stunned. "I always thought Bobby Cox was a bigger man than that," he said after the game,
which the Braves lost 6--2 thanks to the three-run homer they gave up immediately after Cox's departure.
But if Dale held a grudge, the ocean of numbers doesn't reveal it. That was the first time he threw Cox out,
and the last.
At least 83 umpires have tossed Cox over the years, and about half have done it only once. As former ump
Harry Wendelstedt once said, "Everybody can't be wrong." Major League Baseball would not allow any
current umpire to be interviewed for this story, but former Braves coach Ned Yost, now the Royals'
manager, said the umps understand that Cox's eruptions are just business: "Every umpire that you talk to
will say that you can go out and get into it with Bobby Cox during the game. They may eject him, he may be
mad, but the next day it's like it never happened."
Bob Davidson shares the record for most ejections of Cox: six. "If I was a ballplayer," Davidson told The
New York Times in 2007, "I'd want to play for Bobby Cox."
THE 22ND ejection was never consummated, at least in the strictest sense of the rules, which direct the
banished man to the clubhouse, the grandstand or off the premises altogether. Cox did leave the premises
once, in Chicago, by taxicab, so angry that, he said, "If I had stayed, I might have murdered somebody."
But this is rare for someone who arrives at the ballpark hours earlier than necessary because he's afraid he
might miss something. Cox would rather not leave the game at all. And so he lurks.
On this day, Sept. 25, 1983, Cox (managing the Blue Jays after the Braves fired him for not winning fast
enough) was ejected for flinging a bat on the field after Derryl Cousins ruled that Toronto pitcher Dave Stieb
had hit the A's Mike Davis. So Cox watched the rest of the game through a crack in the fence behind home
plate. He may have done some managing from back there. Various beat reporters over the years have
noticed him directing the team from the dugout tunnel after he's been tossed. He has never reappeared in
the dugout disguised in sunglasses and an eye-black mustache, as the Mets' Bobby Valentine once did,
because he has never cared for theatrics. This is the consensus around the major leagues: Bobby Cox never
gets ejected for show. If he throws things, it's because he's actually angry. Other managers admit to
intentionally provoking umpires to get thrown out and inspire their teams, but Cox insists he's never done
that.
Braves broadcaster Brian Jordan said that when Cox is ejected at Turner Field, he goes to a special room
within shouting distance of the dugout and watches the game on a plasma television. "He just goes right
down the steps," said Jordan, one of Cox's former players. "He's still calling the shots."
THE OCEAN of numbers shows that Cox is most likely to be thrown out in the fifth or sixth inning, least
likely in the second or ninth. He's been ejected twice in the 10th inning, three times in the 13th, and 15
times in the first. If these numbers add up to anything, it would have to be anger, sincere and uncalculated.
No manager in his right mind goes out in the first or the 13th looking to get tossed.
The 31st ejection came during a rain delay. Toronto had a 3--2 lead over Boston after 4½ innings, making
the game barely official, and the Jays couldn't wait to get it in the books. A summer storm had rolled in and
parked over Exhibition Stadium. Two hours passed. Jays second baseman Damaso Garcia asked crew chief
Joe Brinkman if he would call the game already. Brinkman took offense. Cox rushed to take up the fight, and
Brinkman threw him out. The rain stopped, and the bullpen gave up the lead, and the Jays lost 5--3.
So: Cox's teams don't have to be losing when he departs in order to lose after he's gone. It has happened
seven times. They're winning. He gets himself tossed. And then they collapse.
THE 35TH ejection took place almost five years later, after one of the strangest plays of all time. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was an odd place back then: dark patches on the infield dirt, grass like a bad haircut,
desolate banks of orange seats populated only by the occasional shirtless man. Cox had returned to the
Braves as general manager, spent four years building a farm system with great young players—Tom
Glavine, David Justice, John Smoltz—and then gone back to the dugout, where he could watch them grow
up.
Down 5--3 to the Expos in the fourth, the Braves had runners on first and second with two outs and an 0and-2 pitch coming to Jim Presley. The ball scraped the dirt, but Presley couldn't check his swing. Forgetting
to tag Presley out, the Montreal catcher made a wild throw to first base. It sailed into right field. The runner
on second took off and slid into home well ahead of the rightfielder's throw. Instead of running to first,
however, a confused Presley had moved several feet behind home plate. Finally the third baseman got the
catcher's attention and persuaded him to throw to first, finishing a 2-9-2-3 strikeout, ending the inning and
erasing the run.
The crowd of 11,237 murmured in perplexity. Cox hobbled out to confront Bob Davidson, followed him up
the baseline and demonstrated a checked swing. He went back to the dugout and kept arguing. Davidson
urged him to be gone. Cox shook his head, angry words pouring from his lips. He assumed a mock batting
stance and took a full swing, as if to imitate what Jim Presley did not do. Never mind that Presley would
have saved the run simply by jogging to first. Cox could blame the player or he could blame the umpire. His
choice was never in doubt.
FOR THIS STORY the Braves granted a single half-hour interview with Cox, in his office at Turner Field. "In
all your life," he was asked, "what are the things that are most important to you?"
He paused for 11 seconds.
"Everything's important," he finally said. "The game of baseball's important. Your family life's important. It's
important, for me, to give everything I can give. You know, as a manager. That's very important. So. What
else?" And he chuckled.
Here are a few of the ways in which Bobby Cox gives everything he can give as a manager. He treats
everyone like a man, from bat boys to 20-year veterans. He keeps track of retired players and occasionally
writes them checks if they need money. When a player is released, Cox calls other teams, trying to find him
another job. When the game starts, he stands on the top step of the dugout, calling out encouragement. He
calls his players by affectionate nicknames. Over the years he has cheered for Knucksie, Campy, Boggsy,
Pokey, Hubby, Rock, Horns, Murph, Lemmer, Smoltzie, Teepee, Mad Dog, Glav, Chip, Fookie, Mac, Roscoe,
Esco, Schafe and Wick. His voice carries across the infield and into the other dugout, where opposing
players hear him and wish they could play for a man like that.
THERE IS no way to know how many times Cox has saved a player from ejection. The number must be
large. David Vincent found that since Cox took over in 1990, the Braves' player-ejection rate has been about
half the major league average.
We found evidence of at least six times that Cox took an ejection to keep a player from getting tossed. Then
we looked at how those players used their second chances.
The salvation backfired once, on June 8, 1996, when Tom Glavine allowed 12 hits and seven runs after Cox
rescued him from the thumb of Gary Darling.
Four other times it succeeded. Steve Avery pitched 2 1/3 innings more without allowing a hit. Tim Hudson
cruised through the next six innings to get the win. Chipper Jones had that walk-off double against the
Giants. It even happened once in the World Series, Game 6 in 1996, when Marquis Grissom exploded over a
blown call at second base and Cox was ejected after helping other coaches restrain the Atlanta outfielder. In
the ninth inning Grissom hit a two-out single to bring in a run and put the tying run on second. The Braves
could have sent it to extra innings if Mark Lemke hadn't popped up to end the Series.
The sixth time is notable in its own way. On May 4, 1998, Ryan Klesko was in the dugout, airing various
grievances to umpire Joe Nauert, when Nauert walked toward the bench to shut him up. It was the eighth
inning. Klesko had already made his final plate appearance and was scheduled for defensive replacement in
the ninth. Cox stepped up and took the ejection anyway.
ALONG ABOUT January 1978, in a clothing store in a midsized city in northeastern Georgia, a young female
employee watched a man with suspicion. She thought he was a shoplifter, as opposed to the new manager
of the Braves passing the time before a publicity appearance at the mall. Which is why she tried to have him
arrested.
When it was all ironed out, Cox said the least she could do was give him her phone number. And so
eventually she became Pam Cox, Bobby's second wife.
Seven years later, near the end of her husband's time with the Blue Jays, Pam Cox was the subject of a
feature story in the Toronto Star in which she wistfully estimated that his life was 99.75% baseball. She told
of a rare family trip to Toronto's Metro Zoo and Cox's fascination with one species in particular:
"It's those gorillas, he's just mesmerized by them," says Pam, her voice a soft Southern singsong. "He could
stand there and watch them all day long. I could not understand why until he said to me, 'Honey, would you
just look at the arms on those guys. Could you imagine our team signing one of them up?' "
Cox could not leave the game at the ballpark. And while it seemed as though he had mastered his anger—
confined it to the one place where he could churn it into loyalty and success—that notion came into question
the night his wife called to have him arrested. It was May 7, 1995. He had been drinking, and he spilled a
drink on the carpet. She made a comment he didn't appreciate. The police report said she told an officer
that her husband grabbed her by the hair and hit her in the face.
"I asked Pamela Cox if this kind of incident had ever occurred before," officer Sonya Lee wrote. "Pamela Cox
told me that this was the first time police had been called but that there had been 5--6 previous incidents
involving physical abuse in their 18-year marriage. When asked, Pamela Cox stated that she has sustained
blackened eyes and a broken hand, injuries inflicted by her husband."
There was a media firestorm when the news broke, but Cox and the Braves quickly contained it. He held a
press conference the next day to deny hitting his wife. The battery charge disappeared when he agreed to
take anger-management counseling.
Loyalty is a powerful thing. Pam Cox stood by her husband at the press conference, and she saved him. "He
didn't hit me," she said.
You were wrong if you thought Bobby Cox would stay home with his wife that night. The Phillies were in
town, and he was needed in the dugout.
HE SLEPT in the clubhouse in Fort Lauderdale when he got his first job as a minor league manager, in the
Yankees system in 1971. He had five young children with his first wife, but he made barely $7,000 a year,
and that wasn't enough to bring the family with him to Florida. So they stayed behind.
"I put my heart and soul in that," Cox said. "In my mind, everybody was a big leaguer, and it was my job to
get 'em to the big leagues. I did work hard. But you wouldn't trade those experiences for anything."
If you tracked down any of his players from those days, they would say the same thing all the other players
did. They would say Bobby Cox was the best manager they ever had—showering them with praise in public,
gently correcting them in private, cheering for them when nobody else would, fiercely defending them from
every conceivable danger. They would help you create a composite sketch of Bobby Cox, and when it was
done he would look remarkably like the perfect father.
Would the five children of his first family say the same thing? One of them, the middle daughter, Connie
Perkins, said her father came home whenever he could and took all five of them golfing and once agreed to
serve as a show-and-tell exhibit for her third-grade class.
She wasn't sure why her mother, Mary, asked for the divorce—loneliness, maybe?—but she said when Mary
died about four years ago, Bobby paid for the funeral.
Three of the five children live in California, but Connie and her sister Shelley moved near Atlanta decades
ago to be closer to their father. They often bring their own families down to Florida to join him for spring
training.
She was asked what she thought about her father's arrest. "I think the media blew it way out of proportion,"
she said. "He's never touched anybody that I know of, not me, not my siblings. He's not that type of person.
"He was always there when we needed him," she said, but then she added, "I think baseball is his love,
before everything."
THE 70TH ejection was described thusly by John Smoltz on the SportSouth television network:
My favorite one's gotta be Cincinnati, when I got thrown out for no reason [by the third base umpire]. And
then Bobby just came out to try and protect me from the umpire, and the umpire threw him out. And I can't
repeat what was said out there, but he told me to go stand on the mound and I wasn't coming out of the
game. And I stood there with my arms crossed, and unfortunately it didn't work. I had to come out of the
game. I got thrown out. But it was a priceless moment.
THE 121ST ejection is a crucial piece of evidence for the Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn Hypothesis. On a
rainy night in San Francisco, April 7, 2006, the Braves were down 6--4 to the Giants in the seventh inning
when Cox came out to inform first base umpire Greg Gibson that the last strike was not, in fact, a strike.
Gibson threw him out. In the same at bat Andruw Jones hit a two-run single to tie the game. The Braves
scored eight times that inning and twice more in the eighth for a 14--6 win. It was Cox's first ejection in 91
games, which appears to be a personal record. The best the Braves ever performed after an ejection
coincided with the end of Cox's longest drought. They may mean more when they happen less.
When searched at greater depth, the ocean of numbers confirms the Chipper Jones Momentum-Turn
Hypothesis. Yes, Cox loses more often when he's thrown out. Yes, his teams have blown a few leads. But
when we separate each game into two periods—before the ejection and after—and then average the team's
performance in each period over 156 games, we can see the momentum turning.
On average, at the moment in the game when Cox is thrown out, his team is losing by a little more than a
run. And on average, for the rest of the game, his team outplays the opponent by about a third of run. It's
not always enough to turn a loss into a win. But it makes a difference. When the game has been tied at the
point of his ejection, Cox's teams have gone on to win more than they've lost. And they have almost three
times as many comeback wins post-ejection as blown leads. Manny Acta says the Braves never won because
Cox was ejected. The ocean of numbers says otherwise.
HAS COX mellowed with age? These figures may help you decide.
Total Ejections, First 14 Seasons: 48
Total Ejections, Next 14 Seasons: 98
THE 148TH ejection, on June 21, 2009, involved a little-known pitcher named Eric O'Flaherty, who had
come to the Braves after finishing the previous season with an ERA of 20.25. On O'Flaherty's first day at
Turner Field, Cox came up and talked with him for half an hour, covering numerous topics that had nothing
to do with baseball. It was the longest talk O'Flaherty ever had with a manager. Then, when O'Flaherty
needed some shower shoes, Cox offered his own pair.
Anyway, the 148th ejection completed a chain reaction that began when O'Flaherty threw a pitch that
seemed to disobey the laws of physics. Viewed from the mound it crossed the heart of the plate. Viewed
from behind the plate, where umpire Bill Hohn stood, it missed the plate entirely. O'Flaherty protested. Hohn
took the bait. Chipper Jones stepped in to defend O'Flaherty. Cox stepped in to defend them both. Hohn
ejected all three.
The Braves lost to the Red Sox 6--5, dropping their record to 32--36. But this is when the momentum
turned in the 2009 season. The Braves won their next game and 54 of their next 88, nearly overtaking the
Rockies in the wild-card race before going cold at the end of September.
After Cox is ejected, his team wins the next night's game more than 60% of the time. The momentum turns
and then keeps going.
KEVIN NEWELL, Coach and Athletic Director magazine: What has been the secret to your success in a
profession that discards managers like yesterday's newspaper?
Cox: Good players. We've had good players here forever. Whatever little success I've had, that would be the
key.
AFTER THIS SEASON, at age 69, at the time of his own choosing, Bobby Cox will take himself out of the
game. Even then he won't really leave. Sure, he'll spend more time with his wife and the 14 kids who call
him Gran-Bobby, but he'll stay with the Braves in the nebulous role of "consultant," scouting the minors for
more good players.
By now, maybe you see what his players see.
That getting tossed can be an act not of hubris but of humility, because it means Bobby Cox values himself
less than the man he's saving, and because he will inhabit the place he hates most—the spotlight—in order
to save him.
That it can be an act not of aggression but of sacrifice, because even if he keeps control, he loses something
even more important: a place on the top step of the dugout, a clear view of the game.
That the ocean of numbers matters less than the knowledge that Bobby Cox will fight for his players, right
or wrong, whether or not it makes tactical sense, in the first inning or the 13th, in a rain delay in Toronto or
in the washroom at Shea Stadium, with water gushing from a shattered toilet.
The 150th ejection came to pass on July 29, 2009, after a Braves player in the dugout yelled something at
Bill Hohn, and Hohn took off his mask and came over brandishing his lineup card. He didn't know who'd
done the yelling, but someone would have to pay.
"I have to throw somebody out," he said, or something like that, and the players were not surprised to see
what Bobby Cox did next.
180 days, 180 speeches, one big job
How will Brian Kelly win over football-crazed South Bend? One speech at a time
By Bruce Feldman
ESPN The Magazine
On Dec. 9, 2009, Jack Swarbrick sat down for a series of meetings with Cincinnati coach Brian
Kelly. Over the next 36 hours, Notre Dame's athletic director discovered Kelly had what it took
to be successful in South Bend. He liked that Kelly had been a college head coach for 19 years -winning more games than he lost in 17 of them -- and yet was still only 48 years old. Kelly was a
sharp contrast to the man he was hoping to replace. Charlie Weis had shown up five years earlier
flashing Super Bowl rings he'd won as an assistant but an empty entry on his resume under
"Head Coaching Experience." That deficiency showed as the Irish limped to a 16-21 mark in his
final three seasons. Swarbrick also loved the way Kelly ran a program, right down to dictating a
body-fat percentage for each position. But there was one particularly thorny issue the AD had to
broach before he could be sure he'd found his guy.
"There are a number of things about Notre Dame that aren't going to change," Swarbrick, class of
'76, told Kelly. "You're either okay with them or you're not. If you're not, good luck to you;
they're not getting altered." The list of immutables included striving to have the best graduation
rate among D1 football teams, housing players in on-campus residences for most of their career,
academic-support services run independently of the athletic department and random drug testing,
also independently administered. "It's what we do, and you have to be okay with it," Swarbrick
said.
"I know," Kelly replied. "It's part of why I want the job."
Two days later, that job was his. Kelly had taken over a program a few times before, if not one
with such a spotlit perch. So he knew his first few decisions would be the most crucial. What and
whom he chose to keep or jettison would be the difference between a quick turnaround and a
deeper hole. But he also knew that at Notre Dame -- much more than at Grand Valley State or
Central Michigan or Cincinnati -- how he presented his changes would actually trump the
changes themselves. Somehow, he needed everyone affiliated with this football-crazy, traditionobsessed institution to buy in.
Guido Vitti for ESPN The MagazineKelly hopes to alter the culture of the football team while embracing
what won't change at Notre Dame.
So the new coach got down to business, zigzagging tirelessly around campus and the country,
convincing his players and the rest of ND Nation that his choices were the right choices.
Basically, his first six months added up to one massive sales job.
Day 1
Dec. 11, 2009: First official day at work
In most get-to-know-you team meetings there is a time reserved for players to ask questions of
their new coach. Not this one, though. "That first meeting was different from any I've had at
other transitions," Kelly says. "It was, 'Listen, I don't have time for a group hug right now. We're
too far behind. You sat on the couch while other teams were getting ready for bowl games. We
don't have time for a feeling-out process. We have to get to work now.'"
The one-way street is unfortunate, because senior offensive guard Chris Stewart, for one, has
questions. Here are two he doesn't get to ask: What are the workouts going to be like? Will we
have a say in any of this?
Maybe it's for the best that Stewart gets no hearing, because he wouldn't have much liked the
answers: Harder than you've ever worked here and No.
The team meeting is just the first hint that the players' world has changed. The Irish players will
quickly learn that Kelly's high-octane, no-huddle spread offense is a significant departure from
Weis' pro-style approach. Not to mention a tiring one; they will be running to the line after each
snap. And to manufacture that frenetic tempo, the Irish are going to need a major fitness upgrade.
The first step will be introducing a football-only training table in January. (The NCAA allows
one such meal per day.) Most FBS schools have one, and those that don't usually can't afford it.
At Notre Dame, which put $18.7 million (20th in the nation) into football for the 2008-09
academic year, the budget hasn't been the culprit. "There was this view that if you don't have a
training table, the players will eat dinner with others [the general student population] in the
dining hall," says Swarbrick. But he has learned this is in theory only. In reality it means players
subsisting on a diet that pales in comparison with their opponents'. So the Irish have been the
weaker of the teams on the field on many Saturdays, wearing down late in games and at the
season's end. "People always talk about how we were 28 points from going undefeated and 17
points from going 2-10," Stewart says. "The difference is stuff like training table and running in
sandpits."
Then, in the spring, Kelly will start construction on a 30-yard, 20%-incline hill for sprints.
Day 32
Jan. 11, 2010: American Football Coaches Association meetings
In Orlando to accept an award on Notre Dame's behalf for achieving the highest graduation rate
among all FBS schools, Kelly sits down with members of the national media in the basement of
the Marriott. He wears a navy blazer with a shiny Notre Dame pin on the lapel. After talking
about the biggest challenges he'll face, he breaks down the difference between this job and the
others he's had. "I sense a bit of entitlement that needs to be rectified," Kelly says. "At Central
Michigan, the key was weeding out. I got rid of more guys than at any time in my career. They
weren't championship kind of guys. At Cincinnati, it was constant talk about how they're better
than they think they are." His message to Notre Dame's returning players is blunt: "You think
you're better than you are."
New leading men
New coaches across the country are busy putting their own stamps on programs.
Butch Jones, Cincinnati
Jones will supplement the fast pace of Kelly's offense with a dose of toughness reminiscent of
another former Cincy coach, Mark Dantonio: The Bearcats will practice in pads more often.
Derek Dooley, Tennessee
The man replacing Lane Kiffin wants to rebuild character. Dooley brought in former Tennessee
DB Andre Lott to head the Vol-for-Life initiative, designed to develop life, career and
community skills.
Jimbo Fisher, Florida State
Of late, FSU hasn't exactly been D1's most disciplined program. So Fisher has instituted a strict
penalty point system for infractions. Late for a film session? Ditch your tutor? Answer to coach.
Skip Holtz, South Florida
Former coach Jim Leavitt let senior Matt Grothe run free last season -- until the quarterback tore
his ACL. Holtz will develop sophomore QB B.J. Daniels into more of a pocket passer.
Tommy Tuberville, Texas Tech
What do you need to do to be the anti-Mike Leach? Well, wearing a suit is a good start. That's
how the dapper Tuberville showed up for the Big 12's media day. His players arrived in dress
threads too.
Lane Kiffin, USC
Kiffin may have worked under Pete Carroll, but he doesn't share his predecessor's laid-back
demeanor. Practices are far more intense, with players running lines -- old-school style -- for
conditioning.
That attitude can be seen as one more side effect of the Weis era. Kelly's predecessor arrived in
South Bend boasting about schematic advantages but often sent out a team that looked
unprepared. Kelly will make sure the Irish aren't satisfied with mediocrity. In the coming
months, he'll take a shot at players who wear their 2008 Hawaii Bowl T-shirts.
Day 106
March 26, 2010: First day of spring practice
Three months into the new regime, change is already apparent. A messy locker room is now
pristine. This is clearly a more efficient operation. "Notre Dame had 63 four- and five-star
recruits over the past four years," says Kelly, whose new office features a case that holds
championship rings earned at his previous stops. "Navy had none. Syracuse had one. Are fourand five-star players important? Yes. But it's about developing them, the atmosphere you create
and getting them to play hard for four quarters the whole season."
In some ways, Kelly is fostering a much looser environment, pouring cash into the facility's
game room. "I want them to play pool," he says. "I want them to come over and watch TV." No
one in South Bend questioned how much Weis cared about the school or winning, but his stress
hovered over the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, a.k.a. The Gug (ND's football offices), like a
storm cloud. The Irish carried it onto the field; they played tight and made mistakes. "I think they
felt like coming to this building was a job," Kelly says. "It can't be a job. This is college, and it's
gotta feel like college."
If "fun" is the word off the field, "faster" is the word on it. Kelly demands his players operate at
an accelerated pace -- his pace. "The tempo was something each position group had to learn,"
QB Dayne Crist says later in the spring. "It wasn't just the X's and O's and the technique of what
your position asks for, but how to actually operate at that tempo. You have to process things fast.
Going that speed exposes guys -- and their lack of knowledge -- very quickly."
The team is also in the midst of making one of the most basic adjustments: getting used to a new
football. Unlike teams in the NFL, where one model is used by all the offenses, each FBS team
provides its own ball (from one or two sanctioned choices per manufacturer), home and away.
Some coaches let their starting QB pick the ball, but Kelly has his own favorite, the Wilson GST
F1003. It is slightly narrower than the old ball-in-residence, the Wilson F1001. "It's better in
inclement weather, not as slippery for receivers," says Crist. Kelly's offense revolves around
getting the ball out of the triggerman's hand faster -- there's that word again -- so the easier it is
to grip it and rip it, the better.
Day 133
April 22, 2010: Meeting with business school dean
At Notre Dame, it's customary for a new coach to visit with the dean of each of its schools.
Convincing these university power brokers that you understand their academic mission is as vital
as courting any recruit's parents. It's no coincidence Kelly prioritizes his get-together with
Carolyn Woo, who lifted Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business to No. 1 on Bloomberg
BusinessWeek's list of top undergraduate B-schools. (Weis took two years to book his meeting
with Woo.) "Our students' lives, their sense of who they are, what they can do and how well
prepared they are, is our job," Woo says later, explaining why her first question to Kelly was
about what he wants his players to accomplish. Beyond winning, that is.
Joe
Robbins/Getty ImagesKelly made quite a splash in Cincy: Over three seasons, he led the Bearcats to a
34-6 record and two Big East titles.
One of the themes that emerges from Kelly's meeting with Woo: character. To build it, he
launched Irish Around the Bend in March, a community service project. "We spend two hours
every day giving back," Stewart says. "It really helps the team come together."
Days 137-165
April 26-May 24, 2010: Fund-raisers, award dinners and golf outings, plus 10 alumni club
events in eight states
"The one question that's a given is the one about conference affiliation," says Beth Rex, Kelly's
director of football administration, who is with him at all his appearances. The off-season's
conference expansion saga has plenty of folks holding their breath, including Kelly. "What
scares me more than anything else about conference realignment is I don't want to be
marginalized," he says later. "I don't want to be in a Big Ten footprint for recruiting. I know if
we can recruit coast-to-coast as an independent, I have a better chance of getting the kinds of
guys we need to get to succeed."
Kelly can't ignore the obvious. Notre Dame is the biggest domino in a realignment game that will
last into the summer. The thinking goes something like this: The Big Ten, with its hefty TV deal,
would love the Irish's brand power. And if it can coax ND to jump, chaos would reign in college
sports. The SEC might respond by poaching from the ACC and Big 12, leaving those
conferences ransacked. The Pac-10 might grab Texas and crush the Big 12 (which, of course,
nearly came to pass). Kelly, at the helm of the premier domino, can only hope it will remain
upright.
Day 166
May 25, 2010: Appearance on Live! With Regis and Kelly
Regis Philbin, a proud Irish booster: "The alums are restless. It's been a long time! Do we want
too much? Are we expecting too much?"
Kelly (not Ripa): "No, I don't think so. We can do it both in the classroom and on the football
field, and, quite frankly, that's why I took the job. I want to be able to prove you can have great
academics and be able to do it on the football field."
The answer is good enough for Reege. A few minutes later, he signs off by calling the new coach
"our savior!"
Day 180
June 8, 2010: Dinner for participants in the Notre Dame Football Fantasy Camp
Jeff "Country" Balitsos, a 38-year-old high school coach, played receiver at D2 Carson-Newman
in Tennessee. But, he says, "if you open up my right arm, gold and blue will pour out." Balitsos,
who has the Irish leprechaun tattooed on his right butt cheek, is one of the "Subway Alumni," a
term first used to describe the many New York City residents who cheered for the Irish without
having attended the school but that now applies to all such rooters around the country. Like the
rest of them, he is depressed by the program's recent series of false starts.
This is Balitsos' fourth trip to the camp, where for $4,500 he is coached by the Irish staff, gets to
touch the "Play Like a Champion Today" sign and competes against other campers on the field at
Notre Dame Stadium. He already sees a huge difference between the Kelly regime and what
came before. "Weis came in and sorta put the fantasy campers down -- 'Why would you pay
money to do this?' He'd never mingle with you. You didn't dare go up to him, and he'd leave
before you could even get a picture."
"It can't be a job. This is college, and it's gotta feel like college."
This particular event is Kelly's 144th in the past 146 days, and the third today. He has just
stepped off a flight after a meeting with Donald Keough, the former COO of Coca-Cola, so he
has every reason to be off his game. Instead, he is everyone's old college buddy. "I don't usually
drink the Kool-Aid, but I'm bathing in it now," says Balitsos, adding that he's never been around
any team in which every member of the staff, from head coach to equipment guy, preaches an
identical message the way this group does: Work fast, be efficient, enjoy college and win the
Notre Dame way.
The toughest question Kelly faces tonight in the Monogram Room at the Joyce Center comes
toward the end: "Is this the year we finally beat USC again?"
His answer starts off slowly: "Right now all of our attention is on Purdue and Sept. 4 ... "
But it ends on a nice note. "... but, yeah, the Trojans' time is coming."
The room erupts in fist pumps and applause. Sold.
ON WHY COX IS SO BELOVED
BY HIS PLAYERS
"The great thing about Bobby is he lets you be who you are, and he lets you be the player you
are. He doesn't make you something you're not. He's going to put you in the best situation
possible. He threw me in the 3-hole my rookie year for the best team in baseball. Who does that?
But he knew my best chance to be successful was to let me get some fastballs to hit in front of
David Justice and Javy Lopez and a bunch of veteran hitters, and it worked."
ON WHY COX MAKES DECISIONS
ON FEEL, NOT NUMBERS
"He doesn't need [numbers]. He just knows. Oh, maybe just to back up his feeling he might
check the numbers. But I've never seen him thumb through three or four pieces of paper just to
figure out who he wants to pinch-hit in a certain situation off a certain pitcher, and make his
decision based on that. … He's just got a knack for doing things. You can't explain it. There's no
formula to it. It's a feel. He'd be a great poker player because he reads people well."
"He makes you feel so special about what you do," backup catcher David Ross said. "Even if it's
the smallest little thing you can do for your team, he notices it."
Want an example? Bullpen coach Eddie Perez, who had two stints catching for Cox, once told us
a story about his final season as a player, in 2005. Early in the season, Perez hurt his shoulder
and couldn't throw. So Cox called him into the office.
"I thought I was going to get released," Perez said. "Instead, he told me, 'Eddie, I need you now
more than ever. I need you to teach these kids how to act and how to play in the big leagues.' I
walked out of there and I thought, 'He just made me feel like I was the most important guy on the
team -- and I couldn't even play.'"
Jones says Cox has softened slightly -- all right, make that very slightly -- throughout the years.
He now allows his players to wear Oakley sunglasses, for instance -- but only if they never cover
up the Braves logo on their cap.
"I didn't have the talent some of these guys have; I got 2,200 hits by willing it," he said, the fire, by
the way, still there.
"We have some people here walking around saying 'woe is me' every time things don't go their way
instead of just grinding it out. I hear someone say, 'That's a really good pitcher.' All these guys are
good pitchers. They make a good pitch, then foul it off.
"We're four games under .500 since June 1. That's not acceptable. You've got to battle through this.
No one is going to put a hand down to help you up. Where's the sense of urgency?"
Biggest stretch of the season, the Dogs fail to show up, and Bowa is talking about how important
every moment is now to this team, the question — is anyone listening?
On Friday night after Andre Ethier had been thrown out at home plate by a few feet, Bowa
returned to the dugout screaming and throwing things.
"No one said anything, but it was like they were all looking at me and saying, 'What's Bowa mad at?'
"It cost us a run," snapped Bowa, and the Dogs haven't scored many of those lately.
He said he was not calling out Ethier, "who has carried us most of the season, but he didn't get a
good walking lead and the shortstop was so surprised to see he still had a chance to throw him out,
he hesitated and still got him by six feet. It's the little things like that — secondary leads.''
Bowa, though, did call out the team's core players, "good players" as he called them, "but they have to
bring it every night. And if they are not hitting then they should be asking what can I do to win the
game?
"We can do the math. All these teams ahead of us have to lose — not just one of them but all of them
every night and we have to win every night. We've got 58 games left, 58 playoff games."
How about the players here, do they feel the same way?
"The majority of our guys are tremendous people, but there's a few, definitely a minority, but I would
say the coaches want to win more than they do," Bowa said. "We've got some people giving away atbats..."
Speaking of Matt Kemp, I wondered what Bowa thought of the guy who has the ability to carry the
Dod-gers, but so far has only let them down.
"I wish I had Matt Kemp's tools because I would be in Cooperstown," Bowa said. "He has so much
athleticism. I don't know if he knows what it's like to go full bore for nine innings. He's so talented, I
don't think his mind lets him ask, 'Is there more here?'
"I have one question I'd like to ask him, 'Are you dead tired when the game is over?' My dad told me
early on I should be exhausted after every game if I've done my batting practice, taken ground balls,
backed up every play and gone all out. I wonder if he's ever felt like that?"
I asked Kemp.
"There's more there," Kemp said. "I agree. It's something I need to sit here and think about and then
change."
If Kemp broke from the batter's box every time like a posse was in pursuit, with his speed he'd
probably have six more hits this season.
"Way more than that," said Bowa, who understands someone so gifted hasn't had to do much extra to
get ahead. "He works out, he does all his stuff. But instead of 10 minutes I'd like to see 20."
Why doesn't Kemp go all out? Why doesn't he break from the batter's box with all he has?
"That's a good question," Kemp said.
Ordinarily Kemp is quick to brush aside any talk about potential not realized. But this time he sat
there, listened to everything Bowa had to say, and there was no argument.
"I need to help this team out and I'm not doing it," he said. "I've wasted a lot of at-bats this year.
Pitchers have gotten me 70% of the time, but it's not them getting me out, it's me."
So why doesn't he lay off that outside pitch as he did in April, when he might have been the best
hitter in the game — seven home runs to start the season?
"I feel it, trust me," he said. "Everything being said, I've said to myself. I have no excuses. I've never
hit below .290 in my life."
Kemp is now a .259 hitter, two for 19 during this critical stretch against the Padres and Giants, the
last hope for the Dogs in the ninth inning, and on a positive note, he didn't strike out.
But he was out, completing another flat-line performance by the Dogs, and so what did Bowa have to
say?
"I made a mistake," he said. "Make that 57 playoff games to go. Starts tomorrow."
If only the Dogs playing the game showed as much life.
LAKERS FYI
Lakers trot through a light practice
Coach Phil Jackson holds his traditional 'fun' scrimmage that pits the
'smalls' against the 'bigs.'
Lakers Coach Phil Jackson before Tuesday's game against the Chicago Bulls. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times /
November 23, 2010)
By Broderick Turner
Thursday, while so many around the nation and Southland were enjoying some turkey on
Thanksgiving Day, the Lakers had a little practice, nothing serious, just enough to get a sweat and
perhaps to get in a little trash-talking in the process.
The Lakers held a scrimmage that Coach Phil Jackson calls the "Turkey Trot."
It's something he has done since his days as coach of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s and here with
the Lakers.
"Instead of having a serious practice, we have a fun practice in which there is a lot of levity," Jackson
said. "We still try and get something accomplished because that's part of what we do whenever we
take the court."
Basically, it was players 6 feet 4 or under, or the "smalls," going up against the "bigs," the forwards
and centers.
Jackson explained how it works.
"We put our bigs at guards and our guards at centers," Jackson said. "We let them play roles that
they never get to play, but they still have to work it out in the offense.
"Last year, I think the … guys under 6-4 scored like 120 points. And our [bigs] got about 25 points, so
it's really tough."
When I was at Syracuse there was a saying that strength and conditioning coach Todd Forcier used
to toss around when he was working out guys after practice and a player wanted to head to the locker
room while a teammate stayed for extra drills. "So and so is getting better today, you don't want to?"
It was part athlete speak, appealing to a player's prideful side as a sort of guilt trip, but it was also a
way to see results.
_____________________________________________________________________
he came to every spring training as though he was a fringe player, a bench guy just trying to make the
team.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Lumpkin told Bethea -- who coached Rainier Beach to four state basketball championships -- there would
always be people critiquing him. He said to be satisfied coaching the way he knew best -- a feeling Bethea said
Lumpkin had in his own career.
Asked by the Seattle P-I to describe his coaching style in a word, Lumpkin chose discipline.
"It's pretty simple; I teach the game a certain way and I expect my teams to play the way I teach it," he said in
2005. "I respect the game and my players, and in return I expect them to respect the game, as well as their
coaches."
The book every recruit must read
Recruits tell all in this inside look at the life of a ESPNU 150 blue-chip prospect
By Gene Wojciechowski
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Presenting …
THE LITTLE BLUE-CHIP RECRUITING HANDBOOK
A Collection of Recruiting Wisdom by ESPNU 150 Blue-Chippers for Blue-Chippers (with
some help from their coaches)
Chapter 1: It Gets Old Fast
• "At first, you'll walk into the locker room hoping there'll be letters waiting for you. But after a while,
you can tell just by looking there's nothing important in them.
"If it was a handwritten note, I would read it. If not, I wouldn't even open it. Nothing worse than
a [recruiting] form letter. That's another thing recruiters should know: 99 percent of recruits
would open your letter if it was handwritten."
[+] Enlarge
Davide De PasOne thing players talk about is how overwhelming the calls and letters can be. And don't
even get them started on when their names are spelled wrong.
• "The mail's ridiculous. I'm looking at five letters, and they all have my name spelled different."
• "That's happened a lot to me. Whenever I get a letter with my name misspelled, I don't feel like
they really put in the time."
• "I was 14 or 15 when it started. I played on the varsity a little bit as a freshman and got
recruited a little bit. I went to camps and stuff and, by my sophomore year, I was getting verbal
offers. I'm wide-eyed and all excited. These elite programs -- they want you.
"But you have to be careful. Some of these kids, they get overwhelmed. They have like 15
[college] coaches talking to them. They start thinking, 'I don't have to work anymore because
these schools want me.' You get lazy.
"I wouldn't have been able to do it if I didn't have a good high school coach who helped me. And
my brothers, too.
"We'd get the letters, the calls. My coach would ask me, 'Are you interested in this one? Are you
interested in that one?' It was, 'Thank you. … No, thank you.' You listen to what they have to
say, but I got it narrowed down pretty quickly.
"The biggest mistake kids make is getting too caught up in it. You're still a kid; you've got to live
your life."
• "The recruiting process can help you a lot. The interviews you do. The character you have to
show. Having to be a leader. It shows what type of person you are. It might get tiring every now
and then, but if you stick with it and pull through it, you learn how to communicate with people
better."
• The calls? Unbelievable. Too many to count. At first it was cool, but then it got aggravating.
It's their job -- I know -- they have to do that."
Chapter 2: Campus Visits Can Be Your Friend
• "Visit as many schools as you can. You get five official visits, but I probably took 20 unofficial visits to
schools. I visited [the school I committed to] five times before I committed to them.
"At first I had some offers from smaller programs in the Midwest, where I'm from. But then
these other schools started calling. [One school] called, but it was eight hours away. I didn't want
to go that far. But I thought, 'Why the hell not?' I took the visit, and I just fell in love with it.
“
Have fun with your visits. If you go on a visit and try to make it totally businesslike,
you'll miss out. Meet the guys. Make friends. Have some fun. ”
• "Take all your visits, especially the guys who have been in-state their whole lives. Get down to the
schools as many times as you can. You've really got to know the place where you're going to be.
"Have fun with your visits. If you go on a visit and try to make it totally businesslike, you'll miss
out. Meet the guys. Make friends. Have some fun."
• "Look at every school and give them a chance. I almost messed up because I didn't give
everyone a chance at first. I was committed to [an in-state school], but I ended up decommitting
after I took a visit to another school [out of state].
"I was going [in state] because of my mom. But I didn't really feel that was a good fit for me, so I
changed my mind and signed to go out of state."
• "It's a blessing to be out here. If you can go visit five different places for free, take advantage of
it. Enjoy it while you can because once you sign on that dotted line, you're pretty much through.
That's pretty much it. It's gone. [The recruiters] disappear. It's done. You're on your own."
Chapter 3: Don't Fall Helmet Over Cleats for Your Coaching Staff
• "Coaches take other jobs. Those guys who came to Texas to play for Will Muschamp? He left for
Florida. Those guys who came to Florida to play for Urban Meyer? He's leaving, too.
"Don't go to a school because you like the coaching staff. It's a big business, and coaches move
all the time. Look at their bios in the media guides and you'll see how often they change schools.
"You have to ask yourself: If the coaches left after you signed, would you still want to go to that
school? If you got hurt and couldn't play, would you still want to go to that school?"
• "You'll hear a lot of sales pitches. Most of the coaches will be truthful with you. But I had one
coach tell me, 'You can come in and start, and I'll be here your whole career.'
"He's gone now.
"At the beginning of the recruiting process, you believe whatever the coach tells you. Coaches
are kind of like celebrities. But after you spend enough time with these guys, you learn about
them: who's trying to sell something and who's telling the truth. You really can't tell unless you
spend time with them."
• "Don't just look at a school because of coaches because coaches can leave, but you'll still be
there."
Chapter 4: When Recruiters Get Desperate
• "One prime example is when a recruiter comes in and starts to rag on other schools and other
conferences. After I narrowed my finalists down to four or five programs, I went down to visit a school
and their coaches picked through each school I was considering. That bothered me. I felt like that wasn't
a classy thing to do."
• "Good recruiters don't negative recruit. They don't say things like, 'Hey, man, you don't want to
go to that school -- they've got four feet of snow.' Or, 'They're not any good.' Or, 'Who have they
put in the NFL?'
"That's the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. They're not salesmen; they're
coaches telling a kid, 'We've got something to help you. We're going to make sure we look out
after you.' It's not, 'We've got 35 guys in the NFL.'"
• "I get that sometimes, the negative recruiting. So I basically go find out for myself. My biggest
thing in recruiting is the relationship the coaches build with the recruit. You have to be there for
the next three, four, five years. You need to get a relationship with that guy where you know you
can trust him, that he'll be there for you."
• "At one point, I kind of let people know Penn State was probably going to be my school. A lot
of recruiters tried to convince me that [Joe Paterno] was going to retire. Obviously, I want to
play for him, but the reason I'm going to Penn State is that I felt comfortable with the other
coaches and that I fell in love with the university.
"The negative recruiting was a turn-off, it really was. If I could give advice to recruiters, I'd tell
them that if you've got to talk trash about other schools and coaches, then your program is not
that strong. I want to hear about your program, not what's wrong with other programs."
Chapter 5: We Notice the Little Things
[+] Enlarge
Davide De PasPlayers notice when recruiters are making the extra effort. Want to know if a coach is
interested in you? See if he stays for every play of one of your games.
• "There's a lot of good [recruiters]. You're really impressed by how hard they work. There was one
[recruiter] who was going to fly here to see us, but his plane was delayed. So he jumped in a rental car
and drove 3½ hours so he can say hello. It's admirable for someone to do that. It shows their
commitment.
"Another thing that's impressive is when a coach comes to a game and he doesn't leave at
halftime to go watch another kid in the area. They'll stay for the entire game."
• "Coaches who stay the whole time, it kind of shows how much they want you."
• "If I go on a visit and notice their players aren't working hard, then I don't want to go to a place
like that. Or if I can go to a place and pick up a defense just like that, I don't want to go there. I
want a place where the defense is complex and where it will really benefit me to know the whole
defense inside and out."
Chapter 6: In a Perfect Recruiting World …
• "I would tell recruiters that one of the reasons I committed early is because the phone calls were
getting absurd. One school e-mailed me once a day. To recruits, it starts to get annoying after a while. It
ruins your impression of that school. At least, it did for me.
"Once a week, on a certain day and at a certain time, I was going to talk to [recruiters]. Most of
them, when they start to call, they repeat the same things over and over again. Some guys tell
you stats over and over again. I don't want to hear that. I want to hear family stuff, what the guys
on the team are doing. We just don't want stats."
• "I want the guy who keeps it down to earth. I would tell a recruiter, 'Just be yourself.'"
• "I'd set a day to accept calls from recruiters: Wednesday night from 7-9. Limit the calls to 3- to
5-minute calls. I mean, if I'm recruiting you, there's only so much I can tell you. You know
you're a top recruit, that you'll play as a freshman, that you know how many players we have in
the NFL, that you know about our academics and how many seniors we're graduating. It's almost
to the point where you hear those things repetitively every single phone call."
• "Coaches need to know when to push, when not to push. And when a coach calls, he needs to
make sure he's got something to say. Not just football stuff, but life stuff. It gets frustrating
because they all say about the same exact thing.
"But I had one coach, he was the best. When the call came, we talked about important stuff. We
had something to talk about. He'd message me on Facebook, but not every day. He didn't push."
• "In the beginning, it was all fun having everybody calling you. Now, sometimes I answer,
sometimes I won't."
• "Sometimes we just want to relax. … If players aren't picking up your calls, that's not a good
sign. If you call and we pick up on one ring, that's a good sign."
Chapter 7: Playing the NFL Card
• "There was one guy -- I'm not going to mention his name -- and he'd flash his Super Bowl rings and talk
about all these NFL players that he coached. Everybody in the industry knew he was a bad egg and took
what he said with a grain of salt.
"I wonder about recruiters when they start bragging on themselves that they got this guy in the
league or that they're responsible for getting that guy that much money in the league."
Chapter 8: We're Not Stupid
• "[A recruiter] told me: 'We're not going to promise you anything. We're not going to put your face on
billboards. But we'll try to get the best out of you. If you work hard, we'll get the best out of you.'
"I really liked that." (And the player committed to that program.)
“
Whenever coaches make you promises like that, you have to remember there are other
guys on the depth chart. You have to use some common sense with it. They recruited those other
guys. too. ”
• "Don't lie about playing time. Coaches can look at a kid on video and be able to tell pretty much if he
can play as a freshman. Don't tell a kid he can play and then he gets down and he doesn't play at all.
"Don't lie because, in the end, he'll know the difference. Just say, 'Son, you might be able to
come in and help us play as a freshman.'"
• "Whenever coaches make you promises like that, you have to remember there are other guys on
the depth chart. You have to use some common sense with it. They recruited those other guys,
too."
• "Recruiters will tell you anything to make you happy. They'll lie to you and tell a different kid
the same thing, like, 'You're going to start [as a freshman].' Just tell the truth."
• "I would tell them to be completely honest. Sometimes they'll tell you, 'You can come here and
start. You can come here and do this.' I wanted a recruiter -- and this is why [my school] really
intrigued me -- who would tell the truth. [My school's recruiter] said, 'You can start, but it's
going to be tough. You're going to have competition.' That's what I liked. I liked the fact that
they were being honest with me."
• "I can tell the [bulls------s]. Since I've been through this for almost a year now, I can tell when a
recruiter is lying to me. You can tell just by the way they say things to you."
Chapter 9: Do What's Right for You
• "Take your time and make the right choice. Most of those guys who commit in the spring [as juniors]
and summer [before their senior seasons] seem to decommit later on. Those are the guys who rush into
it. They get that one offer they're looking for and, once they get it, they don't look anywhere else.
"Maybe the school is telling them to take it now because it might not be there later. But if they
really want you, I think they'll hold [the scholarship] for you.
"My biggest thing is to get into an offense that fits me, that will get me the ball so I can make it
to the NFL. That's my dream, to play in the NFL. So I want to put myself in the best position to
do that. That's basically how I'm looking at it, as a business decision."
• "I'd tell guys not to worry about recruiting. Finish your high school career and finish strong.
"Recruiting is a business, so make sure you ask questions. My main thing was dealing with
academics -- how good was their graduation rate. I wanted to know what the depth chart looked
like, how did my position look on the depth chart, what would my team look like.
"The process started for me when I was 15. I'm 17 now. I talked to every recruiter who called so
I'd get to learn them. It was a great process. But committing early was a big help to me. I'm
starting [college in the] spring semester."
• "Scope out the recruiter. See what type of person they really are. Are they into it to help you
out, or are they just doing it to get somebody and get paid? Do they care, or are they selling you
something?"
• "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Don't try to rush through it. You're going to have the one
school you've been rooting for since you were a little kid. It's the school you always looked up to
and your favorite player went there.
"But sometimes you have to make business decisions over emotional decisions. The emotional
decision for me would have been to go to the school where my brother was [playing]. But I had
to think what was best for me."
• "Stay focused. It will play out. The [recruiters] are going to come and they're going to go, but
you need to stay focused. Do what you need to do. Concentrate on what's important."
O'Neill shrugged off the idea that he has an edge over Howland and said success in rivalries is often
cyclical and that UCLA is struggling now because of its youth.
But like Howland, O'Neill's trademark is a physical defense, and the Trojans have fared better in that
category, holding the Bruins to an average of 57.3 points in their last three meetings.
And in each of the wins, it wasn't just USC's defense that made the difference. The Trojans simply
played as if they wanted it more.
Part of that is O'Neill's ability to motivate his players, said former USC Coach Bob Boyd, whose 13year run (1967-79) as the Trojans coach was overshadowed by UCLA's dynasty under John Wooden.
"He doesn't think he can't beat anybody," Boyd said. "He really doesn't. And he conveys that to his
players."
Junior forward Nikola Vucevic, who has played in all three of O'Neill's wins against UCLA and scored
a game-high 20 points Sunday, agreed. ""He always tells us we don't know how good we can be and
that if we play hard and play good defense, we can beat anybody," Vucevic said.
UCLA isn't just anybody. O'Neill knows that.
"When you beat UCLA, you've beaten tradition," he said Sunday night.
Originally Published: January 18, 2011
Rex's Rx a tried-and-true formula
Ryan's pitch hasn't changed a whit since the 1980s, New Mexico cronies say
By Gene Wojciechowski
ESPN.com
Rex Ryan stood in front of his players in a hotel meeting room the night before the game. They
were on the road. They were underdogs. It was personal.
"Nobody's your friend on the field,'' said Ryan, working himself into a familiar four-letter-word rant.
"You want friends? You can have friends after the game. Right now, it's you against everybody, and you
have prove yourself every time.''
The next day, Ryan's sixth-seeded New York Jets sandblasted the heavily favored New England Patriots
from the postseason bake-off. NFL Nation is still in shock. Now it's on to Pittsburgh to face the Steelers
for the AFC championship.
Wait. Sorry. It wasn't last weekend that Ryan gave that speech. It was 22 years ago in Grand Junction,
Colo. That's because some things never change.
Like Ryan.
"It ain't any different from when he was with New Mexico Highlands in 1989 and the New York Jets in
2011,'' said George Martinez, the former NFL assistant coach who first hired Ryan at Highlands
University. "He didn't have to interview 10 minutes and I knew he was the guy.… I knew when I hired
him that this guy is big-time stuff.''
In 1989, Ryan was a rookie defensive coordinator making his professional debut as a full-time coach.
Martinez's dinky Highlands team was playing NAIA powerhouse Mesa State. Not that Ryan gave a damn.
He had a bad mustache and an even worse mullet. He was making food and rent money working in the
depths of college football and living in isolated Las Vegas, N.M., which shares its name, but nothing else,
with the "Ocean's 11" Vegas a state away.
But Ryan did then what he does now. He finds a motivational pressure point. He creates a specific
reason to play that game and to despise that opponent. Then, he invents belief.
By the time kickoff arrives, Ryan has his players convinced that the other team not only needs to be
crushed, but that it deserves to be crushed. Doesn't matter if it's Mesa State or Bill Belichick's Patriots.
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Kathy WillensRyan wears his emotions on his sweater vest, it seems, and his players buy in.
"His No. 1 ability is to get his players to identify hate in the week,'' said an NFL team executive who
knows him well.
Two seasons, two AFC championship appearances for the Jets with Ryan. Not bad for a guy whose first
full-time coaching gig was at a pinhole on the New Mexico state map. A guy who's as corporate as a lap
dance. A guy who so desperately wanted to become an NFL head coach that he had his teeth fixed and
his waistline reduced.
The Miami Dolphins interviewed him, liked him, but didn't hire him. The Atlanta Falcons interviewed
him, liked him, didn't hire him. The San Diego Chargers interviewed him, liked him, didn't hire him. Even
his own Baltimore Ravens, who he was a star defensive coordinator for at the time, made him put on a
suit and tie for the team's interview committee. It liked him, but it didn't hire him.
The Jets did. They love that his personality is as oversized as Times Square. He is a players' coach, a
tabloid's dream and an opponent's nightmare.
In the past two weeks alone, he out-prepared Peyton Manning and out-coached Belichick. In the Jets'
28-21 AFC divisional playoff win over the Patriots on Sunday, Ryan's defense made the great Tom Brady
look like he was lost in a corn maze.
Nobody in the NFL, with the possible exception of Brett Favre, has had a more controversial or headlinegenerating season than Ryan. Every time he opens his mouth, there's a 75 percent chance that he'll say
something ridiculously provocative.
Then, he'll almost always back it up.
From his HBO "Hard Knocks'' performance in training camp to January's playoff challenge to Belichick
("There's no question, it's personal.''), Ryan's ego, mouth and confidence have never taken a sick day
this season. Or any season.
It runs in the family. Buddy Ryan, inventor of the "46'' defense, is his old man. Rob Ryan, the soon-to-be
Dallas Cowboys' defensive coordinator, is his brother.
"Hell, I'll call them geniuses,'' said Martinez, who has worked with each of the three Ryans. "I've been
coaching 33 years and I've never seen three guys who are so damn smart on the defensive side in my
life. And their rapport with players is unbelievable.''
Rex's defensive schemes against Manning's Indianapolis Colts in the wild-card game and against Brady's
Patriots in the divisional game were sublime. Even more impressive is that he managed to hit the erase
button on the Jets' past.
Manning had broken the Jets' hearts year after year, most recently in the AFC Championship Game last
January. Belichick and Brady had presided over a 45-3 humiliation just a month-and-a-half ago. And by
the way, Ryan had been ridiculed during a December stretch in which the Jets lost three out of four,
including the Patriots' blowout.
And yet, here Ryan and the Jets are, a victory away from the franchise's first Super Bowl since Joe
Namath's guarantee in 1969.
Like him or loathe him, but Ryan has withstood more heat (much of it self-inflicted) than a good pair of
oven mitts. His players adore him. More important, they respect him.
Now, 22 years later, former Highlands linebacker Mike Ulibarri still respects him.
"My mentor,'' said Ulibarri, now the football head coach at West Las Vegas (N.M.) High School.
Ulibarri remembers Ryan as the guy "with the cheesy mustache" who cut off his prized mullet after
Highlands pulled off an upset. A bet is a bet, right?
Ulibarri still remembers Ryan's speech the night before that Mesa State game in Grand Junction. He can
recite it by heart.
And speaking of heart, Ulibarri remembers Ryan crying outside the the visitors' locker room after a 28-6
Highlands loss the next day.
"He was telling our head coach that he was sorry that he had let the team down,'' Ulibarri said.
The head coach remembers it, too.
"That's true,'' Martinez said. "And here's the crazy thing about that whole deal: Mesa had a running back
who averaged almost 200 yards a game. Against Rex's defense, he had like 27 carries for 40 yards. Are
you kidding me? We threw five interceptions, three or four of them in the end zone.
"I said, 'Rex --- damn, son, you didn't lose the game for us. You got nothing to feel bad about.'''
That's Ryan for you. Three decades later, he's wearing his emotions on his sweater vest. And the Jets
don't want to change a thing.
Gene Wojciechowski is the senior national columnist for ESPN.com. You can contact him at
[email protected]. Hear Gene's podcasts and ESPN Radio appearances by clicking
here. And don't forget to follow him on Twitter @GenoEspn.
You want discipline? Ball security? Mental toughness? According to Morris, the team has a rack
of 12 balls to work with during a typical practice. If they turn all 12 balls over, they spend the
remainder of practice running. It doesn't matter how much time is left.
"We play winners and losers, too," said Morris, who is tied for the team lead with 11.6 points per
game. "If you lose, you're running."
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
USC's Ed Orgeron is a rah-rah recruiter
USC assistant coach loves the thrill of the chase and excels at figuring
out who can play at the next level. With high school standouts
choosing their schools Wednesday, Orgeron will find out how
persuasive he was.
USC's Ed Orgeron has developed a reputation as one of college football's top recruiters. (Kent Nishimura / Getty
Images / September 2, 2010)
By David Wharton
February 1, 2011,6:56 p.m.
Start with the sound of him.
A voice deep and gruff, like dump trucks rumbling down the street. If dump trucks had a Cajun
accent.
Add a sturdy face and barrel chest, a sense of determination that allows the man to go days on end
with little sleep, living on Slim Jims and Red Bull.
Save on daily L.A. Times deals powered by Groupon.
These are the peculiar charms that Ed Orgeron brings to his job.
"I learned it a while ago," he says. "Be who you are."
Orgeron is — among other things — the recruiting coordinator at USC, in charge of coaxing high
school football players to sign with the Trojans. Over the past decade, he has built a reputation as one
of the top names in a cutthroat line of work.
"He's a big guy who goes in there with a lot of humor and aggressiveness and the kids just love him,"
says Tom Lemming, a recruiting expert for CBS College Sports Network. "He overwhelms them."
Though USC figures to harvest another top-10 class Wednesday — the first day that prospects can
sign letters of intent — the next few years could be rough.
The Trojans face continuing NCAA sanctions that, unless overturned by appeal, will severely limit
scholarships through 2014. That means rival schools will be looking to gain an edge in living rooms
across the country.
"There's no question," Orgeron says. "We have to deal with this."
Now, more than ever, USC needs a man of his charms.
Star search
Recruiting was tailor-made for a big guy with an even bigger personality, a former defensive lineman
who played at Northwestern State in his native Louisiana.
But before Orgeron could send his first letter or make his first call, he needed to recognize talent. A
series of entry-level coaching jobs landed him at Miami in the late-1980s, working under Jimmy
Johnson.
"That's where I learned to evaluate," Orgeron says. "I just listened to him."
The process began with hours of watching film. But lots of players look impressive against high
school competition, so there was an element of trial-and-error, developing an eye for athletes whose
skills would translate to the next level.
Years later, Orgeron, 49, explains: "You're doing it for 25 years and you have pictures in your mind.
You remember what Mike Patterson looked like, what Kenechi Udeze looked like, what Matt Leinart
looked like."
Experience taught him to stretch beyond football. He made a practice of talking with anyone who
could tell him about a prospect's character — the school principal, the counselor, even the janitor.
It was all about sharpening his instincts, finding ways to measure a young man's heart.
Those early days in Miami were exciting, Orgeron coaching eight All-Americans on the defensive line
— including Warren Sapp and Russell Maryland — while the Hurricanes won a pair of national
championships.
But the good times did not last.
First came a domestic violence incident in 1991, when he was single. The next year, Orgeron was
charged with head-butting a man during a fight in a Baton Rouge, La., bar. The incident led to a year
away from the game.
"I believe that things happen for a reason," he says. "We learn from what we do."
The road back began at Nicholls (La.) State and wound through Syracuse before leading him to Paul
Hackett's staff at USC in 1998. The late Marv Goux, a legendary assistant for the Trojans, pulled him
aside to talk about hard work and loyalty.
"I realized how powerful this place was," Orgeron recalls. "There were people here who helped me,
both in football and in my personal life."
Newly married and starting a family, he saw everything falling into place. Then Hackett got fired.
Love of the chase
It was the winter of 2000 and Pete Carroll felt confident about getting hired at USC. In town for an
interview, he stopped by a Long Beach Poly game to scout the local talent.
That is where he met Orgeron.
"Ed didn't know who the next coach would be, didn't know if he'd still have a job," Carroll says. "But
he was out there recruiting, working it."
Done correctly, college recruiting demands a year-round effort, every spare moment devoted to
finding new blood for the program. Some coaches would rather diagram plays or work with their
teams on the practice field. Or play golf.
"If a head coach plays golf, the chance is great that he will be a lousy recruiter," Lemming says. "A lot
of coaches play golf."
Carroll and Orgeron were different because they had a passion for the chase and loved signing
prospects almost as much as winning games.
Their plan to bolster USC's struggling program was simple: They focused on local talent, which
meant reconnecting with high school coaches throughout Southern California. It was a matter of
sheer will, the men constantly challenging each other to see who could work harder.
That meant driving to a dozen or more campuses each day.
"I distinctly remember Coach O showing up and telling me that he and Coach Carroll were going to
do it like it's never been done before," recalls Matt Kerstetter, the coach at Taft High in Woodland
Hills. "They said it and they followed through with it."
Orgeron enjoyed the legwork, sometimes showing up at high schools early to talk football or even lift
weights with the coach. He liked getting to know recruits and their families.
That first spring, the Trojans surprised everyone by signing Shaun Cody, a prep All-American from
Hacienda Heights Los Altos. In seasons to follow, they cast their net wider, stealing Mike Williams
from Florida and LenDale White from Colorado.
"It's tireless," Orgeron says. "You've got to love the grind."
Man with a plan
The job at USC entailed more than just recruiting.
Orgeron produced a string of top defensive linemen for the Trojans. That big voice thundered across
the practice field as he transformed the likes of Patterson and Udeze from ungainly freshmen into
NFL-ready talent.
"He knew how to maximize results," former linebacker Dallas Sartz says. "He coached you hard."
But it was in the pursuit of high school prospects that Orgeron distinguished himself, named
recruiter of the year by the Sporting News and Rivals.com in 2004.
This success helped get him the head coach's job at Mississippi, where he stockpiled talent but was
fired after three seasons and 10-25 record. The New Orleans Saints hired him to coach their
defensive line for a season before Lane Kiffin took over at Tennessee and brought him back to the
college game.
Orgeron did not need much persuading.
Watching Ole Miss win with his recruits made him feel as if he had fallen a year short of succeeding
in that job. He wanted another shot. Also, he missed the recruiting.
With each passing season, his strategy grew sharper.
"It's a detailed process," he says. "You have to be organized and execute your plan."
The line between persuading and pestering can be thin. Rather than inundate prospects with calls
and emails, Orgeron tries to establish what he calls "regular patterns of communication." For
instance, he will tell a recruit to expect a call every Thursday night.
For each home visit, he draws up a list of talking points and answers to questions he expects to hear.
After that, the laughing and joking can take over.
"He's very spirited in how he talks and, being a kid, that's what you want to hear," says Sartz, who
came to USC from Granite Bay High near Sacramento. "He also got very close to my sister and both
my parents."
Hooked on work
Several USC boosters arranged for a private jet to fly Kiffin and Orgeron on a whirlwind tour last
week. The coaches visited recruits in 11 states over five days.
There wasn't much time for sleep. At one point, Kiffin suggested they stop for a meal, but Orgeron
waved him off.
"We're good," the coordinator said. "I've got plenty of Slim Jims and Red Bull."
Both men are known for their recruiting prowess, and the living-room banter followed a predictable
pattern: Orgeron loud and energetic, Kiffin quieter and more serious. They met the issue of NCAA
sanctions head-on.
"We know at the end this is going to be a great story," they told recruits. "We're going to win national
championships again."
It helps that Orgeron is nearly as well-known as his head coach. There was a book called "Meat
Market" about his time at Ole Miss and he appeared as himself in the popular film "The Blind Side."
His devotion to work suggests that Orgeron — who has been sober for more than a decade — traded
alcohol for an addiction to recruiting, though he explains himself a different way.
"I don't like to use the word addicted," he says. "I can put down the football and play with my kids or
go out to dinner with my wife."
But when it is time for football, he is clearly focused.
After the hectic trip, he returned to USC to host recruits visiting campus over the weekend. Then
came a dead period in which no in-person contact was allowed, but coaches could work the phones,
trying to protect the recruits who had verbally committed and, perhaps, sway a prospect planning to
sign elsewhere.
"We've seen a lot of crazy things happen on Monday and Tuesday," Orgeron says. "We make sure
they hear our voices and we're answering questions."
No one around Heritage Hall expected to sleep on Tuesday night because the first signatures usually
come over the fax machine around sunrise on the East Coast — 4 a.m. in Los Angeles.
"It's like game day," Orgeron says. "It's exhilarating."
That voice tends to grow a little louder, a little rougher, with excitement. Orgeron has been waiting
all year for this.
Even better, he says, "the next day we start all over again."
[email protected]
Men's basketball program at USC is hanging tough despite
sanctions
Coach Kevin O'Neill has led the Trojans to a much more respectable
showing than some other programs that had to deal with similar
NCAA penalties.
USC Coach Kevin O'Neill has his critics, but his team has
done fairly well compared to other programs that have been
hampered by NCAA sanctions. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles
Times / February 25, 2010)
By Baxter Holmes
February 9, 2011, 5:56 p.m.
Fans flood his inbox with messages of disappointment, but Kevin O'Neill says it doesn't bother him.
USC's second-year men's basketball coach has rebuilt programs before and believes he can do it
again.
"What you have to do in these situations," O'Neill said in his office recently, "… is you have to be able
to stand some of the bad times to get to the good.
Some critics have let O'Neill know that they believe USC, at 12-11 overall and 4-6 in Pacific 10
Conference play, has underperformed. Indeed, the Trojans have lost five of their last seven going into
Thursday's game against Oregon State at the Galen Center.
But considering that O'Neill took over a program that was hemorrhaging players and recruits in the
wake of an NCAA investigation that resulted in a postseason ban, scholarship reductions, recruiting
limitations and probation, USC really hasn't fared too poorly.
The Trojans are 28-25 under O'Neill, which looks pretty good compared to other major college
programs that have been rocked by penalties.
At Baylor, for example, Coach Scott Drew took over a program in chaos in 2003 after a player was
found shot to death and then-coach Dave Bliss resigned after allegedly violating myriad NCAA rules.
Four players transferred in the Bliss fallout, and in 2005 the NCAA handed down penalties that
included probation, limitations to scholarships and recruiting and the cancellation of Baylor's 200506 nonconference schedule.
The scandal, transfers and the specter of impending sanctions marred Drew's first three seasons,
when Baylor won eight, nine and four games.
Then the penalties kicked in and the challenges continued.
"Sometimes, it's like driving the car," Drew said. "If you have a governor on the car and you're going
60 and everybody else is going 70, it's tough to catch up. That's what sanctions are designed to do."
The same thing happened at Georgia when the NCAA handed down penalties in 2004 for widespread
violations — mostly academic fraud — under coach Jim Harrick.
Harrick was ousted and Dennis Felton struggled to match the success the Bulldogs had become
accustomed to. With a depleted roster and later under probation and with scholarship reductions,
the program that lost only eight games in 2002-03, Harrick's final season, lost 49 over the next three
seasons.
"This is the biggest challenge I've ever seen — as a head coach or an assistant," Felton said before his
second season at Georgia, when departures left him with no seniors and four freshmen among only
eight scholarship players.
Even basketball blue blood Indiana remains in rebuilding mode under Tom Crean, who replaced
Kelvin Sampson as coach in 2008.
The NCAA charged Sampson with major rules violations for allegedly taking part in hundreds of
impermissible phone calls to recruits, and Indiana faced probation and scholarship and recruiting
limitations.
With two players remaining on a roster raided by early departures to pro basketball, dismissals and
transfers, Crean won six games his first season — a low in school history — and 10 in his second
season. Now midway through his third season, his record at Indiana is 28-59.
"Nothing short of an athletic disaster," Crean has said of the situation he stepped into.
Baylor's program has been righted by Drew, whose team was 28-8 last season and fell one win short
of the Final Four. At Georgia, Felton was fired in 2009 after posting a record of 84-91 in six seasons.
O'Neill rebuilt programs at Marquette, Northwestern and Tennessee, coaching downtrodden teams
to postseason tournaments, which is why USC interviewed him in June 2009.
But O'Neill knew what lay in front of him at USC. Coaching friends told him he wouldn't win five
games in his first season. (He won 16.)
"This isn't going to be easy," he recalls then-USC athletic director Mike Garrett telling him during his
interview.
"As long as you guys support my efforts, I don't care," O'Neill responded. "I've been through hard. I
can deal with that."
O'Neill apparently has the support of USC's new administration. First-year Athletic Director Pat
Haden said the coach has
"Got us on the right path. … I'm very pleased with where he's headed. We're quite satisfied."
O'Neill said rebuilding programs always face certain challenges, and his main obstacle is a lack of
depth. The Trojans have been using only a seven-player rotation.
He hopes that will change next season when transfers such as forward Aaron Fuller (Iowa), center
DeWayne Dedmon (Antelope Valley College) and shooting guard Greg Allen (Navarro College in
Corsicana, Texas) become eligible.
USC has also signed two freshman guards and a 7-foot-1 junior-college center.
The Trojans will definitely lose three seniors — starters Alex Stepheson and Marcus Simmons, plus
sixth-man Donte Smith — but the immediate future probably hinges on whether junior forward
Nikola Vucevic, who is averaging team highs of 16.7 points and 9.8 rebounds, decides to leave early
to play professionally.
As far as long-term goals, O'Neill's boss has a lofty one:
"If I can do one thing as an athletic director," Haden said, "I'd want to win a national championship
in basketball."
After Isaiah's last-minute shot was blocked in a loss to Purdue in the second round of the '09 NCAA tournament, Isiah
rang, telling him to take a defender and a broomstick to the gym that summer to hone his floater. Isaiah did.
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1181472/2/index.htm#ixzz1DflFC41N
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Brennan Carroll will be at the forefront of the success that the Miami has this season. He is a young,
aggressive coach with a good personality and already earned consistently positive reviews from
recruits when they make their way to the Coral Gables campus. He has also been around big-time
football, and big-time recruiting, throughout his coaching career due to his time at Southern
California.
_________________________________________________________________________________
"Baron was talking to the team and asked Casper to go close the gym door," Ware Sr. says. "He did it
and Baron made the point, 'Sometimes when you're told to do something, just do it. Don't ask
questions.'"
_____________________________________________________________________
Overton's final season has been full of pain, perseverance - and now production.
He pulled a hamstring in September. It took him two months to get through that. Then he bruised his
tailbone. Then he hyperextended his knee. He played through that, plus a bruised shoulder, into February.
It all slowed his fiendish defense, which for years has had opponents dribbling balls off their shoes at the
mere sight of him.
Then he got healthy - at the same time Romar got mad.
The coach, angered by lackadaisical defense during February's three-game losing streak, demanded more
man-to-man, pressure defense all over the floor.
Presto! Overton's season started anew.
"Coach finally got mad and said, `We are going to pressure up,'" Overton said, smiling. "I was waiting for
that day."
_____________________________________________________________________
"They were crazy to fire him at UCLA. Why would they fire him when he went to the Sweet 16
five out of seven years?" Keady asked. "Steve could always coach. But I've seen changes in him,
too, since before. He's a much better teacher now, a lot stronger. He's picked up a lot about the
game, how to play the game right. He watched a lot of teams' practices when he worked [as an
analyst] for ESPN. This year he's done a great job of mix and matching the talent, knowing how
to sub, how to mix up the defenses and stuff. And he can motivate kids."
***As geese flap their wings, they create an uplift for the bird following. By flying together in a
V formation, the flock’s flying range is 71% greater than that of any bird flying alone.
- When we share a common direction and sense of community, we can get where we are going
more quickly and easily because we are traveling on the energy of another.
***When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly
alone, and quickly gets back into form to take advantage of the lifting power of the birds in front.
- When we have as much sense as geese, we will stay in formation with those who are headed
where we want to go; we will be willing to accept their help as well as give ours to others.
***The geese formation honk to encourage those up front to keep their speed. When the lead
goose gets tired, it rotates back into formation and another goose files out the point position.
- When we take turns doing the hard tasks, when we encourage others, we become stronger
through shared leadership.
***When a goose gets sick or wounded, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to
help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again or dies. They then launch out on
their own to find another formation or to catch up with the flock.
- When we have learned the value of teamwork, we too will stand by each other in challenging
times. Let us fly in formation and remember to drop back to help those who need it.
Coach: “Fists in.”
Player: “Why fists? Why not hands?”
Coach: “When you have hands your fingers are separated, but with a fist they are all together.”
Beyond the Basketball was inspired by Coach Wooden's interest in me as a person. Whenever
we speak, he always asks about me, my wife, and children first. He remembers their problems
and always asks for updates. When I played for him, he didn't seem that interested. That's
probably because the "status differentiation" was important for teaching effectiveness. Since I've
been an adult, we have had more personal dialogue. It's during those times I realized the
confines of Pauley Pavilion was his classroom for basketball but, because he cared, he loved
me far beyond those walls.
Old coaching assumptions are fading
Successful mid-major coaches no longer jumping ship at the first opportunity
they get
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By Dana O'Neil
ESPN.com
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Asked for the umpteenth time during the NCAA tournament if he would entertain other job
offers after his repeat Cinderella run ended, Brad Stevens patiently tried to explain why he
probably wouldn't.
"Here's the point," the Butler coach said from the dais in Houston, "I think people always look at
their job, and you hear people say this all the time, that the grass is greener somewhere else.
Well, I think we recognize the grass is very green at Butler."
And the media, ever cynical after years of being told a coach was staying only to watch him cash
in on the greener grasses elsewhere, was forced to accept the startling fact that maybe this guy
was the one -- the one who wasn't perpetually stretching for the next brass ring.
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Eric GayBrad Stevens and Shaka Smart coached in this year's Final Four, an event programs
like Missouri, Tennessee and Miami have never participated in.
But it turns out the media was right: Stevens wasn't the one.
He's one of three.
Stevens, Shaka Smart and Chris Mooney, the season's "It Boys" whose names were on the lips of
hiring athletic directors everywhere in the country, did the strangest thing in the past two weeks.
They did nothing.
Given the chance to follow one of the very tenets of college coaching -- thou shalt move on at
the first opportunity -- the trio defied the norm, opting instead to stay right where they were.
It isn't reasonable to take the actions of three and apply broad brushstrokes to the whole,
especially since a few coaches did grab the brass ring (Cuonzo Martin went from Missouri State
to Tennessee and Ed Cooley went from Fairfield to Providence).
But as Miami still recoils after being turned down by the Harvard coach -- not long after another
ACC school (NC State) was rebuffed by the Virginia Commonwealth coach -- the trio's nondecisions do seem to speak as much to the current climate of college basketball as anything.
As mid-majors continue to assert themselves as solid programs, Stevens' argument is gaining
validity: The grass isn't necessarily greener somewhere else.
"Jimmy V used to say, 'Don't mess with happy,' and I think more and more coaches are realizing
you don't have to mess with happy," said ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, who once parlayed his
Manhattan gig into a job at St. John's. "And I think more and more universities are realizing that
if they make a commitment to basketball, it's going to be better for our university, so they make
it reasonable to stay."
There was once was a time when virtually no one stayed.
Typically, the coaching carousel doesn't just spin; it climbs. Climbs faster than a debutante trying
to marry up or a society maven awaiting a better party invite before RSVPing on another. The
road to basketball glory is a ladder littered with the discarded business cards of smaller schools,
making for a wild parlor game of six degrees of separation.
Last season, Fran McCaffery turned a great run at Siena into a job at Iowa. Of course, McCaffery
got his job because Todd Lickliter was fired by the Hawkeyes. Lickliter moved to Iowa from
Butler, which is why Stevens got the job at Butler.
And honestly it's only because Thad Matta moved to Xavier from Butler that Lickliter got the job
at Butler. And then, of course, after Matta moved to Ohio State, that paved the way for Sean
Miller at Xavier, which ultimately opened the door for Chris Mack after Miller left for Arizona.
We digress.
The point is, this is how the profession goes -- onward and upward -- which is why it's so
mystifying when the carousel stops spinning and someone says no.
And saying no is, if not yet the norm, becoming easier.
(There are caveats here: The job pool this year was so-so at best. Tennessee is facing potential
NCAA sanctions; NC State has proven a difficult place to win thanks to the looming recruiting
shadows of Duke and North Carolina; and Georgia Tech is in a similar ACC recruiting bind and
a financial stranglehold thanks to a mega payout to Paul Hewitt. And the fact all three coaches
said no now isn't to imply that none would jump next season if the right position opened.)
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Jack DempseyAfter taking Richmond to the Sweet 16, Chris Mooney declined the overtures of
larger schools.
Stevens, Smart and Mooney follow what is becoming a somewhat steadier stream of coaches
who have turned down a pot of gold in favor of a decent-sized container of the stuff.
Five years ago, Jim Larranaga could have turned his George Mason Final Four run into a headcoaching job at his alma mater, Providence. He also could've grabbed another Big East gig
(Seton Hall) if he'd wanted it.
He stayed.
The reasons were unique and personal but followed the same theme that Stevens, Smart and
Mooney shared: He thought he was better off where he was.
"When Providence offered me the job, there was quite a distance between one salary offer and
what I was making at George Mason, but I wasn't comparing Providence to George Mason,"
Larranaga said. "I was comparing Providence to other Big East schools and George Mason to
other programs in the CAA. I felt like we had the support for our program here to be competitive
and to succeed."
The most critical part of that argument is Larranaga does have a good job, as do Mooney, Smart
and Stevens.
Mooney was weighing his options this offseason when Richmond offered him a 10-year
extension. VCU extended Smart and also made significant increases to his staff's salaries in order
to make sure he stayed. And in 2010, Butler gave Stevens a 12-year extension, the equivalent of
a lifetime deal in basketball.
VCU also is renovating its fairly new Siegel Center and Butler is spending $25 million to update
historic Hinkle Fieldhouse.
The money is critical, but more it's what the money signifies -- a commitment to basketball and a
recognition from the university that the program is important.
Not every mid-major -- heck, not every major -- program is like that.
"Someone once said to me that good jobs come in all shapes and sizes," Smart said. "If you're in
a low-major conference, but you have the best facilities, the best pay, that's a good job. It's the
same here in the CAA. VCU, Old Dominion, George Mason, those are the best in the league and
even though you're not in a BCS league, you're in a very good basketball situation. That gets lost
in the carousel. Everyone assumes bigger is better."
That's always been the case, though -- even back when most coaches left their really good midmajors for really average (or worse) rebuilding majors.
What's changed? For starters the one-and-done rule has leveled the playing field. Since the rule's
inception five years ago, 26 non-BCS programs have advanced to the Sweet 16 and five have
reached the Final Four. In the five years prior to the age-limit rule, just 13 reached the Sweet 16
and only one (a Marquette team that would join the Big East shortly thereafter) appeared in a
Final Four.
"Those that advance have that maturity, the maturity of the players, the maturity of the
experience," said Davidson coach Bob McKillop, who remained at his tiny North Carolina
school even after his Stephen Curry-led team made it all the way to the Elite Eight in 2008. "The
coach has been in place. The system has been in place. People understand that dynamic today
more than ever. Maturity for a mid-major can get you to the Sweet 16."
It can get you there, presumably, without the all-encompassing pressure and the baggage that can
come with the bigger programs. Smart is convinced his team beat Kansas because the Rams
played with no pressure while the top-seeded Jayhawks toted an unbelievable burden.
[+] Enlarge
Douglas C. Pizac/US PresswireDoes this look like man who is eager to leave the friendly confines of
Butler University?
Plenty of coaches have assumed that burden and succeeded -- speaking of Kansas, Bill Self once
turned success at Tulsa into a good run at Illinois into his current spot at KU -- but there are just
as many cautionary tales as success stories. And there is nothing quite like the wet-fish smack of
reality to open eyes.
A national coach of the year in 2007, Lickliter was fired in 2010, given all of three years to make
a go of it at Iowa.
Three years ago, Darrin Horn took Western Kentucky to the Sweet 16. Now at South Carolina,
he's already on some people's hot-seat lists.
John Pelphrey went to the postseason in each of his final two seasons at South Alabama, grabbed
a brass ring at Arkansas, recruited arguably one of the best classes in the country this season, and
now won't have the chance to coach those players. He was fired after only four years.
"There aren't usually any easy transitions," McKillop said. "You either are following someone
who was a legend who retired or someone who was fired. Who's to say with the volatility of our
profession you survive the rebuilding process? You might make more money, but if in three
years you aren't in the NCAA tournament, you're out on the street."
Certainly a run of failure would doom all three of these guys to a pink slip, too, but all have built
up equity with their universities and will be granted a few more mulligans if needed.
The real risk with staying is whether opportunity will knock again. The trouble with being this
year's It Boy? Next year's It Boy. Coaching love affairs last about as long as Hollywood
heartthrobs. The notion to strike -- or at least cash out -- while the iron is hot runs rampant in
coaching circles.
"I've been told that all the time by a number of people," Stevens said. "And with all due respect,
it's none of their business."
Stevens then told a story about the first contract Butler gave him. His wife, Tracy, a lawyer,
parsed every word and pored over every sentence until her nagging husband finally insisted she
stop.
"I said, 'I don't care what the lingo says, I'm just signing it. Who cares?'" Stevens said. "To me it
was like, is this really happening? Is someone offering me this job? I think it's important to
remember that feeling and not get caught up in what's better or what's out there or what's being
said. It's all fleeting and it's not why you got into this in the first place."
Steve Kelley
Washington's Lorenzo Romar watches his
assistants oversee their own programs
Washington's Lorenzo Romar on Sunday faces former assistant Ken Bone, now the head coach at Washington State, and feels a fatherly
pride.
Steve Kelley
Seattle Times staff columnist
Sunday
One of Washington's big men was ho-humming his way through a drill, not getting to his spot on
the floor quickly enough, not fighting for position, not acting particularly interested.
Ken Bone, a Washington assistant basketball coach at the time, could feel the bile rising in his
throat. The drill was repeated and repeated and repeated, and the big man still couldn't find a
higher gear.
Finally Bone lost his patience, stopped the action and removed the player from the drill.
Watching from a distance, head coach Lorenzo Romar walked down to Bone.
"Did you kick him out of the drill?" Romar asked.
"Yeah," Bone said. "If he's not going to do what I tell him, then we don't need him in the drill."
Calmly, Romar explained to Bone that the player kicked out of the drill, needed that drill, and it
was up to Bone to get the player motivated.
"Lorenzo had a kind of composure at times when I might have gone nuts," Bone said late last
week. "He does a good job of dealing with the issue at the time in a composed manner and then
coming back later and dealing with the individual.
"There were many times when certain guys would do certain things and me or another assistant
would think, 'You've got to be kidding me. Lorenzo's going to let that go?' But Lorenzo would
deal with it. He'd just deal with it on his time and at an appropriate time."
That incident at practice was the kind of moment that Bone, the assistant, told himself he had to
remember when he became a Division I head coach.
Now Bone is the head coach at Washington State, and faces his mentor Sunday when his
Cougars play Washington at Edmundson Pavilion at 7 p.m.
"Lorenzo understands that most assistant coaches have aspirations of becoming head coaches,"
said Bone, who is in his second year as head coach at Washington State, "so if you can mentor
them in the right way, be a good role model as a head coach, it helps the assistants reach their
potentials and reach their goals."
One true measure of a coach's success, beyond wins and losses, is his ability to graduate his
assistants to head-coaching positions. Some of college's best coaches — Roy Williams, Mike
Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Mike Montgomery — have some of the game's most extensive and
impressive coaching trees.
Romar says he hires people who want to become head coaches.
"You come here to become a head coach," he said. "It's easy to be an assistant and be detached
from the overall operation. I want coaches who are thinking, 'One day, this is what I want to do.'
"
For the second season in a row, Romar is coaching back-to-back games against former assistants.
Washington beat Cameron Dollar-coached Seattle University on Tuesday
Dollar coached with Romar for a decade at Saint Louis and Washington. Bone was a successful
coach at Seattle Pacific before joining Romar's staff, understanding that he needed experience as
a Division I assistant before he could become a D-I head coach.
Dollar, Bone and Saint Mary's coach Randy Bennett form the branches of Romar's coaching tree.
"The plan is for them to come in here and eventually become head coaches," Romar said. "I
think it's part of my responsibility that I put on myself to get them to that point."
Romar, however, said the teaching works both ways. The defense the Huskies run, for instance,
comes from Bennett, who was an assistant with Romar at Pepperdine and Saint Louis.
In the best of times, coaches have their own coded language with their assistants. Romar and
Bone spoke that language. Romar and Dollar finished each other's sentences.
After 10 years together, Dollar and Romar instinctively knew how each other would handle
situations in recruiting, practice and games. Often Dollar would start to explain something to
Romar, then finish by saying, "Well you know the deal."
Dollar was the student, Romar the role model.
"Our coaching relationship started off with me being impatient and him being calm and
reserved," Dollar said. "He's so calm under fire. He's not threatened by a losing streak. He's not
threatened by a player who doesn't see things the way he does. His patience, over time, with
situations, with players, taught me volumes."
Both Bone and Dollar say that as much basketball as they learned from Romar, they learned even
more about perspective.
"He really confirmed to me how important it is to have a balance in your life," Bone said. "For
him to be the leader of a team in a big-time program, it was refreshing to see him put his family
and his faith high up there on the priority list."
Two years ago, Romar stood in the back of the room, during the news conference that introduced
Dollar as the new Seattle U. coach. Romar felt a paternalistic pride watching the man he
mentored getting rewarded after a decade of preparation.
"I knew Cameron was ready," Romar said, "and, at his press conference I was back there proud
and just glowing, thinking, 'He's got his own program now. He's up there doing his own deal.'
"It's like when your kids move out and they show you their first apartment or first house and you
see how they've decorated it and you think, 'Wow, look at you.' "
Head coaches can be brutish. As we've seen recently at places as diverse as Connecticut and
Coastal Carolina, head coaches can blame their ills on assistants. They can leave their assistants
marinating in the acid of their anger.
But Romar passes his serene confidence to his assistants like a father to a son.
"You can go find other coaches who technique-wise can draw up a good play, or you can go find
other coaches who can help take a player to the pros," Dollar said. "But there isn't a better coach,
for a parent to give their kid to, knowing that he is going to 100 percent take care of your kid.
You don't even have to worry about that part. That's who Lorenzo is and that's how he's taught us
to be."
Posted: Thursday March 3, 2011 12:17PM ; Updated: Thursday March 3, 2011 8:26PM
Lee Jenkins> INSIDE THE NBA
More ColumnsEmail Lee Jenkins
Story Highlights
Summer two-a-days
help Rose & Friends
turn potential into
polish
Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love
worked out together last summer
They worked with trainer Rob McClanaghan,
who turned their potential into polish
The three have improved dramatically this
season; Rose leads MVP race
Russell Westbrook, Derrick Rose and Kevin Love spent the early part of last summer working out
with trainer Rob McClanaghan in a gym just west of L.A.
Courtesy of Rob McClanaghan
LOS ANGELES -- St. Monica High School sits near the corner of Lincoln Blvd. and Washington Ave. in
Santa Monica, an intersection of potential and stardom. There is nothing inherently impressive about
the St. Monica basketball gym -- "It's pretty small," said trainer Rob McClanaghan, "and a little grimy"
-- except for the NBA players who walked through the doors last summer and kept coming back.
Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook and Kevin Love arrived at St. Monica last May, full of promise, but
still in need of polish. They had just finished their second season in the pros. Rose made the All-Star
team. Westbrook wowed in the playoffs. Love was not even a full-time starter yet.
They worked out six days a week at St. Monica, McClanaghan putting them through full-court and
half-court game simulations, peppering them with hypothetical questions: "How good do you want to
be? You want to be an All-Star? You want to be an MVP? You want to be a champion, or lose in the
conference finals?" McClanaghan's assistant was a 3-foot black football pad he used to punish the
players so they would not forget what it feels like to rush into a power forward.
The group trained twice a day, once at 9 a.m. and again at 6 p.m., in their white T-shirts and practice
shorts. Sometimes they came straight from photo shoots still wearing makeup. When McClanaghan
tried to give them one Sunday evening off, they showed up anyway. When other NBA players stopped
by and went half-speed, the regulars told them to stick with the program or drop it. "The intensity was
unbelievable," McClanaghan said. "Russell would do something great and you could see Derrick and
Kevin telling themselves they would do even better. It became their gym."
PHOTOS: Rose could become youngest MVP ever | Top point guards
As the summer wore on and word spread, coaches in Southern California went to St. Monica just to
watch. Former Lakers general manager Jerry West made an appearance. What they witnessed were
three young players preparing each other to take one simultaneous leap into the elite. "We put so
much pressure on those workouts," Rose said. "You felt like you couldn't miss a shot in there."
Many NBA stars have experienced significant breakthroughs in their third seasons. LeBron James'
scoring average went up 4.2 points, Kevin Durant's 4.8, Chris Paul's 3.8. But the St. Monica Three
have dramatically exceeded the typical progression. Through March 2, Love is scoring 6.9 more points
per game than last season, grabbing 4.5 more rebounds and has racked up 48 straight doubledoubles, three shy of Moses Malone's record. Westbrook is scoring 5.9 more points per game, has
improved his three-point shooting by 8.2 percentage points and is no longer just Durant's sidekick.
Rose is scoring 3.8 more points per game, dishing out 2.2 more assists and has also improved his
three-point shooting by 7.2 percentage points.
All three players made the Team USA roster, won gold at the FIBA World Championship, and were
selected to the All-Star team last month. But in their endless attempts to one-up each other, Rose has
emerged as the leading candidate for MVP, receiving endorsements even from Heat forwards Chris
Bosh and Juwan Howard.
McClanaghan used a football pad to teach Rose to absorb contact from defenders and appreciate
the ensuing free throws.
Courtesy of Rob McClanaghan
While Love and Westbrook had their own summer to-do lists, Rose built a jumper almost from scratch.
A transcendent driver, Rose rarely used to take outside shots because he could easily race to the rim,
with his Iversonian crossover. But as opposing teams sagged off him, he found fewer driving lanes,
and grew frustrated that he could not make defenses pay. He shot 26.7 percent from three-point
range last season, and on the rare occasion that he let fly, his release was low and his arc flat. The
ball invariably smacked the front of the rim. McClanaghan told him, "If you can just get to 39 or 40
percent, where guys have to respect you, it will be over."
McClanaghan lifted Rose's release point, gave him the mantra "no short shots" and made him hoist
upward of 1,000 threes a day at St. Monica. Rose's practice percentage ticked up, from 60 to 68 to
72. It became clear that defenses were not going to sag off him anymore, but to take advantage of
openings he had to throw himself into big men as often as he slithered around them. "I spent a lot of
time getting hit by that pad and trying to finish off it," Rose said. By initiating contact instead of
avoiding it, Rose has already attempted and made more free throws than he did all of last season.
He has also identified yet another way to expand his game. He plans to spend this summer developing
post moves. He already knows the perfect workout partners and the ideal place.
Read more:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/lee_jenkins/03/03/derrick.rose/index.html#ixzz1KeDhbWk2
Originally Published: April 28, 2011
Critical assistant shuffle quietly rolls on
By Dana O'Neil
ESPN.com
The year after Florida went back-to-back, winning its second national championship in a row,
Billy Donovan figured he was facing the toughest task in his career.
Turns out reloading arguably the best roster in school history was merely a warm-up act to the
reshuffling Donovan has had to do on the fly this offseason.
Had Donovan peeked out of his office and down the hallway recently, he might have felt a little
lonely.
On March 31, Larry Shyatt, Donovan's associate head coach for the past four years, left to
become the head coach at Wyoming.
[+] Enlarge
Kim Klement/US PresswireJust last month, Larry Shyatt (left) and Richard Pitino (center) helped Florida
to the Elite Eight. They've both moved on, along with Rob Lanier.
On April 12, assistant coach Rob Lanier bolted for the Texas bench.
And on April 14, assistant coach Richard Pitino elected to join his father, Rick, as a member of
the Louisville basketball staff.
That Donovan was able to hit one out of the park with his new hires -- naming former Arkansas
head coach and one-time Gators assistant John Pelphrey, ex-St. John's head coach Norm Roberts
and one-time UF director of operations Mike McCall as his assistants -- doesn't negate just how
turbulent the last month has been at Florida.
The head-coaching carousel may have been relatively tame this offseason, but the assistant
coaches' revolving door has made for some interesting scrambling. And though those moves and
decisions don't generate a lot of headlines or attention, they are undeniably critical.
"Sometimes losing continuity on your staff can be even more difficult than losing good players,''
Donovan said. "This was really hard. Rob has been with me for four years, Larry seven and
Richard I've known since he was 4 years old. There's a level of trust and comfort in that. They
know you and you know them.''
Plenty of assistants have jumped ship this year, as they always do. No group is more responsible
for the fiscal good health of U-Haul than assistant coaches, whose address histories read more
like phone books.
Some of the highlights of this offseason's relocation program so far: Tracy Webster left Nebraska
for Tennessee, Chris Walker parted company with alma mater Villanova in favor of a spot on
Billy Gillispie's bench at Texas Tech and Bobby Lutz left Iowa State to head back to his old
stomping grounds of North Carolina, where he'll assist Mark Gottfried at NC State.
Rarely are the partings less than amicable -- going home, bigger jobs and in plenty of cases headcoaching opportunities -- are all part of the cyclical nature of the business.
But there is no denying that the moving and shaking can make for some wrung-out and stressedout head coaches, who are trying to help players get ready for the draft, work with other players,
recruit and suddenly have little help to do it all.
At Florida and Louisville, the spin cycle has been especially vigorous. Donovan and his mentor,
Rick Pitino, both have been left to rebuild their entire staffs in the last month.
Pitino plucked his son from Donovan but only because his own staff upheaval left him with job
openings. Tim Fuller bolted after one season to join new coach Frank Haith at Missouri; Steve
Massiello is the new head coach at Manhattan; and Ralph Willard, Pitino's longtime friend,
announced he will step down as the Cardinals' director of basketball operations.
Pitino, in turn, just announced that along with Richard Pitino, he is hiring Wyking Jones (a
former assistant at New Mexico and one-time grassroots director for Nike) and longtime
Hargrave Military Academy head coach Kevin Keatts.
"This year for Billy and I, it's probably been as difficult as it possibly could,'' Pitino said.
"Replacing one person is difficult, but with three, now you not only have to make the best hires,
you need to somehow make sure they all get along. It's difficult.''
That's because, contrary to popular belief, assistant coaches are a lot more than glorified yesmen. Hit a Las Vegas gym in July and you'll find bleachers filled with assistants watching
prospects and then frantically directing their head coaches where to go, when to go and who to
watch.
Hit a basketball office after hours and you're sure to find an assistant breaking down film or
working the phones.
Consequently, with head coaches relying so much on what their assistants advise or suggest, they
need to find guys whose opinions they trust as practically sacrosanct.
That's not easy to do when staring at a pile of resumes.
"If we're not on the same page as a staff, how can we expect our team to be on the same page,''
Donovan said. "It's easy to identify guys who can play and who can't play. But the people you're
working with have to know you. They have to know what kind of guys you want to coach and
that can take time.''
And time is not a luxury anyone has. The recruiting window reopens in earnest in July.
Both Donovan and Pitino found life a little easier when they were able to immediately bring
someone familiar on board. For Donovan, that was Pelphrey, a guy who had worked at Florida
for six years before embarking on his own head-coaching career.
And for Pitino it was the ever familiar face of his own son.
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Frank Franklin IIAfter six years in charge at St. John's, Roberts sat out last season but is back in
the game at Florida.
But Jones and Keatts are new to Pitino and Roberts to Donovan.
"We've been blowing and going for the past two weeks,'' Roberts said. "I took the job on a
Tuesday, flew here on a Wednesday and been going ever since. It's going to be a constant
learning curve throughout the whole year.''
The three were hired for similar reasons -- recruiting reaches. The simple secret to basketball
success is getting good players and the simple secret to getting good players is relationships. You
need to know people or have people on your staff that do.
Jones' previous job with Nike afforded him contacts with countless summer-league programs
stretching from California to the East Coast. Those names, numbers and relationships will be
invaluable to Pitino and Louisville.
Keatts, who coached 103 Division I players during his 10 years at Hargrave, has similar and
equally important connections.
"The way things are now, I think having someone like that is crucial,'' Pitino said.
Donovan didn't know Roberts more than socially, but liked the idea of his background. The
former head coach at St. John's is from New York and has strong ties to the Northeast.
Roberts, who's been out of coaching since being let go by the Red Storm, welcomed the idea of a
fresh start.
A longtime assistant with Bill Self before becoming a boss himself, Roberts knows well the
rigors of being an assistant -- but with the benefit of age and wisdom, recognized the
opportunities Donovan was offering him.
"I remember thinking to myself, 'What do I want to do right now? Do I want to be a head coach
just to say I'm a head coach and then two years down the road think what did I get myself into?'''
Roberts said. "When you're a young assistant, your mindset is, 'Get a head job, get a head job.' I
had a different perspective. I wanted to be somewhere I could win, have an opportunity to grow
as a coach, a chance to recruit in another part of the country and be even more versatile, and I
wanted to go somewhere I enjoyed living. This afforded me all of that.''
That Roberts and Pelphrey both have head-coaching experience gives Donovan assurance, but it
also could make for a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
"Maybe this is just me, but I think you have to have a level of confidence and security in
yourself,'' Donovan said. "I'm always eager to learn and to get better. I also happen to believe
that you're a much more effective assistant after you've been a head coach. When you're an
assistant, it's hard to understand what a head coach is going through all the time. If you've been a
head coach, you get it.''
Indeed, Roberts said he thinks he's not only more cognizant of what Donovan wants to do but
smarter about what his role is.
"Working for Bill Self for so long, if you had a suggestion, you offered it,'' Roberts said. "But I
also know you can't be so thin-skinned to get upset if he doesn't run with it. If I say we need to
trap on that ballscreen and Billy says, no we're going to hedge, I'm not going to run to my office
saying, 'Damn, they just won't listen to me.' It's not personal. It's about winning the game.''
Dana O'Neil covers college basketball for ESPN.com and can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow Dana on Twitter: @dgoneil1.
A smoother transition for Mark Turgeon
May, 18, 2011
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The pained expression Mark Turgeon sometimes had during his first two years at
Texas A&M wasn't just related to a tight game, a bad call or some anxious moment en route to the
NCAA tournament.
Turgeon wasn't at peace in College Station.
He arrived from Wichita State to replace Billy Gillispie, and for the first time in 10 years he was
back at a major-conference school after playing at Kansas and coaching at KU and Oregon as an
assistant.
Turgeon didn't handle the transition well.
"I was miserable the first two years," Turgeon said.
He arrived from the Missouri Valley knowing that if he was going to keep heralded star recruit
DeAndre Jordan, he had to retain his one-time AAU coach Byron Smith on the A&M staff. He
did, but reluctantly. There were apparently other situations that Turgeon was never comfortable
with as well.
[+] Enlarge
Dennis Wierzbicki/US PresswireMark Turgeon never won fewer than 24 games in any of his four seasons
at Texas A&M.
"The most important person is me and I've got to be happy and I tried to make everybody happy
when I took the job," Turgeon said. "The fan support was great. The administration was great.
The young men coaching for the most part were great. But there were a lot of agendas that I
inherited."
A number of college coaches that have ties to the state of Texas told ESPN.com that high school
and AAU coaches in the Lone Star State are famously provincial. If the staff isn't Texas-based, if
there isn't a tendency to really cultivate the in-state coaches, there can be a backlash.
Turgeon, a Kansas native, still coached the Aggies to four straight NCAA tournament
appearances despite not feeling totally at home. Things had gotten better the last couple of years
and he wasn't considering leaving College Station when the season ended.
But then a call came in from a source close to Maryland athletic director Kevin Anderson, two
days before longtime Terps coach Gary Williams was set to announce his retirement.
"I got the phone call and the person said Gary was going to retire and that your name is on the
list," Turgeon said. "The person asked if I were interested. I said I would be. I had been offered a
few jobs in the last four years but never told my wife. But I told her that this is one we have to
think about it. I said, 'Maryland might open and we might have a shot."'
But when Turgeon left on May 6 for a family camping trip in Pennsylvania, he was convinced
Arizona coach Sean Miller would take the job. Turgeon's cell phone went dead in the mountains.
"I told her don't worry about it, Sean's an East Coast guy and he'll go," Turgeon said. Miller did
meet with Anderson in Las Vegas the next day, but later that night Arizona announced he had
agreed to an extension. By Sunday, when Turgeon regained cell service, his phone was filled
with messages.
"That's when I knew I was probably their guy," Turgeon said. "I don't care what choice I am. I
just know that I'm the coach at Maryland right now and it's a great opportunity for me. Roy
Williams wasn't the first choice at Kansas. I'm not saying I'm Roy, but that didn't bother him and
he's done pretty well."
Judging by how he handled his first week in College Park, Turgeon isn't doing so bad himself.
His first two assistant coaching moves were to keep Maryland assistant Orlando "Bino" Ranson
and then reach out to Kansas State assistant Dalonte Hill, who was once the head coach of AAU
powerhouse DC Assault and created a pipeline to K-State with Michael Beasley, Rodney
McGruder and Wally Judge, who recently transferred to Rutgers.
Hill, who at KSU was one of the highest-paid assistants in the country at $420,000, is expected
to take a pay cut in his return to the Beltway. Turgeon made it official Tuesday when he said Hill
had accepted the job with the details to come on the agreement. Landing Hill and keeping
Ranson was key in establishing firm recruiting roots in the D.C.-Baltimore area -- fertile ground
for recruiting and a sticking point for Gary Williams in the past, when elite players like Beasley,
Kevin Durant, Rudy Gay and Carmelo Anthony departed.
Turgeon firmed up the staff when he brought with him Scott Spinelli from Texas A&M after
Spinelli lost out to Murray State's Billy Kennedy for the Aggies' head-coaching job. The
Massachusetts native has strong ties in the East and has been a longtime assistant to Turgeon at
Texas A&M and Wichita State. Spinelli had been recruiting Virginia-area guard Seth Allen for
the Aggies and ended up locking him up as Turgeon's first Terrapins recruit.
Turgeon also brought along Dustin Clark from College Station and was going to bring Bill
Walker too, but the salary structure didn't work out. So Walker will stay in College Station to
finish out his one year remaining on his contract as an assistant coach.
"I've learned a lot from the Texas A&M situation," Turgeon said. "I was out of the BCS for a
long time. Everything had changed tremendously. I'm going to be a much better person this time
around. I'm hiring the right staff and I'm going to be a much better communicator. I know in this
area you have to be to be successful. Everyone here in the area has welcomed me with open arms
-- every prominent high school, AAU coach, everyone."
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Nick WassWhile it's clear Mark Turgeon wasn't the first choice of Maryland AD Kevin
Anderson, that doesn't seem to matter much now.
Soon after his retirement, Gary Williams told ESPN.com that Turgeon was a name on the list and
that he was a quality coach. Having Williams' blessing is and will be key in this process. The 66year-old Williams didn't have a succession plan upon his sudden announcement to move on with
his life, so Turgeon will need the support of Williams, who does plan on being around the
program as a special assistant to Anderson.
"Gary is supportive and that's a must," Turgeon said.
And like Williams, the new Maryland coach still will seek out the hard-nosed, defensive-minded
players. Turgeon will covet the elite players to compete with Duke and North Carolina, but he
has had a history of going after the undervalued recruit who emerges as a star, the latest being
Khris Middleton at Texas A&M.
"We're going to get the player that really wants to be here," he said.
Leaving a power-six school for a power-six school is becoming increasingly rare. Salaries are
higher across the board and coaches don't want to leave Top 25 teams for rebuilding projects.
Well, Texas A&M is poised to be a Big 12 title contender. The Aggies should be in the thick of
the race with Baylor, Missouri and Kansas.
As for the Terps, they should be somewhere near the bottom of the ACC with limited bodies and
no star power after sophomore forward Jordan Williams declared for the NBA draft. But longterm, the comparison between the two jobs isn't close.
"Sunday [May 8] was one of the best days we had at Texas A&M in my four years," Turgeon
said. "All three Texas kids went pro [Jordan Hamilton, Cory Joseph and Tristan Thompson],
David Loubeau returned from the draft to us, Kansas lost a lot of guys, too. And then the next
day I take the Maryland job.
"I don't want to put a lot of pressure on the next coach [Billy Kennedy], but I know what we had
there and we were confident we were going to win," Turgeon said. "We'll have nine bodies here.
But you can turn it around quickly. We're not panicking."
Turgeon walked through the concourse of the Comcast Center on Monday, acknowledging the
history and marveling at the potential of his new program.
Turgeon agreed to a seven-year contract and said he might get another year added on soon after a
couple of signed players decommitted from Maryland. (Although Ranson and the Terps were
able to retain Baltimore guard Nick Faust after he flirted with leaving.)
"I'm not about one year," Turgeon said. "It's what we're going to do 15 to 20 years. We're going
to do this the right way. We have a lot of work to do, but we're going to win. We're going to win
a lot of games. I have more energy now than I've had in a long time. I haven't felt this passionate
about something in a long time. My energy level is at an all-time high. Everyone here made me
feel like I'm their guy from day one and that meant a lot to me."
Turgeon is well aware Maryland fans expect the Terps to be in the mix with Duke and North
Carolina, and ahead of every other ACC program.
Williams, who led the program to its only national championship (2002), is beloved here. The
students wanted him to speak at graduation Thursday, so he will. And don't be surprised if they
end up naming the Comcast floor for him. University president Dr. Wallace D. Loh already got
the ball rolling by saying he will work with the athletic department to make it happen.
"Gary had a great run and I expect to have a great run, too," Turgeon said. "This is a destination.
I'd be divorced if I had to do this again."
Turgeon's one-time dream job was Kansas, his home state and alma mater. But Bill Self isn't
going anywhere, and if he did, Turgeon swears it wouldn't matter.
"This is the destination for me now," Turgeon said. "I want them to be talking about naming the
floor after me in 20 years, too."
The mystery guest has arrived
Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra has risen from "The Dungeon" to the NBA
spotlight
By Kevin Arnovitz
ESPN.com
AP
Photo/Michael PerezErik Spoelstra once toiled in relative darkness. That all changed this season in
Miami.
They call him "No Problem."
Mind picking up some dry cleaning?
No problem.
Can you throw together some video clips of our pick-and-roll defense?
No problem.
We need someone to make a sandwich run.
No problem.
This is 1995, the Miami Heat's seventh year of existence. Expansion teams never get an engraved
invitation to legitimacy. At some point, if they want to become a franchise that matters in the
NBA, they have to cultivate an organizational identity, find a leader or two and lay down a path.
On the periphery of that process is a 25-year-old named Erik Spoelstra.
After playing a couple of seasons of pro ball in Germany, Spoelstra is eager to return to the
United States to get into coaching. His father, Jon, a well-respected NBA marketing executive,
puts a call into his friend Chris Wallace, the director of player personnel for the Heat, to see if
there's anything available in Miami.
The Heat are in a state of flux following a 32-50 season. Pat Riley will arrive in September but,
at this moment, executive vice president of basketball operations Dave Wohl is in charge under
the new ownership of Micky Arison.
The draft is coming up and the Heat are a little shorthanded. How about a summer gig helping
out with that?
The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Once the draft is over, Spoelstra's job status is uncertain, particularly since there still isn't a head
coach. But among the items on the Heat's to-do list is developing a video department.
Would Spoelstra be interested in getting that project moving?
Spoelstra doesn't know jack about video: coordinating video, editing video, or the coordination
of video editing. All he knows is that he wants to be around basketball. He has applied
everywhere for a college coaching gig, but has come up empty. If the Heat are interested in
having him stick around, then he'll gladly take on whatever tasks they have for him.
"I was kind of like the concierge-slash-video coordinator my first year," Spoelstra remembers. "I
just figured I wanted them coming to me with as many different things as possible to lean on,
whether it was basketball-related or not. I wanted to be the guy who they'd pick up the phone and
say, 'He'll get it done.' "
ZUMA
PressErik Spoelstra wasn't the A/V type, but found himself in charge of the Heat's video department.
The Early days
Jack Ramsay presents Spoelstra with a copy of his book, which Spoelstra graciously accepts. The Hall of
Fame coach is in town to broadcast the Heat's final regular-season showdown against the Boston Celtics.
As Spoelstra removes the hardback from the plastic shopping bag, he nods as he flips through the pages,
then recounts a story about Ramsay.
A young Erik, about 10, is at the Portland Trail Blazers' family picnic. Erik is dressed a little
more nicely for the occasion, and his father eagerly introduces him to everyone in the
organization, including Ramsay.
After the introductions, Ramsay, a renowned fitness enthusiast who coached the Trail Blazers to
their only NBA title in 1977, insists that everyone on site stretch for a pre-lunch jog. No
exceptions!
"And by everyone, I mean everyone," Spoelstra says, still holding Ramsay's book.
Administrative folks in the Trail Blazers offices, people from the sales department, virtually
every Trail Blazer employee jumps to attention -- including young Erik, jogging in his school
shoes and slacks.
After finishing the story, Spoelstra smiles and returns to the pages of Ramsay's book. There are
only a couple of people within earshot of Spoelstra's recollection. The memory is intended to
honor a man, not to entertain an audience.
Growing up in Portland, Spoelstra excels as a point guard at Jesuit High School in suburban
Portland. Though Portland is a hotbed of pro basketball, it lies a bit off the radar on the high
school basketball landscape -- and this is especially true in the pre-Internet 1980s.
After his junior year of high school, Spoelstra is eager to see how his skills match-up against the
best players in the country, and Sonny Vaccaro's Nike All-Star camp in Princeton, N.J., is the
place to do that. The camp has only about 120 slots, reserved for the best of the best, but
Spoelstra really wants an invitation.
"It was a chance to play against the best," Spoelstra says. "The top talent in the nation. Any kid
would take that." Wallace, who is then an executive with the Trail Blazers, also works closely
with Vaccaro at the Nike camp. He ensures that Spoelstra's résumé gets a fair look back East. A
few months later at the camp, Spoelstra is the point guard for the premier high school player in
the country, a kid named Alonzo Mourning.
Before he packs for Princeton, Spoelstra is given a directive: Don't be a matinee idol. Take a
couple of shots per game, but your job this summer is to feed Mourning the ball.
"I had never seen a player that big and gifted who was so fierce," Spoesltra says of Mourning.
Was he intimidated by Zo's intensity, especially since this was arguably the biggest stage of his
basketball life?
"He was on my team, so it was great," Spoelstra says.
At camp, Spoelstra also witnesses something he's never laid eyes on before, a brand of freakish
athleticism belonging to a player he had to face in his first game.
"He was doing things none of us had seen before and doing it in an easy way," Spoesltra says of
the 6-foot-9 prodigy.
The kid's name is Shawn Kemp and, mercifully, Spoelstra never draws him on a switch.
For the 17-year-old Spoelstra, facing Kemp in a competitive five-on-five environment isn't the
most humbling experience of that summer.
"I got absolutely annihilated at camp by a skinny white kid who was a year younger than me,"
Spoelstra says. "I remember after that camp, going home and thinking, 'I'm not nearly as good as
I thought I was' and 'I don't know if I had a future in college basketball, because this kid kicked
my ass.'"
The skinny white kid's name? Bobby Hurley.
Spoelstra underestimates his talents. He receives scholarship offers, and ultimately lands at
University of Portland, where he has a solid college career as a four-year starter at point guard in
his hometown.
But during the defining moment of his collegiate career, Spoelstra is merely a terrified spectator.
It happens at the West Coast Conference tournament semifinal game during his sophomore
season.
"When he fell to the ground it was like time ran in slow motion," Spoelstra says. "I was frozen
on the court, watching."
Seconds earlier, Spoelstra is guarding Loyola Marymount's Terrell Lowery on an LMU fast
break. Lowery flings a beautiful lob over Spoelstra to the left side of the rim, where LMU
teammate Hank Gathers flushes the ball for a thunderous dunk.
As Gathers runs up the floor at Gersten Pavilion in Los Angeles, he collapses a yard or two away
from Spoelstra's feet.
"I still remember how eerie the sound of an absolutely silent gym sounded," Spoelstra says, "The
piercing silence -- it was shuddering. It's something I won't forget."
Spoelstra and his teammates are led into the locker room, where they remain for three hours, at
which point they're told the remainder of tournament has been canceled.
Spoelstra's body of work at Portland is enough to earn him a roster spot as a player/assistant
coach on a Pro-B midlevel professional German team in Westphalia.
"What that really means was the head coach and I would go get some beers and talk basketball
and I'd bring the basketballs to practice," Spoelstra says, downplaying the slash between player
and coach.
In addition to his duties in the backcourt and the bierpalasts of West Germany, Spoelstra is also
in charge of coaching the club's local youth team, his first real head coaching gig.
"I get out there my first practice and they're all 12 years old," Spoelstra says. "I don't even know
what kind of offense I'm going to run and how to organize a team. I had balls flying all over the
place. I had kids screaming and yelling in a different language. Everybody was out of control,
running and bumping into each other. It was probably the most chaotic practice anyone has ever
run anywhere."
The kids eventually teach Spoelstra how to speak in German. Meanwhile, Spoelstra uses the
season to appreciate that basketball is a lingua franca that can bind a Filipino-American kid from
the Pacific Northwest to a bunch of Teutonic preteens in Herten, Germany.
Reports from players and coaches in the Heat organization suggest Spoelstra runs a considerably
tighter practice these days.
The Dungeon
"That's what we called it," Spoelstra says. "It was in the bowels of the old Miami Arena. It wasn't even
part of the offices. It was probably an old storage room. When they decided to make a video
department I think they just cleared everything out, threw a couple of VCRs in there and said, 'OK, this is
the video room.'"
[+] Enlarge
ZUMA PressFor our younger readers, those items stacked next to Spoelstra are VHS video cassettes.
Spoelstra is the Heat's Dungeonmaster. He rarely sees the Miami sunlight and will sometimes go
days without visiting the inside of his Miami Beach studio -- a converted hotel room -- because
he overnights in The Dungeon. There, he breaks down game tape, evaluates players, figures out
where the pick-and-roll defense is failing and which offensive sets are producing results.
Sometimes Spoelstra's late-night findings after a game need to reach the Heat while they're
traveling. Since the main FedEx office in Miami closes early, Spoelstra hops into his old Toyota
station wagon it the middle of the night and drives out to the cargo terminal at Miami airport.
"I started asking around, 'There's gotta be somewhere you can ship a package [late at night],'
Spoelstra says. "I dug around and found out that I could basically almost hand-deliver the
package to the airplane."
If you ask Spoelstra how he rose up through the ranks from The Dungeon all the way to the head
coaching position, he'll offer you a self-deprecating variation of Woody Allen's old adage that 80
percent of life is just showing up.
His willingness to stay late and do the work nobody else wants to do is enough to keep him
around. As people come and go from the organization, he invariably moves up because Pat Riley
and the organization prefer to tap someone in-house over bringing in someone from the outside.
Stan Van Gundy was Riley's assistant coach -- then assistant head coach -- from 1995 until
earning the head coaching position in 2003. Van Gundy, who now coaches the Orlando Magic,
says he's only met two people whom he knew, right away, were going to be standout coaches -current University of Arizona head coach Sean Miller and Spoelstra.
"Very early on in his career, we all knew he'd end up where he is," Van Gundy says. "I don't
think anyone is surprised that he's gone to that level. Erik might say he's surprised, but no one
else in [the Heat] organization is."
In a field in which many of the highest achievers exude mad ingenuity and flamboyance,
Spoelstra might strike some as programmatic. But Riley sees Spoelstra as someone with a unique
combination of conventional and unconventional training, a sensibility that's both conservative
and creative.
"What [Spoelstra] did was prime the pump for 11 years, years of learning down in The
Dungeon." Riley says. "Sometimes I think being a video coordinator and an advance scout
prepares you better to be a head coach than just becoming an assistant coach. You're forced to
look at X's and O's and so many things. He had such a great reservoir of basketball knowledge."
Once Spoelstra is promoted to advance scout in 1999, he develops a unique habit of providing
what Riley calls "above the brain thinking" with the general scouting report and game plan.
"It was outside your normal realm of thought as a scout or coach, whether it was a story about a
player, or a theme for that night based on something that happened with that opponent, or a quote
from a book he had read, a news clip from USA Today," Riley says. "These were things a lot of
guys probably wouldn't send to the head coach."
Mark J.
Rebilas/US PresswireThe scrutiny on Spoelstra intensified last fall when the Heat sputtered to a 9-8 start.
Stay-in-the-present momentism
Ask a dozen people and you'll get a single impression: Spoelstra is among the game's hardest workers,
most prepared coaches and respectful characters. The uniformity of these testimonials is so extreme, it
demands a little diversity of opinion. Can Spoelstra possibly be as unimpeachable as everyone says he
is?
"Let me save you a lot of time and phone calls -- yes," says one NBA general manager. "All he
does is work his balls off and treat everyone the way they should be treated. He treats the film
kid the same way he treats Pat Riley. He knows the game as well as anyone. But the big thing is - he's respectful of the opportunity he's been given. He doesn't have amnesia about where he
came from."
Those are all admirable qualities, but the basketball world is filled with plenty of guys who fit
that description. But only a handful of them can wrangle superstar egos, develop a coherent
message for seven or eight months and coach a professional brand of basketball.
That's the question surrounding Spoelstra last summer when the Heat reel in LeBron James and
Chris Bosh and re-sign Dwyane Wade. After amassing that unprecedented concentration of
talent, Riley decides to entrust the job of delivering not one, not two, not three, but multiple
championships, to a young head coach without an NBA playing pedigree or a playoff series
victory to his name.
Lakers coach Mike Brown, who coached the Cavaliers for five seasons, understands what it's
like to confront the burden of expectations as a young head coach. At age 35, Brown was hired to
lead the Cavaliers and James with nothing less than a title as a measure of success.
"In order to be successful at this level, you have to have management skills, people skills,"
Brown says. "If you have that, you have a chance to reach guys who make more money than you
and have more staying power than you. ... At the end of the day, the NBA is about players. And
you have to respect that to a certain degree."
Even though they're old friends who faced off years ago in the WCC when Brown played at the
University of San Diego, Spoelstra intentionally doesn't seek out Brown's specific advice in the
summer of 2010 on working with James, both on and off the court.
"I didn't want to know," Spoelstra says, shaking his head. "I just didn't. This is a different year
and it's about staying in the present."
Spoelstra's devotion to the present has been one of the central themes of the Heat's season. When
you ask him if he subscribes to any "-isms" as a thinker, he'll offer only one.
"I'm a stay-in-the-present momentist," he said.
Is Spoelstra fearful of what Brown might tell him? That James is a handful who requires constant
maintenance? That he isn't coachable?
"I just didn't want to know," Spoelstra says adamantly. "And LeBron is coachable. One of the
most coachable players we've ever had."
Spoelstra's tone rarely gets dismissive, but when he's asked how he manages personal
expectations or prepares for potential disappointment, the notion is baffling to him.
"I don't," he says. "I don't even think about that. I'm thinking about right now."
"Right now" almost always means work. The job keeps him completely occupied, though he
maintains a close stable of friends in Miami and Portland that's seen very little turnover over the
years. He takes a certain comfort in the grind and doesn't dwell on his singlehood, but confesses
that a workaholic's isolation has its hazards.
"My dad probably put it best when somebody asked him about me a couple of years ago,"
Spoelstra says. "He said we grew up with the Spoelstra work ethic. It's either an incredible
blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it. When I heard that, I laughed because I
immediately knew what he was talking about."
Like a lot of athletes and coaches, Spoelstra has taken to the yoga mat -- along with jogging and
spinning -- to unwind, at the recommendation of his mom when his back started acting up.
"I've found a lot of other mental and emotional benefits," Spoelstra says. "It's really helped slow
things down. I think it's helped manage a lot of the possible anxieties you could feel in a position
like this."
Spoelstra emphasizes the word "possible" very pointedly, as if to say: I don't succumb to such
anxieties, but I could see where a less balanced person might.
Contact
Erik Spoelstra is Kevin Martin.
Well, not really, but Spoelstra's impression of the Houston Rockets shooting guard during Heat
shootaround is uncanny -- right down to Martin's funky left-leaning release on his jump shot.
"[Spoelstra] had it down pat," Heat assistant coach David Fizdale says. "You know how [Martin]
has that wind-up shot and how he's always shuffling his feet? It was unbelievable. He literally
had the whole team on the floor laughing."
Fizdale stresses that Spoelstra isn't trying to ridicule Martin. Like virtually everything else
Spoelstra does as Heat coach, it's about preparation -- in this case, for the Heat's upcoming game
against Houston. The laughter brings the shootaround to a standstill.
"He knows everything," Wade says. "He knows the player, knows his tendencies. We died
laughing. It just shows you how much film he watches and how much he prepares. It was just
like [Martin]. But he wasn't laughing. He was serious."
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Wilfredo LeeIn many ways, Spoelstra and Wade have grown up together in the Heat
organization.
Wade harbors a special appreciation for Spoelstra's mastery for the finer details of Martin's game
because, for many years, Wade is Spoelstra's subject, both on film and in the gym.
When Wade comes to the Heat as a rookie in 2003, his jump shot still needs some refinement,
and Spoelstra takes on that challenge as a project.
"We worked a lot of hours," Wade says. "You saw that he knew the game of basketball. You
knew he was a hard worker. He gave me the confidence to think, 'I can do it.'"
Spoelstra works Wade out incessantly. He wants Wade to establish more balance on his shot and
to learn to absorb contact.
"I used to do my 1-2 step-in, wide base and he would literally shove me so I could learn how to
shoot with contact," Wade says. "And once I got that done, he made me do it with a shot fake,
which is even harder."
Fast forward to a game in November 2004, with the Heat and Jazz tied in overtime. Guarded by
Raja Bell on the last possession, the ball goes into Wade.
"It was the exact shot we'd been working on," Wade says. "I hit the game-winner and I remember
looking over at him, smiling like, 'This is working.'"
Dogged preparation and intelligence puts Spoelstra in a strong position to succeed as an NBA
head coach, but as is the case in any professional context, the support of important people is
essential to withstand the political challenges that come with the job.
Spoesltra might be a relatively unknown quantity around the NBA, having resided in one of the
NBA's most insulated organizations for the entirety of his career, but the fact that his two biggest
champions are Riley and Wade isn't a coincidence.
"He's got a believer in Dwyane Wade already there who has won a championship," Brown says.
"When stuff gets rocky, Dwyane's presence helped Erik Spoelstra."
Riley shares the belief that connectivity between coach and superstar is vital to a coach's
standing. He credits his relationship with Magic Johnson as among the primary reasons for his
early and enduring success in Los Angeles.
"You've got to have a very personal contact with these guys," Riley says. "You've got to talk to
them through the course of the game. You have to ask their advice and take their advice. I
learned that from Earvin Johnson and he became my greatest ally and I became his."
Wade offers an eerily similar explanation, perhaps not that eerie when you consider he's never
known any other organizational culture than the Heat's. For him, the buy-in works in the same
symbiotic manner that Riley describes.
"We understand that we can't win without our leader," Wade says. "We need him to lead us. And
we also understand he needs us to help lead him. It's a team thing. He's always going to get a lot
of flak. We're going to get a lot of flak and we're going to do it together. If we win, he's going to
look like a genius, and we're going to look like great basketball players. And if we lose ..."
Wade raises his eyebrows as he finished his thought.
"We're all going to look like something is wrong. With all of us. But if we win, he's the young
Pat Riley. Right? He's the next good-looking young coach with that same style of team."
Integrity of intentions
Whether Spoelstra can reach his band of superstars the way Riley did in his prime is the central question
heading into the season. If you believe some of the media reports, it's practically a referendum on his
capacity to hold onto the head coaching job.
The Heat struggle out of the gate last fall, going 9-8 over their first 17 games. The stretch
culminates with the notorious bump during a timeout in Dallas, when LeBron James collides
with Spoelstra. Only one man knows whether James intentionally bumps Spoelstra's shoulder,
but the incident sets off a public firestorm.
“
We need him to lead us. And we also understand he needs us to help lead him. It's a
team thing. He's always going to get a lot of flak. We're going to get a lot of flak and we're going
to do it together. If we win, he's going to look like a genius, and we're going to look like great
basketball players.
” -- Dwyane Wade
During this rocky period, Riley urges Spoelstra to pay special attention to internal
communication with the team.
"When things got rough, I told him, 'Make sure you don't lose contact with the players,' Riley
says. "Regardless of what's being said or who's being blamed, don't lose contact with them
because they're your allies. Your greatest allies are your best players and their greatest ally is
their head coach."
Listening to Riley, one gets the impression contact is written with a capital C, like so many other
of the battle cries that are scrawled in red on the Heat's whiteboard -- buzzwords such as "trust"
and "process." According to Riley, contact is Spoelstra's greatest challenge this season. X's and
O's, practice drills and film sessions? That stuff is routine and academic, particularly for a guy
with Spoelstra's résumé. But talking to superstars three times a day? That's the tricky part.
"He's never lost contact with Dwyane and he's making contact with LeBron and with Chris,"
Riley says. "Not that they need special attention, but those are the guys that the gauntlet is falling
on every single night."
For Spoelstra, communicating well with players is as much a manual task as a verbal one. He's
perfectly capable of delivering a locker room address, peppered with those Heat-ish constructs
like the "Band of Brothers" theme, but leadership is more nuanced than that, though Spoelstra
insists it isn't brain surgery.
"There's an integrity to my intentions," Spoelstra says. "I probably look at this more simplistic
than you want. It doesn't matter whether you're a former player or you come up through the
video room, whether you come from college. You have to earn that trust from NBA players
every day. It doesn't stop unless, of course, you win 10 rings. But even at that point, you have to
prove that there's competency, there's a work ethic, there's a plan, there's an organization to your
thoughts. Then, at some point, they believe you can help them achieve what they want to
achieve."
Wade acknowledges the heightened level of frustration that surfaced when the team struggled at
the outset of the season. But here's what the public misses: The Heat's superstars might be a little
pigheaded at times, but they're pragmatists at heart, particularly after they pushed all-in on this
experiment.
"It was tough," Wade says. "We were into the unknown. It looks great on paper, but then it
becomes real, and tough to make all this work. There was frustration -- from LeBron, from Chris,
from Coach, from me. Then we got together and we said, 'This is a decision we all made. We all
want to be together. This is our head coach. He's not going anywhere and we're not going
anywhere. Let's figure out a way to make sure this works for the betterment of us and our
careers.'"
Ezra
Shaw/Getty ImagesSpoelstra's work ethic, preparation and temperament are cited as his best qualities
as a head coach.
Winning the job
After the bump in Dallas, the Heat come home to Miami for a brief homestand, with James' return to
Cleveland on the immediate horizon later that week. At Spoelstra's media availability that Monday,
there's a palpable tension in the Heat's interview room. The buzzards are swirling amid reports players
are unhappy with the coach.
Spoelstra won the Heat's head coaching job on April 28, 2008, and he wins it again on Nov. 29,
2010 -- the day of the news conference.
At the podium, Spoelstra comes across as a hero in an Aaron Sorkin play. There isn't a trace of
defensiveness in his remarks. He's strong in his conviction that these conflicts are essential to the
process. Verbiage that can be easily dismissed as transparent spin instead convey a strength
rooted not in self-delusion but in self-confidence. The atmosphere is diffused by the weight of a
man who knows he's in the right, no matter what the NBA's chattering class is saying.
"I think it's great they had to go through the turmoil they went through because, at the end of the
day, it will help prepare them for the playoffs," Brown says as a man whose seat was frequently
on the warm side in Cleveland. "I thought Erik did a nice job staying even-keeled and preaching
the same things he was preaching since Day 1. The more you can preach your message through
turmoil and get through it, that's when guys start to believe."
James is petulant in the days leading up to that sideline collision of Spoelstra -- complaining
about minutes and routinely pouting at the podium. But the two-time MVP now regards that
period with a healthy hindsight.
"When it seems like the world is crashing down on us, he's always like, 'We're gonna get through
it. It starts with me and we're all going to get through it. Let's just stay focused and continue to
grind,'" James says. "Then things would get better. You respect that. When your general doesn't
panic, no matter what the situation is, then the rest of the soldiers don't panic either."
Spoelstra has traveled about as far an NBA lifer can -- from The Dungeon to the first chair on the
most scrutinized sideline in recent NBA history. But in many respects, his temperament hasn't
really changed. The office might be cushier and he's no longer chasing cargo planes in the
middle of the night, but he's still fundamentally the same guy with the same habits.
"We never seen him out anywhere," James said. "Dinner? Never. We never see Spo."
Where is he?
"He's probably breaking down the next game, or breaking down the game we just got done
playing," James says. "He's preparing. He's always prepared."
Wade, who knows him as well as anyone, has another theory.
"He's like Batman," Wade said. "He goes into his cave. Nobody sees him."