Chasing Perfect Read online

  So, absolutely, winning is important. It’s like a carrot at the end of a stick. It gives us something to shoot for. A goal. A purpose. And it tells us exactly what we need to be doing if we mean to get better—if we hope to succeed, on and off the court.

  Those first couple years at St. Anthony, those first couple teams, a lot of my players came from involved, success-oriented families. That was the baseline. Maybe these kids had older brothers or parents who’d gone to college. Maybe they had a parent with a good civil service job, or a steady union paycheck, who wanted a little something more for their children. Almost all of them came from two-parent homes. Education was important. Basketball was a kind of sideline for most of my players, what they used to call an extracurricular activity. That’s how it had been for generations—in Jersey City and all over the country. It wasn’t the kind of front-and-center, all-consuming priority it’s become now. It wasn’t a ticket up and out of a bad situation. It was just something to do to fill the time between school and dinner. A way to keep some of these kids in shape and out of trouble. A positive outlet for all of that bottled-up teenage energy.

  Good things, all.

  I had a lot of two- and three-sport athletes back then, which I guess is what you’d expect at a small school like St. Anthony. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have some solid players. We did; in fact, there was a lot of pure basketball talent on my first teams. It’s just that there was no way my fellow coaches could fill out their football or baseball rosters without dipping into the same talent pool, because, hey, it’s not like the pool was all that deep to begin with. We had a bunch of good athletes at the school, and they played everything; when one season was done, they moved on to the next.

  Once I was passed over for the varsity coaching job vacated by John Ryan, I stayed on for another two seasons as junior varsity coach under Bill Brooks. I’d felt slighted at first, but I was determined to get past it. I wanted to do a great job and set aside any concerns that St. Anthony might have had about my maturity or my ability to lead the program, because in the back of my mind I started to think maybe Bill Brooks wasn’t so comfortable in his new role. It’s a big change for a coach, to move from college back to high school. The other way around, from high school to college, it’s more of a natural progression, but when you’re used to working with young men, it’s difficult to pull back and bring the same kind of approach to sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old boys. There’s a different level of expectation, a different level of commitment.

  Coach Brooks never actually came out and said any of these things, but I could see how he ran practice, and I could see when he left the gym feeling frustrated. It occurred to me this might not be a good fit going forward, so I went to work on my own game. I’d already been attending a lot of coaching clinics under Coach Ryan, to learn what I could, but now I looked to step that up even more. Now I looked for opportunities to gain some experience and to develop my own approach. To seek out other coaches who maybe had something to teach me. To sketch out plays on the backs of napkins. Up until this point, my style as a coach tended to reflect Coach Ryan’s—or now, Coach Brooks’s—but I thought I should put a little more of my own stamp on things, so I looked first to the areas of fitness and preparation.

  The way you practice is the way you play. It’s an old coaching cliché, but you’d be surprised how many coaches don’t embrace it in a full-on way; their practice sessions are loose, disorganized, where they should be planned into the ground. Each session should have a set of goals attached to it, a bunch of things you’re trying to accomplish. Each drill should have a purpose, each touch should have a lesson your guys can carry with them to the next game.

  With these things in mind, I started “writing” our practices. I’d break down each session ahead of time, allowing so much time for shooting, so much time for drills, so much time for scrimmaging. It got to where I had each practice worked out to the minute, because I didn’t want to waste a second of our precious gym time. In our case, this was especially important because we didn’t have our own gym. We rented space, so court time was like gold. That’s one of the big reasons I placed an emphasis on fitness, because that was something we could work on away from the gym. That was an area where we weren’t coming at it from any kind of disadvantage.

  St. Anthony teams had always been known for defense—again, because that’s one of the few aspects of the game a coach can influence. You can’t teach height, or pure athleticism, and if you’re a small school, the odds of filling out your roster each time out with talented big men and exceptional ball-handlers and shooters run pretty long, so you work with what you have. You fix what you can. You find ways to instill a tenacious defensive mind-set, to get your guys to play to their strengths, to lift their basketball IQ so they can better understand the game and how to work it to advantage. Basically, you teach them to focus, to prepare, to approach each game like it matters—but even more, like it’s within reach. This last is key, because if you allow your players to go into a game thinking they’re overmatched or outgunned, then that’s probably how it will go. They’ll be overmatched and outgunned. They’ll be scared, tentative. That’s not what you want as a coach. You want your guys to play with confidence—even when they’ve got no good reason to be confident, other than what you’ve drilled into them in practice.

  Almost as soon as I got the junior varsity job, I started scouting teams on our schedule, which was not something you saw a whole lot of on the JV level—you still don’t, by the way. But I wanted to put my teams in a position to win each game. And it worked. We kept winning, and winning, and folks in and around New Jersey schoolboy basketball took notice. I started getting calls from other schools, offering me jobs. I hadn’t counted on this, although I must say I was flattered at the attention—and careful not to jump at just any offer, because I wanted to make sure it was the right move. I wanted to think through how my schedule would fit alongside my full-time job in probation. Plus, Chris and I were starting a family—our son Bobby was born in 1971, just before the start of my third year as junior varsity coach—so my time wasn’t entirely my own. I knew my way around at St. Anthony, I knew my schedule and what was expected of me, so there was a certain comfort in that. I remember telling Chris I wouldn’t move just to move.

  We’d gone undefeated my second year, so we had some nice momentum going, a good group of players, and I didn’t want to leave the program just for the chance to be a head coach. It had to be the right situation, and for a while I thought I’d found it at Hudson Catholic, which had always had a strong basketball program. I was inclined to take the job there, but there was one wrinkle: my brother Timmy played for Hudson Catholic, and my mother didn’t think it was such a good idea for me to come in as his coach. I didn’t exactly see it the same way, but I couldn’t argue. The timing just wasn’t right, she said. There’d be other head coaching jobs, she assured me. And she was right, there was—at St. Anthony the following year, after Coach Brooks stepped down and Father Walewski and the St. Anthony administration decided that after yet another undefeated junior varsity season, and no more locker room outbursts (at least none that had come to their attention), I was finally ready to take over the program.

  The promotion came with a big bump in pay—all the way to $1,000. It wasn’t going to make us rich, Chris and I were realizing, but it was something.

  ——

  It’s not like I was jumping onto a moving train when I started coaching the St. Anthony varsity. I’d coached the junior varsity for the past three years, which had put me on the bench for the varsity games as well. And a lot of my junior varsity players were moving up to the varsity with me, so there was a level of familiarity you don’t always get as a new coach. This was a good thing and a not-so-good thing. It was good because I knew my players, their strengths, their tendencies, but it was not so good because they had that same level of familiarity with me. They knew me as a big kid from the neighborhood. They knew me as someone who used to
run with a lot of their older brothers and who’d coached them on local teams at the youth level. They’d seen me play at the playground or maybe followed my career in college. And so, because of all this familiarity and proximity, I spent a lot of time worrying how to exert my authority over these kids. Today it’s not really an issue. I’ve been at it a while by this point. I’m a lot older. I’ve got a whole bunch of gray hair and a whole bunch of state championships, and I’ve learned how to raise my voice to make my point (and scare the crap out of some of my players!), so the authority kind of comes with the whole package. But when I was just starting out, I thought my age and my circumstance might get in the way of what I was trying to do.

  First thing I did, and I made a big point of it, was to get them to call me Mr. Hurley. John Ryan had put the idea in my head back when I first joined the program as coach of the freshman team. Left to my own, I might have gone the other way on this, but Coach Ryan stressed how important it was to get some kind of separation with my players. He said the easiest way to do this was to have them address me in a formal way. I felt kind of funny about it, but at the same time I knew I had to find a way to emphasize my position. Nowadays a lot of my players will call me Coach, or Coach Hurley. Very rarely will someone call me Mr. Hurley. But during those first couple seasons, when I was still in my early twenties, still close enough in age to my players that I could have been their older brother, I thought it was the best way to put it out there that I expected to be treated with respect—even though I hadn’t earned it just yet.

  I still remember my first game as head coach of the varsity. We went up against St. Joseph’s of West New York, at Dickinson High School, where I used to be a substitute teacher. St. Joe’s always had a decent team. They were coached by a guy named Frank Grasso, who became a great friend of mine over the years, and they were known as a tough, aggressive group, but I felt good about our chances. We’d played well in a few scrimmages to start the season, and our guys looked strong. It helped, I think, that I knew my players as well as I did, because I was able to slot them into roles early on. I knew what to expect, all through the lineup. A lot of times, with a new coach, it takes awhile before all the parts are moving together, before everybody’s contributing like they’re supposed to contribute, but when you have a good feeling for your personnel, you can make a smooth transition.

  We ended up winning that first game, but a couple things have stayed with me about my varsity coaching debut, other than the victory. One was Frank Grasso getting tossed. Frank was a very emotional guy, coached with a lot of intensity, liked to work the officials, and all during that first game I kept thinking of the kind of coach I wanted to be. I was too young, too green, to have any type of style or approach to call my own. All I could do was mimic what I’d seen from other coaches—from Jerry Halligan, my high school coach; from Joe Palermo, my freshman coach at St. Peter’s College, who also coached Bill Raftery at St. Cecilia High School in Kearny, New Jersey; from John Ryan and Bill Brooks on the bench at St. Anthony. I didn’t know if I wanted to be one of those coaches who rides the officials all game long, the way a guy like Jim Calhoun did so effectively at the University of Connecticut, hoping to get a couple close calls to go my way as a result. I didn’t think so. I was more interested in getting good possessions by working our bench and keeping a dialogue going with my players during the run of play. And all these years since, that’s been my approach. I might even miss a possession or two every game because I’ll be huddled with one of my players, trying to work on something or to reinforce a point, but I’m okay with that. In a typical game, we’ll have the ball sixty to sixty-five times, and I’ve become pretty good at eyeballing all five of my guys, all at once; if there’s just a time or two down the floor when I don’t see everything we’re doing, every twitch and feint and stutter step, because I’m going over some important something with one of my players, I consider that a good trade. I’ll take that.

  But I didn’t know these things about myself just yet. I’d started to get a good feel for the Xs and Os, the fundamentals, but that was about it. I’d only coached at the youth level and in a hundred or so games for the freshman and junior varsity squads, and now it was a whole different ball game. Now it was all about maximizing your opportunities and playing all out for the win much more than it was about trying new things or developing players. Also, I had to think about motivating my team—and by that I don’t mean to suggest my guys didn’t want to win. You always play to win, even as a kid on the playground; as long as you’re keeping score, you want to come out on top. No, this was a different kind of motivation I needed to find, a way to get them up for each and every game, for each and every practice, and to keep them up throughout the long season. At the youth level, as guys are coming up and coming into their own, it’s mostly about talent. But here at the high school level, against good competition, it was mostly about drive and determination, about being prepared, about being mature and even-tempered and playing the right way.

  A good coach leads by example—I knew that even then—but it would take awhile to figure out exactly what example I wanted to set for my players. As I watched Frank Grasso work the officials and get tossed I told myself I’d try a different way. And do you know what? Over the years I’ve stuck close to this ideal. If you’ve watched me work a game, you’ll get that I’m vocal. You’ll hear me yell at the refs if we’re not getting any calls. You’ll hear me chew out one of my players if he fails to execute or messes up an assignment. I’m loud, but I’m in control—most of the time. If we play thirty to thirty-five games a season, I’ll maybe draw one or two technical fouls the whole year. And I can probably count the number of times I’ve been run from a game on the fingers of one hand, so it’s interesting to me now, looking back, that the opposing coach was ejected in my very first game. Nothing against Frank Grasso, a good coach with his own style, but that set it up in my head as a real contrast in style to the ways I saw myself as a coach.

  The other thing that’s stayed with me from that very first game was a fluke play you hardly ever see at the high school level—and you’ll never see it twice on the same possession, but that’s just what happened. We had a guy on our team that year named Walter Majkowski. He hadn’t played a lot of organized ball, but he came out for the team and busted his butt and earned his way on. Walter kept improving all during preseason, and I liked having him around. This was important, because one of the other things I was figuring out was how to cut a kid. When I was coaching the freshman team and the junior varsity, I basically took all comers. That was the St. Anthony way—and John Ryan’s philosophy. It wasn’t my program, and the varsity coaches let it be known that it was my job to keep as many kids playing basketball as possible. Why? Because you never know how players will develop physically, how they’ll grow their games. You cut a kid in ninth grade and he steps away from the game, he might have turned out to be a Division I–type player, so you try to be as accommodating, as welcoming, as possible. That gets tougher to do when you coach the varsity, because the demands on these kids are so much greater and you want to make sure your upperclassmen get their minutes, but I was finding my way on this. In fact, I don’t think I cut anyone that first year, and Walter was like the poster boy for this attitude. To this day I don’t like to cut a kid. If he’s willing to put in the time and the effort, and if he’s shown that level of commitment on our freshman or junior varsity team, I’ll find a way to keep him.

  And the thing of it is, Walter Majkowski ended up playing in college—so, like I said, you never know. Early on, though, Walter was mostly a good, hustling practice player, and that was about it. The other kids all got along with him and seemed to admire his work ethic. He didn’t see a lot of time on the floor as the season wore on, but I found a way to get him into this first game, late in the fourth quarter. We were up by a comfortable number, so I tried to empty my bench and get everyone in the game—thought it was a good way to begin the season, spreading around some minutes.r />
  Almost as soon as Walter went in he had a chance to make a play—only it wasn’t the sort of play any of us had in mind. Rick Jablonski grabbed the rebound off a St. Joe’s miss and fired the ball out to Walter, who must have been so excited to be in the game that he panicked. He was still down at the St. Joe’s end of the floor, but he stepped and shot anyway—at the wrong basket!

  Now, this kind of thing happens from time to time. Not a lot, but it happens, only rarely at the high school level. Still, a lot of our guys thought this was the funniest thing in the world, even though poor Walter must have been mortified. Luckily, he missed, and I think Jablonski got the rebound a second time, although it might have been another one of our guys. Whoever it was pitched it out to Walter again, and sure enough, Walter went right back up with it. Two shots on his own basket, in just a couple seconds. This follow-up shot didn’t go in either, but now Walter’s teammates were giving it to him pretty good, along with the crowd, and as we finally moved the ball toward our own basket I turned down to the other end and saw Walter, face down on the hardwood floor. It looked like he’d been shot. Then he started pounding on the floor in frustration. I felt for this kid, I really did, but there was nothing I could do for him. He’d made his own mess, and he’d just have to learn from it.

  To Walter’s great credit, he did. He lifted himself off that floor and found a way to become an important role player for us. He even came off the bench to score in the state finals that year. A lot of guys never get to play in the state finals, let alone score. And he went on to play Division III ball at New Jersey Institute of Technology, so he clearly got past that one fluke moment.