Chasing Perfect Page 7

  One of my first innovations as a coach turned out to be one of my only innovations as a coach. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a great innovator. Mostly I was a sponge. I borrowed certain approaches from coaches I admired; I pinched certain drills, even certain inspirational quotes, and reimagined them in my own way. If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I was flattering the hell out of every coach I came across at a clinic, every coach I ever coached against, every coach I ever played for. Chances are, if I saw you in the gym with a whistle or a clipboard, I grabbed a little something from your playbook and found a way to make it my own. Occasionally, though, I’d find myself with nothing to go on, so I had to scramble—or I’d go completely against how things had been done for years and years if I thought I could go at it in a new way. That’s how it shook out here, with this one innovation. Actually, to even call it an “innovation” is to give it more weight than it deserves, but I saw something I wanted to change—a small thing, really, but I believe it’s paid big dividends for us over the years, so I’ll share it here.

  Up until I started coaching the St. Anthony varsity, I’d been a kind of lone wolf on the sidelines. As a youth coach, and later as a freshman and JV coach, it was just me on the bench with my kids. I’d sit with Coach Ryan and Coach Brooks during varsity games, but I didn’t really have much of a role, except to observe how the head coach handled the run of play, how he managed the clock, how he talked to his players when they came out of the game. All that good stuff.

  Traditionally, the St. Anthony bench was like every other bench in basketball. The coach would sit on one end, closest to the scorer’s table, and his assistants would sit next to him, filling the next two or three or however many seats they needed until we got to the players. You saw the same setup on most college benches, most pro benches—only now that I was a head coach, with freshman and JV coaches on hand as assistants, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I mean, I’d logged my time in one of the “suggestion” seats—the assistant spots on the bench—but once I stepped up to the varsity I wanted to be close to my players. I like to pull a kid out of the game as soon as I can if he messes up. I’ll even call a time-out to get one of my guys off the floor double-quick if he makes a particularly boneheaded play—not because I want to chew him out, but because I want to reinforce what was wrong about what he did, get it done and out of the way while it’s still fresh. (It might seem like I want to chew him out, especially once you hear me yelling, but there’s usually a method to my loudness.) I didn’t need to have this false buffer of assistant coaches between me and my players, and I certainly didn’t need to be at midcourt, right on top of the scorer’s table. These days, with six or seven assistants, I’d be half a gym away from my players and I wouldn’t be able to talk to them at all during the game if I stuck to this tradition, so I flipped it around. I had my assistant coaches fan out away from the scorer’s table, and I took the last seat before the players, closer to the middle of our bench. This way, I’m in the heart of the action, right where I need to be to get the attention of my guys and to give them my attention in return.

  Like I said, it’s a small thing, really. But it’s made a big difference in how I interact with my players. Anyway, it’s not like I sit all that still during the game. Like a lot of coaches, I’m up and down the sidelines, pacing, stepping onto the floor to bark at a ref, calling out plays over the crazy din of noise that can sometimes fill a high school gymnasium. Over the course of a game, I towel off as much as any player. I drink as much fluid. I sweat. It’s a real workout—but mostly, it’s emotionally draining, and I didn’t see the need to make it any tougher on myself by sitting as far away from the action as possible.

  Very quickly my kids knew if they were coming out of the game to take the open seat next to me. It was drilled into them. Half the time I’d chew them out and send them right back onto the floor because the guy who went in for them would invariably make a screwup of his own. I was a regular “Captain Hook” the way I was yanking kids in and out of games, but I believed this was the best way to get inside a player’s head. Talk to him on the floor, middle of the game, and he’ll nod like he’s listening, but he won’t hear you at all. Talk to him on the bench, when the whole gym knows he’s made a stupid play, when I know that he knows he’s made a stupid play, and there’s no avoiding me. He’s got no choice but to listen … and, hopefully, learn.

  Another innovation was to step up my efforts on the scouting front—in a way that seemed to fit with this in-the-mix approach I’d adopted on the bench. You have to realize, there wasn’t a whole lot of advance work in New Jersey high school basketball back in the early 1970s. You played your game and hoped like hell you could keep your opponents from playing theirs. But I always believed there was a lot to learn about an opponent that went beyond their style of play. It was easy enough to figure out another team’s strengths, to spot their best shooter, their best ball-handler. And it was easy enough to figure out an opposing coach’s tendencies too. Go up against the same coach a time or two and you’ll know his set plays, the tempo he likes to play, the fitness and fortitude of his team. You’re scouting without even realizing you’re scouting. In recent years, I’ve had some big help in this area from my assistant coach Ben Gamble and from alumni and friends of St. Anthony who have scattered about the state. They’ll be my eyes and ears at an upcoming opponent’s game if I can’t make it, and I’ve come to trust their take, their insights. Also, they’ve come to know what I’m looking for with their assessments.

  But back then it was mostly on me, and I found that I was most interested in the action on the sidelines. I’d want to put myself in the middle of their bench as well as ours. I’d fix on the way a kid came off the floor on a substitution. I’d take note of everything. Does he take the seat next to the coach, the way my players do? Or does he go to the end of the bench and sit by himself with the towel over his head? Does he listen—really listen—to what the coach has to say to him when he comes out of the game? What I wanted to know was how a kid responded when things were not going well, because that was a piece of information we could exploit. That was a kid we could pressure, maybe find a way to frustrate him and get him off his game.

  Again, wouldn’t really call it an innovation, this type of scouting, but it was something new—on the St. Anthony bench, at least.

  Oh, and one last improvement I tried to make on the Coach Ryan/Coach Brooks way of doing things at St. Anthony. This one came off the court, in the form of a contract I started asking my players to sign. There was a code of conduct in place when I took the job, but it wasn’t really enforced; you saw the same type of thing at a lot of schools in those days, at Catholic schools especially, but I got to thinking it was something the kids were taking for granted, so I presented it in the form of a contract. I thought if it was something they had to discuss with their parents, if it was a document they had to study and consider and endorse with their signature, in an adult-type way, they’d have to really take it seriously—and they’d get that I took it seriously.

  It’s evolved over the years to bend to societal changes, to technology, to the ways my players live away from the gym, but at its core it’s basically the same. Here’s the current version:

  STUDENT-ATHLETE ST. ANTHONY BASKETBALL CONTRACT

  1. I will represent myself, my family, my school, and my team properly at all times, including on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

  2. I will take my education seriously, knowing that my education is for a lifetime. I will treat my tutors, teachers, etc., with the proper respect.

  3. I will refrain from the use of tobacco, alcohol, or drugs of any kind.

  4. I will not take out or use a cell phone during school hours other than the cafeteria at lunchtime. Failure to comply with this rule will result in an immediate and indefinite suspension from the program.

  5. I will always wear both my school and team uniform properly.

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. I will adhere to my curfew hours of 10:00 PM for school nights and 12:00 midnight on weekends.

  7. I will maintain a clean-cut appearance with a short haircut (absolutely no Mohawks) and no facial hair.

  8. I will not get a tattoo during my time in high school.

  9. I will actively attend my church of choice.

  10. I will stay away from people and places that will not have a positive effect on me.

  11. I understand that any legal difficulties will result in automatic suspension until such time as this has been reviewed and resolved.

  12. I will attend any counseling or tutoring sessions recommended by the school coaches or staff.

  13. I will adhere to the rules regarding the appropriate use of jewelry.

  14. I will refrain from the use of profane language or derogatory comments about others.

  15. I will never involve myself in any hazing of another student.

  16. I will be on time for classes, school or team activities and practices, and games, and understand that I must communicate in advance when I will not be able to attend via a parent or guardian.

  17. I will involve myself willingly in all community service activities as a member of the team and in school.

  18. Finally, I understand that it is a privilege to play at St. Anthony High School, and my participation will be determined by my adherence to the rules and my further development as a player.

  Clearly, we weren’t worrying about tattoos, Facebook, and Mohawk haircuts back in the early 1970s, but every generation came with its own set of challenges. (Don’t get me started on my players and their cell phones!) By asking my players to sign a contract, indicating their willingness to follow the guidelines appropriate to the times, I thought I’d be able to deal with any issues that might come up during the season. This way, if a kid stepped out of line in any way, I could hold up this document with his signature on it and remind him of the pledge he’d made to me, to his teammates, and to the program.

  My first year as coach we lost only two games the entire season—on our way to a state championship—so it wasn’t just Walter Majkowski who figured things out. We figured it out together, as a team, from the coach on down to either end of our bench. And it set us up with a story line for my second season—the 1973–74 season—because it gave me an unexpected way to motivate my players. We’d finished that first season at 27–2. Our only losses were against Hudson Catholic, away, and Bergen Catholic, also away—not a bad start to my high school career, but only because it came with a state championship. If it had turned out we lost in the state finals and finished at 26–3, it would have been a disappointment. Just that swing of one game would have made all the difference, even though those two losses were tough to shake.

  Remember, we hadn’t lost a game my last two years as junior varsity coach—we went 20–0 each season, as I recall—so I didn’t have a lot of experience on the short end of a final score. Not as a coach anyway. I’d never been a good loser in all my years as a player, but I’d usually managed to leave my frustrations on the floor. As a coach, though, I tended to carry the sting of a loss a little longer than I would have liked. This was another thing I was figuring out, about what kind of coach I was going to be. Wasn’t quite sure how to accept a loss and set it aside. I kept going over the game in my mind, wondering if there was something else I could have done in the Hudson Catholic game, the Bergen Catholic game, a substitution I could have made to get a better matchup, a time-out I could have called to put an end to a momentum run … something. I just hated the thought that I might have done something—or not done something—that cost my kids a game. As a coach, the tough losses, the close losses … they’re on you. As a player, I was finding, you can shake off a defeat and turn your attention to the next game, but when you’re the one in charge of moving all the pieces around the floor, of setting out a game plan and getting your guys to respond to any surprises the other team might throw at you, it always feels like you didn’t do enough to help your team get the win. And that’s how I felt about these two losses, all during that first off-season. I wanted those games back, so I could go at them another way. Really, I couldn’t shake them for trying, even though on a purely rational level I knew my players had probably moved on. Even though we ended up winning the state championship.

  That’s supposed to be what you play for, right? That’s the ultimate prize. No coach in his right mind sets out to record a perfect, undefeated season. It doesn’t happen that way. Even a guy like Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, has said it can be a huge distraction. Remember when his Patriots went to the Super Bowl after going 16–0 during the 2007 regular season? All the talk that year was about how the Patriots had a shot to make NFL history, instead of just winning the Super Bowl, and Coach Belichick said all along he wished the focus could have been on just this one game.

  It’s tough enough to play for the championship without also playing for history. It got in the way, in the end, because in football it’s all about winning the Super Bowl. In New Jersey high school basketball, it’s all about winning the state championship. And here we’d done just that, so why was I beating myself up over a 27–2 record?

  I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I still think about those two first-year losses. Two tough games, against two tough opponents. The loss to Bergen Catholic is especially hard to take, still, because it’s become an annoying stain on St. Anthony basketball history. I know I just said history shouldn’t really enter into it, but in my forty years as head coach, guess how many times one of my teams has lost to a team from Bergen County, New Jersey. Just this once. That’s all. So it’s not hard to see why the loss has stayed with me over the years.

  One of the silver linings, heading into my first off-season, was the thought that we’d get to wipe out those losses, sooner or later. In fact, we were supposed to play Hudson Catholic the following year in the back end of a home-and-home, so right away that became a focal point. As a coach, you’re always looking for ways to motivate your players, for a little extra something they can put into their tanks and call on at a crucial point in the game, so I decided going into my second season that this grudge match against Hudson Catholic would be our litmus test as a team. The only problem with this strategy, it turned out, was that Hudson Catholic had a scheduling problem heading into the season, and they had to cancel our game. Hudson Catholic had a good team that year—Jim Spanarkel, who’d go on to be a first-round draft choice of the Philadelphia 76ers after an excellent college career at Duke, was their go-to player—so it was especially disappointing that we didn’t get another crack at them, but that little extra something I’d tried to put into my guys’ tanks seemed to pay off, because once the regular season had come and gone it still looked like we might meet up with Hudson Catholic in the postseason.

  We were on opposite sides of the bracket in the county tournament that year, and it worked out that after we won our semifinal game we sat together as a team to watch the second semifinal—Hudson Catholic against St. Mary’s. Our guys were rooting hard for Hudson Catholic, so they could take another shot at them, and when Hudson Catholic took the lead with a couple seconds to go in the game, it looked like we’d have our chance. But then St. Mary’s hit a half-court shot at the buzzer to win the game and head into the county finals with all kinds of momentum.

  Of course, back then, I couldn’t know any of that. All I knew heading into the season was that I wanted to avenge those two losses. I wanted my guys to want the same thing. I wanted those two losses to matter, so we could build on them, learn from them. In reality, they didn’t matter at all, but I wanted the sting of losing to get into our system in such a way that my guys would do everything in their power to avoid the sting a second time. Most of my team was coming back that year, so this became one of our themes, going into my second season. Each year, I was realizing, there’d be some sort of theme to our efforts—some way to unite
our group and make sure we were working together toward a shared goal. During my first year it was all about starting a new chapter in St. Anthony basketball history and extending the winning tradition that had begun under Coach Ryan.

  This year it was all about payback.

  Turned out we didn’t play Bergen Catholic or Hudson Catholic that year—but the idea that we might was the spark that lit our season.

  The first few Friars teams I coached were built on quickness and speed. Part of the reason for that was that we had some talented ball-handlers, but it was mostly because running was pretty much the only thing we could do with these kids before the season started. In some ways, we’re still facing down the same deal. Remember, without a gym, our court time has always been limited. So I decided early on that we would be the best-conditioned team in the state. That became the foundation. I got it in my head that my guys should run every day in Bayonne Park for thirty-two minutes, since that was the running time in a high school basketball game. If we couldn’t run at the park, for whatever reason, we’d run around a vacant lot next to the school. For thirty-two minutes. After that, we’d run some more.

  The great thing about running is that it creates some very tangible goals for your players. At the start of a season, when everybody’s a little out of shape, you run for about five minutes, hard, and you’re sucking air. But then you find a way to get your second wind, and when it kicks in you’re good to go for another five minutes, and at that point you have to reach for another gear. Basically, you have to keep pushing yourself and pushing yourself until eventually you’ve pushed yourself right past whatever it was that was holding you back. You push the pain and fatigue from your mind and power through.

  Most times, I would run right along with my players. I wasn’t sure how it would work, me wanting to separate myself from them in terms of my age and my position of authority, but like I wrote earlier, I wanted to send the message that I was willing and able to do whatever it was I was asking them to do. When we finally got into the gym and started scrimmaging, I’d run the floor with them as well, and these kids just weren’t used to that. A lot of them had played for coaches who were much, much older than them, who couldn’t keep up, but I could still play. I could still show these kids a thing or two, and I think they appreciated that; I think it added a layer of respect, to put myself down on the floor with them.