Chasing Perfect Page 8

  We were individually talented, that 1973–74 team. We had a kid named Daryl Charles who was probably our best all-around player; he ended up having a nice college career at LaSalle. Pat Rochford, at power forward, was also a big asset for us; he went on to play at Manhattan, along with Howie Wilson, who went on to play at Temple. Tony Gentile, the catcher on the baseball team, was probably the toughest player on the team; he had a real rough-and-tumble demeanor to his game. And we also had Bob Kilduff, a hardworking, playmaking guard who went on to play at Bloomfield College.

  That team had a lot of character, I’ll say that. Probably one of the scrappiest teams I’ve ever coached, but at the time I didn’t think in just this way. I had nothing to compare them to, really. I’d coached a lot of these same kids the year before, and a lot of them the year or two before that, on the junior varsity. Somehow they’d always found a way to win, even when their shots weren’t falling or the calls weren’t going their way or their heads were someplace else—to the point where I almost took it for granted that they’d come through.

  And they did. They always did.

  The thing of it is, all season long, I don’t think we paid any attention to the fact that we had yet to lose a game. I certainly didn’t give it a thought, and I never heard any chatter about it from our players. And even when it did occur to me that we were undefeated, I pushed the thought right out of my head. Our focus was always on our next game, our next opponent—not on the string of victories we were putting together. That was almost beside the point. Our goal, all along, was to make it to the postseason—and, once there, to make it to the state finals. Obviously, once you reach the knockout phase of your season, winning each and every game takes on a whole new significance—but up until that point, we weren’t playing with the kind of urgency or single-minded focus that can attach to a winning streak as it grows and grows.

  We were just playing … and winning.

  And playing … and winning.

  All the way to the state finals and a rematch against St. Joe’s of Camden. We’d beaten these guys the year before, and here we were defending our title on the back of an undefeated record. We were the number-one team in the state, and I think it finally went to our heads a little bit. And the kids from St. Joe’s, it went to their heads too. I’m sure their coach had set it up like a revenge-type game, same way I had our sights set on Hudson Catholic. We’d beaten St. Joe’s the year before, so they wanted payback.

  We were their motivation.

  They were our obstacle.

  Now, I’d made a point all along not to talk about our season in any kind of historic terms with my players; I tried not to attach any great weight or significance to any one game. Winning was the endgame, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all, if that makes any sense. But inevitably, the streak came up in the couple days leading up to this St. Joe’s game. Reporters started writing about it, asking questions about it. Folks in and around the game started bringing it up, and I don’t think I did such a good job preparing my guys and helping them to keep their focus. I let a lot of distractions get in the way. I was no longer a rookie coach, but I made a bunch of rookie mistakes. For one thing, the game was being played at Brookdale Community College, in Lincroft, so I decided to make a real road trip out of it. We got in the night before and stayed over, and that was the first time this group had made an overnight trip. Probably not a good idea to set it up for right before our biggest game of the season, but I was still learning. And like everyone else, I was caught up in the excitement, and since there was money in the budget that year for a low-end motel-type stay, it seemed like a good idea to take my guys away from their home environments so we could live and eat like a team the day before the big game. Just like the pros.

  Not a good idea, it turned out.

  Our guys just weren’t ready for that kind of responsibility. They weren’t mature enough. And I wasn’t mature enough as a young coach to recognize that I was putting them in a tough spot. I thought that if I gave them a curfew, I could expect them to honor it—but that’s not how it went. They were kids, after all, so they ended up staying up a little later than I would have liked, making a little more trouble than I would have liked. Nothing major, just goofball antics and horsing around, but I had this fantasy in my head that we’d talk basketball over dinner, and then our guys would break off into groups of two or three or four and talk a little more basketball before lights out. But the adventure was a little too big for them to get their heads around, I think, and the trip was a little too much about being on the road, away from home, and not nearly enough about St. Joe’s and what we needed to bring to the floor the next day in order to beat them.

  We came out flat. Pat Rochford was sick. He’d made the trip, but he was unable to contribute, said his legs felt like rubber, so that left a big hole down low. He suited up, but I wasn’t planning to play him unless we absolutely needed him—and even then, it wasn’t clear that he’d be in any kind of shape to play—so right away we were at a disadvantage. It was like starting out a game of chess without your bishops.

  Daryl Charles was a couple points shy of a thousand for his high school career, so that was a whole other distraction. A thousand points is a big milestone for a high school player, so guys were looking to get the ball to him early and often in ways that took us out of our game.

  Plus, the facility was disorienting: the court was lined in a multipurpose way, with markings for volleyball and badminton and, from the looks of it, every conceivable gymnasium game you could think to play on a hardwood floor. It was tough to tell from all the lines if you were coming or going, or if you were inbounds or out of bounds. And then, to make matters worse, the gym was lined with big picture windows, in such a way that the light came in during the day and made it difficult to shoot. Of course, these facility-related distractions cut both ways—St. Joe’s had to make the same adjustments—but I could have been smarter about it and brought my guys in the day before for a shootaround to get them familiar with the court and the lighting.

  All these years later, our point guard Bob Kilduff, who now works as the chief of detectives for the Jersey City Police Department, remembers that we laid an egg. It still bugs him—probably always will. Last game of his school career—last game for most of that team, in fact, because we were a veteran team of mostly seniors—and we laid a big fat goose egg.

  St. Joe’s went out to an early lead—they were up 17–9 at the end of the first quarter. Then they stretched their lead to thirteen points by halftime, so we were clearly in trouble. It was shaping up to be one of those blah days. Every team runs into a game like this every once in a while, but you hate it when it happens in such a big spot. There’s not a whole lot you can do as a coach to turn things around at halftime. It’s a chemistry thing usually. You can create chemistry over the course of a long season, but you can’t flip a switch at halftime and make things happen the way you want them to happen. Not all at once, just like that. You can’t take a kid like Pat Rochford out of the mix and expect the pieces to all fit back together, same as always. He was a big part of our offense that year, so it was a blow, and St. Joe’s was playing a wacky zone, some defensive scheme we’d never seen before, and I had no answer for it.

  Didn’t help that we weren’t hitting our shots. Didn’t help that when I finally put Pat Rochford into the game, he could hardly move. If anything, that upset our chemistry even more, because we’d made some tiny adjustments and put the ball in the hands of some other guys who could score for us—and now that we had Pat back out there, we had to switch things up all over again.

  And yet, somehow, we battled back. We pulled close and then pulled out ahead and held on for the win. But it was an ugly, ugly win. It left a bad taste in our mouths because we’d played so poorly—it was like ending the season on a down note. And you could see it in the way our guys came off the court. They weren’t whooping it up and high-fiving and jumping all over each other, the way you’d expect after winning a s
tate title. There was a little of that, but not as much as you’d think—certainly not as much as I’d been expecting going in. Really, it was the most halfhearted celebration, the most ho-hum ending to what should have been a storybook-type season, because none of us were happy with the way we played. Okay, Daryl got his one-thousandth point. Okay, we were state champions. But to a man, our players wanted that game back, same way we wanted those Hudson Catholic and Bergen Catholic games back from the season before.

  And it cost us, that game. We’d gone into the final as the top-ranked team in the state, but we were so listless, so off, we ended up dropping to third or fourth in the polls. Of course, you can’t control the rankings; all you can control is the outcome of the game you’re playing, and here we’d barely managed to do just that. Even though we’d found a way to win, the great lesson to our guys, and to me as a young coach, was that St. Anthony basketball was not just about winning and losing. Sometimes it’s how you win—and even how you lose—that matters most of all. There’s winning, and there’s playing to your potential, and here we’d succeeded in one and not the other.

  Yeah, we won the game. Yeah, we won the championship. But somehow this wasn’t enough—not for me and not for my players. I don’t mean to suggest that it was a full-on disappointment, to eke out this last win, only that it wasn’t the rousing victory I would have wanted for this group. These kids had been with me long enough by this point to get that the manner in which we win is just as important as whether or not we win at all. If you mean to be great, your performance is more significant than winning or losing, and that day my team just didn’t have it. We were flat. It wasn’t at all typical of how they’d played their whole two seasons together.

  And so, on the one hand, we had something to celebrate—heck, we had everything to celebrate, we’d just won the state title! But on the other hand, we had this great takeaway, a lesson to carry with us into the off-season. We had something to work on, some way to grow our games.

  For the kids who’d be coming back to play for me the following year and the kids who were going off to play in college, the takeaway was the same: we could do better.

  And underneath that takeaway was a promise we all made to each other: we would.

  HARD WORK

  Saturday, February 11, 2012

  We’ll play anyone.

  We’ll take on all comers.

  That’s been my philosophy ever since I took over the program. We play as independents, so we’re not bound by any league schedule. Nothing’s set except the games we set for ourselves. The invitations we accept to showcase events. The long-standing agreements we’ve made with our traditional rivals, with home-and-home games in alternating years that stretch back over many seasons.

  In the beginning, I inherited a lot of commitments made by my predecessors, John Ryan and Bill Brooks, but after a while I was free to make my own schedule. There’s an art to it, I realized. You develop a feel for how many games you look to play early on, when your team is still finding its way; how many games you need to play in the middle of the season as your guys are hopefully hitting their stride; how many games you want to play heading into the postseason as you start to worry about injuries, fatigue, burnout, and all the other sideline variables that can mess with a postseason run. That’s always the goal—to play for the state championship. It has a lot to do with pacing. Variety too. The idea is to throw a bunch of different looks at your team, a bunch of different styles of play. To vary the space between games. To keep your team fresh, focused. Basically, you want to give your guys a shot, that’s all—and you certainly don’t want to cost them that shot by loading them up with three or four brutal games in a single week, with no time between contests to install any new plays or to rest or to try someone out in a new role if one of your regulars is hurt or struggling.

  What you’re looking for, really, is a balance. You want to vary the level of competition, first couple weeks of the season, so you can look at your guys in different roles, maybe shake up your rotation a little bit, get into a decent rhythm, but at the same time you want to push them to play at the highest level, as a unit, so you want to be sure you’re going up against some talented teams.

  This season’s schedule looked good on paper. The plan was to get in four or five games ahead of our holiday tournament in Boston, which would hopefully leave us well positioned for a clash with St. Benedict’s on New Year’s Day. And that’s just how it has worked out, only we weren’t quite ready for St. Benedict’s, a strong team out of Newark where my son Danny used to coach. We’ve shown ourselves to be a solid defensive team, holding our opponents to an average of just twenty-eight points over our first six games, but we’re having trouble scoring—one of the emerging concerns of our season. We’ve managed to run up some big numbers against a couple weak teams, but overall we’re inconsistent. Overall, we’re underwhelming. We keep winning, each time out, but I don’t like the way we’re winning. I don’t like the way we’re moving the ball, the choices our guys are making on the offensive end, and I worry how we’ll measure up against St. Benedict’s, which this year features a talented junior guard named Tyler Ennis, one of the top players in the state.

  In fact, St. Benedict’s is ranked as one of the top ten teams in the country heading into this game—a showcase at Hackensack High School. They’ve played a bunch more games than we have at this point, because as a prep school they’re not bound by the same rules as we are as a public school. They’re free to start practicing at the beginning of the school year, which is a huge edge, and they’re just crushing everybody in the early going, so I know we’re in for a battle. Turns out we’re not quite up to it. We manage to win, by a single point, but we play lousy. Make a ton of stupid turnovers. Almost cost ourselves the game a half-dozen times down the stretch. But somehow we hang in there. Somehow we come back from a six-point deficit to start the fourth quarter and manage to build a small lead.

  It’s one of those games that can go either way at the end. UCLA-bound Kyle Anderson goes to the line with a chance to put us up by four points with less than a minute to go, but he only hits one of his free throws, so it’s still a one-possession game. St. Benedict’s ends up calling a time-out with just a few seconds left on the clock and sets an inbounds play for Ennis, who’s already hit three three-pointers, but our two junior guards, Hallice Cooke and Josh Brown, are able to swarm around Ennis and disrupt what he’s trying to do, and he can only get off a desperation shot at the buzzer.

  It feels to me like we’ve dodged a bullet. If we could play that team a month later, we could give them a better game, but we’re happy to come away with the win, deserved or not.

  Later this month we face another test—at the Hoophall Classic Hall of Fame game at Springfield College in Massachusetts, against Miller Grove, a powerhouse out of Georgia. They have a senior on that team named Tony Parker who’s one of the most highly touted big men in high school—the kid is such a big deal that both Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Kentucky coach John Calipari are in the stands to watch him play. But here again, our defense comes through. Our guys do a great job containing Parker, holding him to just six points—on one field goal! Take him completely out of his game.

  This isn’t any kind of rout, though. It isn’t what you’d call a convincing victory or a “statement” game. We win by twelve points, a nice margin, but it’s a four-point game at the half. It’s close all the way. One momentum run could have turned the game either way.

  Still, it’s a good win for us, and it starts to feel like we’re finding our way as a team—but then the bottom falls out of our schedule. That Miller Grove game was on a Monday—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—so our kids were off from school. But then our opponents have to postpone a game that Thursday, and then on Saturday, January 21, there’s a dusting of snow in our area, and the other coach calls two hours before game time to bail. He says there’s a problem with transportation, that traffic is snarled—but, really, to call it a “dusting”
is probably an overstatement. Our guys are already at the gym, so we run a split-squad scrimmage instead, but I would much prefer to stick to our schedule, because it now means we’re going over a week between games. That’s a long time for our guys to be out of action.

  (The snow has pretty much melted by the time we leave the gym, by the way.)

  And then the layoff stretches longer still. We have a game on Tuesday, January 24, against East Orange, which is meant as a final tune-up for the SNY Invitational that weekend, on Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. The folks at SNY have been running that tournament for years—first at NYU, and now at LIU—and it always features some of the best teams in the region. It has become one of the centerpieces of our schedule, and our players look forward to it because the games are shown live on the SNY cable network. It’s a chance for them to play on a big, big stage, against big, big competition. This year we’re in a field along with St. Raymond, Cardozo, and Thomas Jefferson—all dominant teams in our area—so the games are huge for us.

  But we never get to play them.

  NCAA officials pull the plug on the tournament the day before it’s meant to start. Apparently, the tournament is in violation of a new rule, enacted last season, prohibiting nonscholastic events from being held on Division I campuses—one way to keep schools from using these types of showcases as a recruiting tool. I understand the rule, but I don’t get why it’s being applied at the eleventh hour. I mean, we played this same tournament last year, under these same circumstances; the tournament itself has been running for a bunch of years; this year’s schedule has been set for months; and now it’s too late to get those games moved to another venue.