Coaching Juco in Maricopa:
I wouldn’t trade the experience of being at a D1 school for anything, however. When we first came to MCC, the D1’s outside the Metro area dominated the conference. The word was that Arizona Western was the team to beat, and sure enough they pounded us pretty good our first year. Our second year, we won the championship and beat Arizona Western three times. We did this with D2 money, and after that I think the other D2’s felt that it could be done and the conference got a whole lot tougher. Coaches seemed to work harder at not accepting D1 dominance. After we won the conference title in 2014, Phoenix College under Matt Gordon won it twice in a row, which meant that Metro teams had won it three years running, which was unprecedented after the division splits. As I left MCC, I wished that all the Valley teams would go D1, because they have become generally competitive enough to do so. If they did, the winner of our region would no longer have to go through Region 18 to get to the national tournament in Hutchinson. We would get a direct qualifier, and though the D2 national tournament is nice, there is nothing like going to Hutch in my book. It embodies the living history of the NJCAA- a museum inside exhibits the many great coaches and players who have passed through the doors there. The split into classifications, in my opinion, was unnecessary and detrimental to that history. Plus, the arena seats 10,000 people and every D1 school scouts the tournament so if moving players on to four year schools is the goal, that's the Mecca.
What was the competition like in D1 nationally? Intense. One time we were sitting in the office and Joe Esposito, who was then an assistant at Texas Tech came by for a visit. He asked us who we had on the upcoming schedule for that year, and we mentioned that we had a game with South Plains coming up. They were just down the road from Tech, and, in fact, Joe’s team had just scrimmaged them- and lost. He said South Plains could beat half the teams in the Big 12 that year. We said great- what are we getting into? The year that I was an assistant at GCU, we drove down to Yuma to scrimmage Arizona Western, and they thumped us pretty good. As the number of local NAIA schools began to grow in the Valley over the years, we always tried to schedule some of them for scrimmages. Eventually, they wouldn’t get near us, because we typically beat them, which wasn’t good for team morale, I guess. One year, we had to drive up to Prescott to play Embry Riddle, which is a small NAIA school. Before the game, the coach and I agreed to make this an annual home-and-home event. After we beat them, he never wanted to play us again. I called for a few more years to try and schedule another scrimmage, until he finally admitted that losing to a junior college was not good for his team psychologically. And we were at the bottom of the NJCAA D1 facility-scholarships-budget list. I likened us to NAU in our school’s commitment to competing at our level. A low major, in other words. And by the way, NAU absolutely refused to scrimmage us- ever.
What are the down sides to coaching in a Maricopa juco? As mentioned, very few people pay any attention to juco sports in the Valley, even though as in basketball, for example, that is where most of the local high school players who make it to the college level end up. When I say very little attention, I mean from the media, the administrations (unless you bring a problem), the students, and the staffs. The split into divisions was not about size like it is in high schools, so what was it really about? Clearly it was about commitment to athletics as a fundamental part of the school’s marketing. A few of the years I was at MCC, it was listed as the largest junior college in the nation, and it was always in the top five in enrollment. How could it have teams playing in D2? Turns out, the average age of a student was 27 years old. So, from a marketing standpoint, athletics and its four hundred or so students was not that important to the school’s existence. Whether we competed with Salt Lake, or Moberly, or Indian Hills never really mattered to anyone or was ever even discussed with me. I never had one single discussion with anyone in administration about program excellence or the pursuit of championships being important. The only competitive question that ever came to me was one day when the AD walked into my office and asked “why don’t you want to go D2 like everyone else?”.
When I was a kid, John F. Kennedy made a speech where he said that our goal as a nation would be to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the 60’s. At the time the speech was made, we had barely launched any rockets into orbit, much less put people in them. Scientists and other experts looked at each other and just rolled their eyes- this was impossible. What Kennedy said next was stunning- “we choose to put a man on the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. Those words challenged a whole generation of Americans to do better, to try harder, to do more- and certainly stuck with me my whole life. “Why don’t you want to go D2 like everyone else?” was just not what I was about. Given the lack of interest in athletics by the district, this was like asking me why not just become a second class citizen like everyone else. Just because a whole district could care less about the pursuit of excellence, why should I bend to that? Playing D1 with D2 money and mentality is hard- really hard, but we managed to do pretty darn well. We played the toughest schedules we could possible do and would travel anywhere and play anyone to be part of junior college history in some way, always at our own expense. Kennedy’s words were always in the back of my mind- do better, do what’s hard, do more. The memories were priceless, as I have tried to get through in these blogs.
Net time: Potpourri of coaching thoughts
I wouldn’t trade the experience of being at a D1 school for anything, however. When we first came to MCC, the D1’s outside the Metro area dominated the conference. The word was that Arizona Western was the team to beat, and sure enough they pounded us pretty good our first year. Our second year, we won the championship and beat Arizona Western three times. We did this with D2 money, and after that I think the other D2’s felt that it could be done and the conference got a whole lot tougher. Coaches seemed to work harder at not accepting D1 dominance. After we won the conference title in 2014, Phoenix College under Matt Gordon won it twice in a row, which meant that Metro teams had won it three years running, which was unprecedented after the division splits. As I left MCC, I wished that all the Valley teams would go D1, because they have become generally competitive enough to do so. If they did, the winner of our region would no longer have to go through Region 18 to get to the national tournament in Hutchinson. We would get a direct qualifier, and though the D2 national tournament is nice, there is nothing like going to Hutch in my book. It embodies the living history of the NJCAA- a museum inside exhibits the many great coaches and players who have passed through the doors there. The split into classifications, in my opinion, was unnecessary and detrimental to that history. Plus, the arena seats 10,000 people and every D1 school scouts the tournament so if moving players on to four year schools is the goal, that's the Mecca.
What was the competition like in D1 nationally? Intense. One time we were sitting in the office and Joe Esposito, who was then an assistant at Texas Tech came by for a visit. He asked us who we had on the upcoming schedule for that year, and we mentioned that we had a game with South Plains coming up. They were just down the road from Tech, and, in fact, Joe’s team had just scrimmaged them- and lost. He said South Plains could beat half the teams in the Big 12 that year. We said great- what are we getting into? The year that I was an assistant at GCU, we drove down to Yuma to scrimmage Arizona Western, and they thumped us pretty good. As the number of local NAIA schools began to grow in the Valley over the years, we always tried to schedule some of them for scrimmages. Eventually, they wouldn’t get near us, because we typically beat them, which wasn’t good for team morale, I guess. One year, we had to drive up to Prescott to play Embry Riddle, which is a small NAIA school. Before the game, the coach and I agreed to make this an annual home-and-home event. After we beat them, he never wanted to play us again. I called for a few more years to try and schedule another scrimmage, until he finally admitted that losing to a junior college was not good for his team psychologically. And we were at the bottom of the NJCAA D1 facility-scholarships-budget list. I likened us to NAU in our school’s commitment to competing at our level. A low major, in other words. And by the way, NAU absolutely refused to scrimmage us- ever.
What are the down sides to coaching in a Maricopa juco? As mentioned, very few people pay any attention to juco sports in the Valley, even though as in basketball, for example, that is where most of the local high school players who make it to the college level end up. When I say very little attention, I mean from the media, the administrations (unless you bring a problem), the students, and the staffs. The split into divisions was not about size like it is in high schools, so what was it really about? Clearly it was about commitment to athletics as a fundamental part of the school’s marketing. A few of the years I was at MCC, it was listed as the largest junior college in the nation, and it was always in the top five in enrollment. How could it have teams playing in D2? Turns out, the average age of a student was 27 years old. So, from a marketing standpoint, athletics and its four hundred or so students was not that important to the school’s existence. Whether we competed with Salt Lake, or Moberly, or Indian Hills never really mattered to anyone or was ever even discussed with me. I never had one single discussion with anyone in administration about program excellence or the pursuit of championships being important. The only competitive question that ever came to me was one day when the AD walked into my office and asked “why don’t you want to go D2 like everyone else?”.
When I was a kid, John F. Kennedy made a speech where he said that our goal as a nation would be to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the 60’s. At the time the speech was made, we had barely launched any rockets into orbit, much less put people in them. Scientists and other experts looked at each other and just rolled their eyes- this was impossible. What Kennedy said next was stunning- “we choose to put a man on the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. Those words challenged a whole generation of Americans to do better, to try harder, to do more- and certainly stuck with me my whole life. “Why don’t you want to go D2 like everyone else?” was just not what I was about. Given the lack of interest in athletics by the district, this was like asking me why not just become a second class citizen like everyone else. Just because a whole district could care less about the pursuit of excellence, why should I bend to that? Playing D1 with D2 money and mentality is hard- really hard, but we managed to do pretty darn well. We played the toughest schedules we could possible do and would travel anywhere and play anyone to be part of junior college history in some way, always at our own expense. Kennedy’s words were always in the back of my mind- do better, do what’s hard, do more. The memories were priceless, as I have tried to get through in these blogs.
Net time: Potpourri of coaching thoughts
