And now...the juco gym I know most about:

And finally, MCC, where I spent all those years. Tiny lobby- not good for moving people. If you are going to create a facility that has a capacity of 2,000 people, the architects should have considered that. There was no concession area and the lobby bathrooms were embarrassingly small. When I got to MCC, the men’s bathroom in the lobby had two urinals- a big person’s and a kid size- and one stall. Who thinks that stuff up? Anyway, I talked a few times with the AD about it and finally, after several years he told me they were going to remodel the bathroom. I said it’s about time. Little did I know that the remodel included taking out both of the urinals in favor of replacing them with one, yes I said one, water efficient larger uni-size urinal. So now, instead of two urinals and a stall, there is one urinal and a stall for a 2,000 capacity gym.

When I first got there, the trophy case in the lobby was a mess. There was dust everywhere, broken glass, broken trophies, and trash that people had conveniently placed in some of the gaps. When I was showing Stephen Rogers’ mom around campus one day, we walked by the trophy case and she said that MCC must not have a lot of pride in the athletic programs. That hurt. Soon after, I spent several weeks cleaning it up and fixing it. I have a scar on my shin to prove it, as one day I dropped a very heavy plaque on it and cut it pretty badly. Since then, the AD got the hint and had the case completely remodeled, so it looks pretty decent now.

There is no visitor’s locker room. They use whatever is available on the women’s side, or dress next door. I’m not sure what they are doing now, since MCC has to dress next door with their “new” setup. When the AD told me that was the plan, I knew I had to leave Mesa, whether one of my assistants got the job or not. I used to shake my head and laugh at the gyms in Arizona and their visitor’s set-ups. Arizona Western- probably the most “big time” program in the state- had the visitors dress in a hut out by the pool. It was tiny. Central had the visitors use the lady’s PE locker room, which our ladies were using, as well. Ditto with Cochise and Eastern until recently, when both finally constructed pretty decent visitor’s facilities. The problem with those two schools, however, is that they are in Douglas and Thatcher. Enough said. Of course, Glendale was the pits when it came to visiting teams, and the others weren’t great, but at least you dressed in the gym and not next door. Now Mesa was joining Glendale in having the home team dress in another building. Glendale had an excuse- their gym had absolutely nothing. Mesa’s was inexcusable, so I knew I had to get out. A lot of people misinterpreted this as a retirement. It was not...it was just time to move on.

We had difficulty with raising and lowering the baskets over the years. Each of the six baskets in the gym operated on their own system, so to bring them down or raise them up took about five minutes each. They moved so slowly. If I had to multiply five minutes times the number of times I raised or lowered them over the years, it would add up to a significant portion of my life was dedicated to just standing there with a key, nail file, paperclip, or whatever else we could find in a pinch to fit in the key slot. The two main baskets had to be brought down from switches inside of the electrical box, which was often open, but the side baskets had the key slots. The mains were equally slow. Of course, the players knew the system and would often “sneak” into the gym and shoot when no one was around. College guys are generally 18 years old or older, and are therefore adults, but the standing orders from the AD were to have security throw out anyone who was in the gym unsupervised by a staff member, team member or not. That’s why I used the word “sneak” for players who represented the school wanting to get shots up when no one else was around. That was a source of constant friction between myself and the AD, not to mention the fairly constant mechanical malfunctions of the basket-lowering systems. There was a sticker attached to the door of the electrical box indicating that the last lubrication of the wires used to raise and lower the baskets occurred in 1972. Look for yourself the next time you go to the gym, and get ready to duck when one of those wires snaps. You should lube the wires every 50 years or so, right? I thought that maybe they just quit writing it down, but when talking to maintenance guys who had been at MCC for many years, they could never remember lubricating those wires. Somewhere along the way- maybe 2017 or 2018, one of the baskets was raised, but wouldn’t come back down. That was not unusual. What was unusual, however, was that it was never lowered again. Whenever I would check in about it, the usual response was “we have a work order on that”. It is still up, but is covered in dust, and might have a volleyball or two stuck up there with it. Not classy.

And the auxiliary gym. When we got to Mesa in 2008, we immediately discovered that there was a real friction between the Exercise Science Department and the Athletic Department. In fact, they were openly hostile to each other. In the ensuing warfare, Exercise Science had claimed the auxiliary gym as their turf and took a dim view of athletic teams using it for any purpose. They had put large mirrors up on the wall and moved in a variety of exercise equipment unrelated to basketball. On one end of the main floor, and there was only a main floor, one of the baskets was at least a foot lower than it should have been, which was delightful for guys who couldn’t dunk on a regular hoop. Neither basket had break-a-way rims, which was dangerous, to say the least. The side baskets were the old fan shaped type and had been neglected for some time. We worked hard to bridge the gap with Exercise Science and gradually, reluctantly got them to be OK with us using the auxiliary gym for camps and practices, when necessary. And it only took ten years for them to raise the low main basket up to ten feet! And it was on a work order. But, we could never get them to put a three point line down or resurface the floor so it wasn’t too slick. And those mirrors…

Next time: final analysis on coaching juco in general and in Arizona...

I have been noticing a trend (Bias) this year. I know several coaches, who have been coordinators and have a decade or so of experience, not making it to the 2nd round of interviews. But, younger coaches, some of whom were not lower level head coaches or coordinators, are getting second interviews. I don't know a lot of the the new hires, but it appears that anyone over 45 is not getting to round 2, let alone hired. Just wondered what other people think.

For those who didn’t see, Sunnyslope alumnus Oakland Fort hit an absolutely massive 3 at the buzzer to give NAU men’s basketball an upset win over Eastern Washington in the Big Sky tourney.

What other standout performances have we seen from AZ high school grads at the college level recently?

Obviously Kelee Ringo winning another football title at Georgia is up there. His pick 6 in the title game two seasons ago was amazing too

So we have multiple Final-4's starting this week from 4A- the OPEN division !

OPEN---Perry vs Sunnyslope
6A--#1 Highland vs #5 MTV and #3 Boulder Creek vs #2 Brophy Prep
5A--#1 Campo Verde vs #5 Centennial and #11 Sunrise Mtn vs #2 Millennium
4A--#4 Mesquite vs #8 Deer Valley and #3 Bradshaw Mtn vs #2 Peoria

??

Peoria wins the 4A Basketball Chip

@Jacob.Seliga

I scribbled some notes about, IMO, the best game I've seen this season so far...

Richard Smith was there too..

So what do you guys think of that game? !!!

So last season after the postseason I released my own personal awards/recognition based off the teams I’ve seen and from people that I trust and their own evaluations of different teams and players. I received good feedback from both players and coaches last year when I released it as I attempted to show recognition to as many different teams and players that I could. This season you’ll see that trend continue. I’m releasing it on here first for our people who’ve been subscribed to our forums and support us to allow us to do what we do. I’ll soon release them on my twitter account for everyone else after our people see them first.

*Disclaimer*

These are my own personal awards and opinions! These aren’t the views of Gregg, ArizonaVarsity or anyone other than myself. Direct any criticism towards me and not towards the players or coaches that are recognized

This year on top of our usual awards such as Player of the year, Coach of the year, defensive player of the year. I continued the all-underclassmen teams to show love to our young bucket getters in the state and added class players of the year for 2023, 24, 25 & 26. I also added my most valuable player. This is different from “player of the year”. The PoY award goes to the most outstanding player in each conference this season. The MVP is given the player that was the biggest key to their respective teams success. For example without Carter Gittens, the 5A Sunrise Mountain Mustangs struggled through the first month and a half of the season going from looking like a potential final eight team in the open division to start the regular season to on the bubble of the conference play-in. Once Carter returned, Sunrise looked great and is now one win away from the 5A semifinals. The MVP may not be the best player but the most crucial one. By the way, 5A had Co-MVP’s. (The only award to split this year)

Nevertheless here are the awards ⬇️

Coaching juco- part 2

Time to talk about junior college gymnasiums. In the midwestern and southern gyms we went to, most were great. Typically, there was a lot of buy-in by the colleges as to the purpose of athletics, and the importance of it to their communities. There was usually a tremendous amount of pride in their athletic facilities, and a real understanding of how to construct such facilities to serve the dual purpose of education provided by the institution and intercollegiate competition. Remember from an earlier blog, our first two games as coaches at Mesa Community College were played at the Cotton Fitzsimmons/Maury John arena on the campus of Moberly Area Community College in Missouri. That’s right- I said “arena”.

The large urban junior colleges are another story altogether, with the exception of Salt Lake City Community College. SLCC has several campuses around the Salt Lake area, but only one athletic program. Unlike the Maricopa system, which has several campuses in the Phoenix Metro area, each one with their own athletic program, Salt Lake can invest all of their resources for athletics in their main campus, thus their campus gymnasium is one of the best in the entire country. Much of California is like the Maricopa system, and in fact I believe the Maricopa system kind of modeled itself on California. The result is a variety of athletic facilities and an apparent lack of coaching involvement in the construction of gymnasiums. A campus gymnasium should have these minimums: regulation main court for competition and at least two regulation side courts for classes; a ticket booth outside of the main court area; a lobby with enough room to easily move crowds in and out; a concession area in the lobby with facilities for hot food; public bathrooms in the lobby that will accommodate moments such as halftime where several people may need to use them; locker rooms for men and women students who come to activity classes or fitness centers that include bathrooms and showers; locker rooms for home teams and visiting teams, with the home team room being a secure place where the team may use it for practices, off-season training, and games. The visiting team room should be built to be secured during competition, and also have showers and bathroom facilities. There should be bleachers on both sides of the main court. An auxiliary gym should be included, with the best ones being those that could have a smaller set of bleachers and be attached to the main gym building (for camps). A good auxiliary gym would have a main court and two side courts and could be used for educational purposes. Any architect should be alerted to these things and plan accordingly. The California model that Maricopa used is clearly far different.

So, let’s take a look at the Maricopa gyms. I’ll start with Scottsdale CC. They have some of the things that were mentioned as rational features. There is a fairly big lobby which includes a concession area. Their bathrooms are decent, considering the fact that the public may actually attend events in the gym. There is no ticket window, and that function is at a table once you walk into the gym- a real gaffe by the architects. I’m not sure what they had in mind for the locker room areas, either. There is no visitors locker room- they take you to a more general area of lockers adjacent to a home locker room. The problem there is there is a gap in the ceiling that allows the home team to listen to you and you can eavesdrop on the home team in the same manner. We would use the locker room to dress, but go out the back door by our bench to talk to the team. Out that door was a fitness center which was always locked, and a dance room which was sometimes unlocked. If both doors were locked, we would just be in the hallway in between the two rooms, with nowhere to sit. We used it for pregame and postgame talks, and, if the dance room was open, as a place to dress after the game. We had to bring our bags out from the locker room, as it would not be secured for the game. When you see players bring their bags out and put them behind a bench, that is a sure sign of small time thinking and/or poor gym design. Another sign is not pulling out all of your bleachers, which SCC used to, but doesn’t anymore.

Then there is Phoenix College. It has a nice sized lobby for moving people in and out, and a concession area. The bathrooms are a bit small for the size of the gym. There is no ticket window, and again only a table for ticket taking after you walk into the gym. It is a nice gym and they generally pulled most of their bleachers. There was no visitors locker room, which is amazing- only a classroom out some doors just past the home bench. No bathroom and no showers. There was a bathroom in the small foyer, but it was a women’s bathroom, so if our guys needed to use it, we had to place someone at the door to keep women out of their own bathroom. We shared that locker room with the women’s team, which is understandably not a good idea. How could the architects build such a nice facility without a visitor’s locker room? Oops.

When I first took over at MCC, Chandler-Gilbert probably had the worst junior college gym in the country. I don’t know how the coaches there could have brought a recruit in and showed them the gym, and if they did and the kid signed anyway, more power to them. The gym was at Mesa Gateway Airport and must have been an old military gym, back when that area was known as Williams Field, an Air Force base. It had only one semi-redeeming quality- a visitor’s locker room. I say semi-redeeming, because the gym was not secured and players had to bring their bags out and set them behind the bench. The bleachers were old and wooden and really shakey. One decent sized area of bleachers was broken and could not be pulled out, and there was only one side of the gym with bleachers, which restricted crowd size. That wasn’t a huge problem, however, because they never drew any crowds. There were side baskets, but one of them couldn’t be raised and hung over the main court during games. They should have made that the “bonus basket” which would give the offense at that end extra points if they made a shot there during the game. There was a tiny lobby and concession area, and that area was no good for moving any amount of people in or out. Not sure about lobby bathrooms, because all I ever wanted to do was get in, play the game, and get out. It was an embarrassment.

Chandler-Gilbert has since built a nice new gym on their main campus. It has home and visitor locker rooms that are secured for games- a huge plus. The lobby is small and there is no concession area, and curiously there is a classroom on the second floor that has a window overlooking the floor. I don’t know what the architects were thinking on that idea. It has bleachers on both sides, but they only pull one side for games. The coach told me that since he was the one who had to do the set up and take down of the gym each game, he just didn’t pull the bleachers on the side where the benches were. It seems like a lot of high schools and juco’s in Arizona do that. Another reason for many is that whoever designed the gym didn’t seem to realize that bench chairs and scorer’s tables would take up any room on the floor.

South Mountain CC passes muster on the lobby, bathrooms, and concession area. The gym always seemed a bit dimly lit, but was OK. They have bleachers on both sides and sometimes they pull them both out. I guess you know how important your game is by the number of bleachers that are pulled. For many years, we dressed in a classroom in the building, but near the end of my tenure at MCC, they created a visitor’s locker room, which was pretty nice. It was not secured during games, however, which is not classy. Nothing says small time like everybody carrying their stuff into the gym and putting them behind the bench.

And I really question the designers of the Glendale CC gym. It’s almost like a gymnasium was an afterthought after the college was designed. Like someone said “put a gym right there” and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, because that’s pretty much what they came up with. It is a gym with no lobby, no bathrooms, no locker rooms, no concession area, and no ticket window. You literally step one foot in the gym and there is a table for entry. The person behind you will be in the doorway. There are bleachers on one side only. On the other side behind the benches, they erected a large curtain to conceal what’s behind, which is actually nothing. So, the curtain must have been an aesthetic prop, which fails miserably. At least the designers had the wherewithal to put scoreboards in the building. So where did the teams dress, you say? For many years, the visitors dressed in a general locker room in a building next door to the gym. The problem with that was that it was open to anyone at anytime who was using their other facilities. You could be talking to your team before the game or at halftime or after the game, and literally someone could walk in and start getting dressed for some other activity on the campus. Or worse, they may come in, take their clothes off and grab a shower in full view of everyone. That scenario played out many times. Eventually, they moved the visitors over to a classroom on the other side of the gym. The main problem with that was that it was a classroom and not a locker room. It had no lockers, no water fountains, and no showers, and would not be secured during the game. At least no one walked in during your pregame speech. Again, I would really like to know who designed that mess. Let’s talk. You get an F- in gym design.

Next time- coaching juco part 3 (won't forget MCC's gym)

Ok--1st rankings came out

TD!!

I am happy for him~

I had the pleasure of coaching/teaching him from 2nd-6th grade and he was actually on my 5th-6th grade hoops team..

After the 1st season I jokingly told the dad to have Kirk stay with his day job of football

I will never forget 2 stories about him...
In 3rd grade my "track team" best anchor (fastest student in 6th) was sick and could not practice--the students were all concerned to who would we put at the last spot.
I yelled to the playground for Kirk to come over here. He runs over and is like what do you need coach?
I need you to be last on the relay team for me. He is like ok great---the 6th graders looked at me like I was on something
I said they practiced in their class--they are like that is fine but look how little he is--I said don't worry he will be just fine!
They all said ok I guess--just go to your positions and run--do your jobs!

SO that team was neck on neck for the first three players and Kirk got the baton about in 3rd place--but fairly close with the other two top teams. He started running and everyone just froze and watched him run.
They looked at me--I of course smiled--they are like who the HECK is that---meanwhile he caught the top two kids and won the race for his relay race team--I am like ladies and gentleman--that is Christian Kirk!!

From that point on--every 4th-5th-6th grader would see him in the morning or at recess and they were like--that's the kid--that's the fast kid I was talking about LOL

He became a legend at my elementary school overnight !

In 8th grade he came back before he decided to go to HS and said coach I am thinking about going to Saguaro--I am like why not Horizon HS (which is our feeder school) he is like well all my club football teammates kind of decided to go to the school.
I am like well since you will know all those kids--I guess that is a good thing and you will feel comfortable with them..

Nearly did I know that would be the start of the SAGU title runs !!

...Back to hoops for me!!

Does anyone have Black game pants they no longer use in their program that would be willing to donate to our program?

Please contact Coach Hemming via email coachhemming@gmail.com if they are willing.

With the regular season just 20 days away from wrapping up, I’m diving into the world of breaking down numbers and movement from teams throughout 6A, 5A, and 4A and figuring out what the metaphorical bubble is for each conference and laying out what the cut off currently is in each conference.

I’ll also attempt to predict what the formula will have each bracket/play-in look like as we get closer.

Ok here we go--my guesses for the FINAL-8 for the OPEN Div playoffs this season.

Hey y’all! This thread will have the 411 on Westside hoop updates for players & teams to watch this year. During the football season both Richard Smith and I collaborated for #WhatUpWestside spaces and will look to bring those back in January for basketball. In the coming days I’ll have my top teams, players, and storylines from the first month and a half of games as the holiday tournaments begin/wrap up. Hope y’all enjoy this as much as I will, talk to y’all soon!

Coaching in Juco Land (Part 1)...

This is how I see it, after spending almost half of my career doing it. Three of those years were at Yavapai College, which was a completely different experience than coaching in the Maricopa system. Other people may see it differently. Those of you who are interested in doing it can take this for what it's worth. I sat and talked at length one time with Lute Olson in our Mountain Pointe gym, and he told me that he had coached every level from junior high to NCAA D1, and the game was the same at every level- only the talent was different. Coaching is coaching and is something I really enjoyed doing. Nothing I say here will ever take away the joy I had of walking into the gym as a player and coach. I am just trying to be fair to the whole story so you'll know what most people don't.

Bottom line for coaching in a large urban junior college, and I would suspect all of the Maricopa Juco’s, comes in the form of a question that I have been asked frequently over the past several years: “Are you still at Mesa?” I’ve been asked that many times since I resigned. My dentist, for God’s sake, told her new assistant yesterday, while I was in a compromising position and could not respond, that I coached at “some” junior college in the Valley, even though I haven’t set foot on the court in over two years. Urban junior college sports in this county is the netherworld of college athletics. You go there to disappear. I have no doubt that many employees at Mesa never knew who I was. Of course, I didn’t know who they were either. Very few people in the community have any idea what is going on at any given moment in the Maricopa junior college sports world. There is absolutely no media coverage unless you manage to get in a national championship game of some type. That might get you on page nine of the Arizona Republic.

At MCC, the lack of knowledge concerning athletics includes the administration, staff, and students. When my wife taught French there for a while, I would occasionally wander over to the International Studies Office, and they never knew who I was- or cared. The only contact I had with administration was if there was a problem, which you tried at all costs to avoid, for reasons that I discussed in the last blog. The second year I was there, the district brought in a new President for the college. He was there for the next seven years. I don’t think he ever knew my name. On the few occasions when I did run into him, he called me “big guy”. I saw him in our gym once, when he brought some guests from China in to watch us play the Angolan Junior National Team. They left before the game was over, so he didn’t get to talk to “big guy”. During his tenure, we had two Region1 championships and two Fiesta Bowl championships, and a conference championship. We also beat the number 1 team in the nation twice, and the number 1 team in California (they don’t compete in the NJCAA) once. These were things that MCC had not done since the advent of the divisions. In that time, I never got a visit, a phone call, an email, or text acknowledging our accomplishments or congratulating our students.

While recruiting, I also learned that high school students and their parents generally had a dim view of junior college basketball. The parents didn’t spend all that money on club ball for the kid to end up playing juco. I had recruits who decided to just hang it up, rather than face the reality that no one outside of the local juco's wanted them. Most club coaches didn’t sell juco as a possible end result. It was hard to get prospects to come to a game, and when they did- especially our games against Division 1 teams, they were usually stunned and surprised at the level of play. Gradually, over time, even the Division 2’s in Maricopa have upped their play in order to compete. We were all handicapped by the lack of scholarships, so I have to give props to all the programs in the Valley for swimming uphill both ways. Still, we lost many players to their sense that going to a juco meant that they were failures as players, still more to our lack of financial resources, and even more in recent years to the rise of post grad prep schools. I see now where the prep schools are hitting the high schools pretty hard, undercutting the local high school coaches, but that’s another story.

MCC is a commuter college in a large urban metropolitan area. The average age of a student there is 27, and many of the younger students who attend right out of high school have jobs and must arrange their class schedules to fit their need for income. The older students are generally people who are returning to college after a hiatus; or people who are changing careers either by force or desire, but who still must work also to support themselves or young families. These types of people show very little interest in campus life, not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. There is a student association which had an office in the student center building, but they never really showed any interest in athletic events. In fact, I never really knew what they did as an organization. Every now and then, some new hire would come through and sit down in the office and tell us that they had some great ideas for getting more students involved with game attendance, but I can’t say I ever saw much from those meetings, except an occasional halftime event. Our athletic director, who you think would have some interest in this as well, never did much to enhance attendance. Sometimes, he would schedule a little kids dance performance for halftime, which brought a lot of parents in, as well. Unfortunately, they could care less about basketball, and when the kids finished at halftime, half the crowd left the building. I asked him eventually to please quit scheduling those performances, because it was a real let down to the players and coaches to come back out after halftime and see that so many people had left. One time, our AD scheduled a Native American dance group for a halftime presentation. What he didn’t know was that they were going to light up some hula hoop size rings on fire for their dance. Subsequently, the smoke set off the campus fire alarms and made the gym unplayable for the next 45 minutes.

There was never any real incentive financially to bring crowds in, either. Our program did not share in any of the revenue from game attendance. That money went into some kind of “general fund”. With that in mind, the athletic director could never lean on us to get butts in the seats as a matter of job security. We asked until it became redundant to have the district at least recognize us as a Division 1 program, thus allowing us to finance our program by the NJCAA Division 1 allowances, which included room and board. The short answer was “why don’t you just go D2 like everyone else?” At first, we had the AD’s support in pursuing the matter with the district, until finally one day he came into my office and said “why don’t you just go D2 like everyone else?” And that was the end of that pursuit. We would fight on by ourselves. Now that I’m gone, look for MCC to go D2 as quickly as possible. As a side note, over the years I was there, I had discussions with many people who thought MCC was, in fact, given special dispensation by the district because we were D1. I even heard that from coaches in the conference. That was absolutely untrue. We were financed exactly like all the other Maricopa schools, and were never allowed to participate in D1 under D1 scholarship rules.

Next time: Part 2

Here we go..

Doing what you love and loving what you are doing...

Whenever we spoke to our players about the next level recruiting process they were in- and there were many- we always said that from our point of view there were three major considerations that they should view in their choices in order of importance: 1. Who you would be playing for (coaches); 2. Who you would be playing with (teammates); 3. The location of the institution. The plain fact was that if number one or two were not right, number three wouldn’t really matter. You could be miserable in Hawai’i walking on a beach, if you didn’t get along with your coaches and/or teammates. Turns out that the same is true for coaching. I grew up in the Valley and, of course, I love it here. It is a great location. I also loved the assistant coaches that I worked with over the years. But, the biggest reason I moved from job to job over the years was not money, because for most of us coaches, the money is never that good. The reason was the leadership at the institution. Hell, I took a $12,000 a year pay cut to move from Camelback High School to Mountain Pointe High School in 1997, because the Pride were led by Harold Slemmer, and people I respected greatly said he was the best guy in the state to work for. At the end of my interview with Harold, he asked me if I had any questions for him. I said I had just one- “will you be here long term?” He said yes- MP was his baby. Two years later he left to become the director of the AIA. Most of the great Mountain Pointe coaches exited soon after, but I stuck around longer even though it was never the same. I did the same at MCC, but not for the same reasons. It was never the same after my suspension. I was doing what I loved, but I didn’t ever love to do it again there. Loyalty is a two way street.

My assistant in 2014-15 was Cory Hoff. I told him that this would be it for me and I did not want to coach at MCC anymore. He said he wanted the job and I told him that the best way he could get it would be if I waited until the following season’s first day of practice and then walked in say “I quit”. They would pretty much have to let Cory take over, probably on an interim basis, where he would have a chance to prove himself. Quitting on the first day of practice is kind of a sour move, but remember I was still smarting from the treatment I had gotten after the marijuana brownie incident.

Things began to develop well in our plan through the spring of 2015, as I let Cory take a big role in our spring PE class, so the shock of a change would be less to the players. In fact, the class was in Cory’s name so he could get paid, so many days I just stayed in the office during class time. I had a large filing cabinet in our office and I began to clean it out of nearly 35 years of papers, pictures, practice schedules, and the like. The athletic secretary took notice and asked me if I was retiring, but I said no, so the cat would stay in the bag. As summer approached, Cory came to me with a bombshell. He had been offered the position of Associate Head Coach at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, and was going to accept it. So much for our plan.

This began a sequence of events that would go on for the next six years. Each year I would get another assistant coach, and each year they would agree to the same plan that I had devised for Cory, and each year they would get another job before realization of the plan. Ernest Shand took an assistant’s position at an NCAA D2 school, Albany State. Then Josh Kutchinski came back with the idea of taking over, but he left for the head coaching position at Jackson College in his home state of Michigan and took my son Jordan with him. Next up was Jimmy Herrera, a guy from California who had spent twelve years already as a juco assistant.

I had begun to not be involved at all in recruiting- after the brownie suspension, I never went to another high school game on behalf of MCC. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and try to sell a school that I no longer believed in, or establish relationships with players and families that would be broken. However, each time an assistant left, I still felt a sense of attachment to the players and did not want to just leave them in the hands of whoever the AD wanted to bring in. Our records would indicate my continued lack of involvement in the program and the recruiting over the next five years. The first seven years before being suspended we were 144-66 playing a tough schedule every year and having very little to offer financially, and using primarily great Arizona kids. Particularly satisfying was our 113-43 ACCAC record, knowing that they knew we were D1 in name only. The next five after the suspension we were 79-70. We played our usual tough Division 1 schedules during these years, and kept the Fiesta Bowl going barely, even upsetting two more number 1 ranked teams along the way. But, I was definitely not looking at this as anything more than a job, which is not how coaching should be. I spent very little time in the office, which was right next door to the athletic director, choosing to watch film and do most of the coaching work in a little room next to the team lockers in the gym.

Each of those years, I figured was going to be my last. I was trying to get out, but was also trying to have one triumph over MCC before leaving. In the 2019-20 season, the AD called me into his office to tell me that the new college president had decided to move us out of our locker room and take us completely out of the gym to a new general athletic area where we would share lockers with other teams. It was claimed to be a Title IX issue. In my mind, it was an idiotic idea to have us dress in another building with less privacy, especially since visiting teams would still use a locker room in the gym. Now, I was determined to walk away no matter what, but wanted to make sure that Jimmy would follow the plan. If he couldn’t, then I would have stepped down at the end of 2019-20 season. Jimmy swore up and down that he wanted the job and would not leave early. Because of that commitment, I would again wait until the first day of practice to quit, in order to give him the best chance of getting the job. So, this was it- when practice started in 2020-21, I would quit and they would have to hire Jimmy and he would get his shot. Then the pandemic hit. The 2020-21 season was cancelled. Jimmy still wanted the job, so I had to sit on it for another year until practice was beginning in the 2021-22 season. I was still drawing a full time salary, so I kind of viewed this as the Universe’s way of paying me back for the money I lost going over to Mountain Pointe on Harold Slemmer’s promise not to leave. Because of Covid, I had not been on the MCC campus much over that last year and had absolutely no investment in the players Jimmy had recruited. I didn’t even know most of their names. So walking away this time was easy. But, it had taken almost six years to actually do it. And Jimmy was hired to replace me, so I figured that if I could help one guy get a chance, it was all worth it. Paying it forward.

Next time: Coaching in juco land...

Last one of these threads for the season!

This week I'll be doing my first doubleheader of the year (over 2 nights). Through 13 weeks, I've seen 26 different teams. That number grows by 3 with a Friday night game between Red Mountain & Highland plus an Open contest on Saturday between Chandler & Basha.

I was at Highland last year for a 6A semifinal game against Red Mountain. The Hawks raced out to a 28-0 lead and won 28-14. The teams also met on Nov. 4 and Highland won 17-14 (although RM was without its starting QB and RB).

Red Mountain (8-4) has scored 94 points in its 2 playoff games. Last week in a 49-10 win over Mesa, the Lions rushed for 276 yards. This is Red Mountain's 5th semifinal appearance in 7 seasons. Starting QB Carter Crispin has 2,050 yards and 24 TD passes. The Mountain Lions also have senior leadership at RB with Lenox Lawson (1129 yards, 12 TDs) and WR Ja'Kobi Lane (801 yards, 11 TDs).

Highland (9-3) has outscored its 2 playoff opponents 71-32. There were many that said the Hawks would march right through this bracket due to being upset at missing the Open, but Salpointe battled HHS to a 14-10 game last Friday. Both touchdowns were scored by Kody Cullimore (rushing), who also had a sack and an interception. Highland starts Kalen Fisher at QB, a sophomore who became the starter in Game 6. Carson Mulleneaux leads the Hawks with 752 rushing yards. In last year's playoff game, I watched him have a breakout night with 25 carries for 165 yards & 2 TDs.

Highland has rushed for 250 and 236 yards in its last 2 games against Red Mountain. If the Lions can slow that attack down, they can prevent the Hawks from making a third straight title game appearance.


Basha and Chandler had a memorable ESPNU appearance on Oct. 28. While the national cameras were there to showcase '24 quarterbacks Dylan Raiola and Demond Williams Jr., it was the defenses that showed up in a 14-7 Bears' win. Both teams scored in the first quarter and it stayed 7-7 until Deshaun Buchanan scored his 2nd TD late in the game.

Chandler (9-2) is hoping to have Ca'lil Valentine (1,299 yards, 18 TDs) back at RB. I may be the only Team AZV guy that hasn't seen Dylan Raiola in person. The Ohio State commit has 2,342 yards and 22 TDs this season. He led the Wolves in a fourth-quarter comeback last week against Centennial and matched his season high with 36 attempts. Basha is the only team he did not throw a TD against.

Basha (10-1) will be the first team I've seen twice this year. I waited out the 90-minute rain delay back on Oct. 7 before the Bears were defeated by Liberty, 35-7. Will Basha make it back for a second chance against the Lions? Williams, who has 59 career TD passes, has 23 TDs with just 1 interception this season. That pick came way back in the season opener against Los Alamitos. Buchanan has 1,288 yards and 17 TDs and still has time to stamp himself as the state's Player of the Year.

This game will be played at Dick Pallas Field on the campus of Dobson HS (neutral site).

I want to know what y’all think will be the Championship games this year?

4A: ALA-GN vs Apache Junction
5A: Cactus vs Desert Edge
6A: Casteel vs Highland
Open: Liberty vs Basha/Centennial Winner

We got some updates from the small school event.

The beginning of the end....

The beginning of the end for me at MCC came the next year, 2014-15. We went 21-9 overall, and 17-5 in the ACCAC. There were plenty of really good moments, such as the development of Khari Holloway into a Division1 All-American. He was a sophomore, who in old school parlance “paid his dues”. This happens less and less these days, it seems, as players are not willing to bide their time and learn from others. Khari’s freshman year, he played point guard behind Shyheim McClelland, who was a great leader and skilled athlete at the position. Shy would lead us to that 26-5 season, and was the heart and soul of a great team. Khari battled him every day in practice and they really went at it, which is exactly how position competition should be, right? Shy got most of the game minutes, however, and Khari spent a lot of time on the bench. Shy missed a game right after the Fiesta Bowl, and Khari took the job at the point and had a 14 point, 10 assist game against Scottsdale, leading us to victory. The very next game with Shy back, he hardly played. The thought that he might transfer never really entered our minds, so we didn’t agonize over having to play Khari just to keep him happy. He was a great teammate, even though he was getting a lot of pressure from family and friends to leave. He would come into the office more than any other player we ever had and watch film and try to learn. He would always be in the gym working extra on his skills, and was thankfully surrounded by other teammates who did likewise and fully supported his efforts. After Shy left, Khari rightfully felt the job was his and he intensified his training. It was getting harder for us to duplicate the kind of players we could put around him, as prep schools and small NAIA colleges in the area had begun to go after the same players we did. Khari really carried the team, and ended up leading the nation in Division 1 free throw percentage at 93%. He was not someone you wanted to foul late in the game. Khari was eventually named to the NJCAA Division 1 All-American Team.

As mentioned, the team was not as talented as the previous year, but they still fought their way to the number one seed in the conference play-offs. We managed to get to the championship game of the Fiesta Bowl tournament, which was astounding, before losing to San Bernardino CC from California in the championship game. We also played Indian Hills, Iowa, who was ranked number 1 in Division1 in our gym that season. Khari had a sensational game, but we ended up losing in overtime. We beat Arizona Western in the first round of the conference play-offs, but lost to Cochise College in the Region 1 championship game. It was really a good season, but had a dark cloud hanging over it that would impact the rest of my journey at MCC.

In the fall, we held our annual retreat, returning once again to Flagstaff. As we had done many times previously, we rented a house for the weekend. It was a beautiful place- big enough for the whole team- and had a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Peaks. One of players would be celebrating a birthday that weekend, and unbeknownst to our staff, some players had conspired to bring some brownies that were laced with marijuana to the retreat to help celebrate. Marijuana was still illegal at that time, and even if it wasn’t, this would not be something that we would condone, and the players knew it. They took great pains to hide the brownies and ended up putting them in a location at the house that they felt would be safe from us. Our second night at the house, we took our annual dinner trip to Bun Huggers in Flagstaff, and during the meal, one of the players- the one who was celebrating his birthday- passed out and hit the floor. Not all of the players were involved, but the ones who were complicit in the brownies knew what had happened. Our player had a bad reaction to the brownies he had ingested at the house earlier and had become ill. No one told us that and we were frantically trying to figure out what had happened, and were beginning all of the CPR steps as the EMT’s arrived from the hospital, which was thankfully right down the street.

One of our assistant coaches, Cory Hoff, went to the hospital with the ambulance, while our other assistant and myself escorted the rest of the team back to the house. We were getting constant updates from Cory, and very quickly found out the root cause of our player’s condition. The EMT’s, in a college town like Flagstaff, had seen this situation many times. They told Cory that the player had ingested too much marijuana and would be OK under observation in a short time. The police were notified, but after talking to the hospital staff, basically laughed it off. Flagstaff, after all, was a college town. Within a couple of hours, the player was released from the hospital and rejoined the rest of us at the house. While we had been waiting for his return, the other coach and myself met with the team in the living room. I was still trying to figure out what happened and none of the players seemed to know the cause. We were guessing a cold or the flu, or perhaps dehydration and all of the players seemed as mystified as I was. Then the phone call came in from Cory telling me that it was marijuana. The room got real quiet after I told the team, and asked them if they knew anything about this? At first, no- they knew nothing. Then, a group of three or four stood up and said that they, in fact, knew where the marijuana had come from. Within a short time, the main elements of the story were unwound, and we decided to pack up our stuff and cut the retreat short. I told the team that we would meet on Monday to determine what sort of discipline to mete out for all of this.

The plan was to meet with my staff on Monday morning to discuss what would be done to the players who were involved with the incident. Bringing marijuana to a team event was not only stupid, but it was illegal, so our athletic director was going to have to be notified. I decided to have the team meeting first, to lay out the punishments from the team standpoint; then notify the AD of the event. There was one player who had brought the brownies, thus making it a must to remove him from the team permanently. There were other players who were made aware of the brownies, including the birthday boy, and they were going to be suspended for an indefinite period from practices, plus given a healthy dose of running. And it turned out that one of the assistant coaches had known about the brownies beforehand, as well, and he was terminated from the staff.

These were severe, and I thought just actions taken by us. I then notified the AD, because the young man who brought the brownies was, in my opinion, liable to legal action. Then, all hell broke loose. The AD turned the information over to a college vice president, and this is the kind of stuff that they feast on. It is why I tried so hard to never bring any problems to them, but in this instance, there was no choice- someone had broken the law. A full investigation was ordered and other VP’s got involved. All players and coaches were interviewed. One VP told me “your players really love you”, as if she had never seen our program in action or knew anything about it, which she hadn’t or didn’t. The AD called me and asked me why I hadn’t called public safety immediately as the incident unfolded. I reminded him that we were up in Flagstaff, and that we had called public safety another time for a flat tire on I-17, and they said there was nothing they could do, because we were off campus.

Bottom line, someone higher up had to be responsible for all of this, and the administration’s logical choice was me. Even though I knew nothing of the brownies and commanded the situation as I thought anyone in a leadership position would, they had to close the case and put it in a file with an adult held accountable and punished. Ironically, they never involved the Mesa police in any way, and the young man who brought the brownies was never charged with anything. The punishment? I would be suspended for a week without pay, and our upcoming trip to South Plains, Texas to open the season would be cancelled. That trip had already been paid for with non-refundable airline tickets to the tune of about $8,000. That was all fund raised money that we would never see again, so this was not a light punishment.

I never felt the same about MCC again after this season concluded. Given all that we had done to advance the program in our years up to this one, the punishment seemed excessive and unfair. I made up my mind that it was time for me to leave. I wanted one last moment of satisfaction before walking out the door, and that would be that they would have to hire one of my assistants to take over the program. Little did I know that it would take six years to pull it off.

Next time: Do what you love and love what you do...

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

For the 3rd year in a row, I'll be spending the first night of the Open playoffs at Hamilton HS. This will certainly not be as easy of a game for the Huskies as 2020 (Corona del Sol) or 2021 (ALA-Queen Creek) were. Coming into Hamilton's House is the defending Open Division champion Saguaro Sabercats.

Saguaro (7-3) has been in must-win mode for the Open since it lost to Liberty back in September to fall to 2-3. Brophy gave the Sabercats a test in the regular season finale, but SHS prevailed 14-10. In its 5-game win streak, no team has scored more than 18 against Saguaro. Devon Dampier has 14 TD passes and is just 41 rushing yards away from a 1,000-yard season. He was named the 6A Northeast Valley Region Player of the Year. Linebacker John Butler has 60 tackles and 4.5 sacks.

Hamilton (8-2) comes in after a dramatic 19-17 win over rival Chandler. Among in-state teams, only Basha defeated the Huskies, and it was a game that Hamilton led 23-9 with 10 minutes to go. Even with that loss to Bishop Gorman in the schedule, HHS averaged 35 points and allowed just 19. The Huskies had two receivers (Tre Spivey and Jaxon Haynes) make First Team All-6A Premier Region. Those 2 combined for 68 catches, 935 yards, and 13 touchdowns. Hamilton saw its season end against the Sabercats in the Open semis in both 2019 & 2021. In 2020, the Huskies defeated Saguaro in an ESPN regular season game.

So now that it took me 100 days to finish
what does it look like just for 5A?