Setting the tone...
We found out that by having summer PE classes for basketball, that we could double the amount of contact time we could provide to our players. The NJCAA rule was similar to the NCAA rule of eight hours per week. Those eight hours included any meetings, conditioning, or weight room workouts. The loophole in the rule was that if you had a PE class, those hours didn’t count against the eight. The only downside was that the class had to be open to all students, so there were always a few guys enrolled who were not going to be on the team. Regardless, these classes became one of the foundations of our teaching fundamentals to our guys, and a whole bunch of regular dudes became better city league players as well.
First impressions are always important, so this first group set the tone for our future at MCC. We gave them copies of our basketball/life philosophy and made sure that we adhered to it. If you don’t come in the door that way, it can never be recaptured. That is one of the biggest mistakes young and/or new coaches make coming in. We had to concentrate totally on that first group. We had to assume that they knew nothing, so the old line of “this is a ball” became an inside joke among the coaches. So, the first year was really about establishing our core program beliefs and figuring out the level of Division 1 NJCAA. As we were making our schedule, we had to figure out a way to play nationally prominent Division 1 schools in the non-conference portion. It quickly became apparent that it would be difficult to get teams from around the nation to come play us at Mesa. There was so much good competition in the southern and mid-western portions of the country that teams did not want to pay to come and play Mesa and maybe a couple of other Valley D2’s. So, if we were going to see what was out there, we would have to travel. Our recruiting budget was $0, and so was our travel budget for out-of-state games. That meant if we were going to go anywhere away from Arizona, we were going to have to raise money to do it.
We looked on the NJCAA website for teams who were having pre-season tournaments and advertising for participants; quickly finding one in Moberly, Missouri. The name rang a bell for me, because I knew that Cotton Fitzsimmons, a former Phoenix Suns legendary coach, had coached there. So, we figured they must be pretty decent. Little did we know that they would appear in the pre-season rankings later at #2, and were, in fact, the winningest junior college in history. Another aspect of junior college travel that we were not aware of were guarantees for tournament participants. Moberly was offering hotel rooms and cash, which was fantastic. That would ultimately be the way we were able to attract so many great teams to our Fiesta Bowl Junior College Shootout. All we would have to do is get to Missouri somehow.
Our athletic director that first year was Jeff Fore. He was an ex-coach out of Missouri, so when we came to him with our idea of getting out there to Moberly, he was all for it. Problem was, we had no money. and, as mentioned, the out of state travel budget for MCC was $0. Curiously, there is a line item in the budget that lists an amount for out of state travel, but coaches are forbidden to touch it. My guess is that it is used for something else. For the first and only time in my career at Mesa, the AD said he would spot us the cash with the provision that we would have to raise it along the way and pay him back. Can you imagine that level of trust? We did pay it back, but Jeff only lasted one year and we were never given that opportunity again. He got fired, but is now the AD at Park University in Gilbert. We really liked Jeff, because he was a visionary, which most high school and urban junior college AD's are not. They are more of the bureaucratic ilk, which means "don't bring me any problems". Money, and where to get it was an example of the problems they do not like. I think Jeff Fore is already doing great things at Park. It was a big loss for MCC, but he wanted to move much faster than they did. He brought problems, if you understand my meaning. We would have to raise the money for travel first from then on, even though we had honored our commitment.
Going in we had a very limited sense of the ACCAC, just like most people. When I had coached at Yavapai College in the 80’s, there was only one level of junior college athletics and there were over 400 participating colleges. In the 90’s, the junior colleges split into three divisions which mirrored the NCAA. In Arizona, the urban college basketball programs almost immediately dropped into division two, with one exception- Mesa. MCC for many years had been the flagship for athletics in the conference, in particular men’s basketball. There was a strong tradition and several great coaches had passed through the school, so there was a reluctance to wave the white flag and drop to division two. Neither the school nor the district imposed a demand to drop to that level, so while most of the sports on campus did make the drop, men’s basketball did not. Knowing that is what drew me to the job in the first place.
What we didn’t know also was that the district had decided not to fund any sports that decided to stay in Division 1 appropriate to that level. Back in the beginning of the conference, coaches were given a certain number of tuition waivers for their sport. Somewhere along the way- when tuitions were $325 a semester, the district froze those waivers and began calling them “athletic talent” scholarships. Tuition costs continued to rise over the years, but the talent scholarships have been continually frozen at $325 per semester. In basketball, we were allowed twelve of those scholarships, which meant that our total scholarship budget the entire time I was at Mesa was $7,800 annually. Chew on that one for a minute. I remember sitting in the locker room one time with a recruit and his mother, and she said that because her son was such a good player, we were willing to pay for one class each semester, which is about what $325 covered. Yes, ma’am but….we lost the kid.
Since we could never really talk money with prospective student athletes, we had to sell our ability to coach, our program, and the fact that as a Division 1 program we would be at a better level than our Valley sister schools, thus giving a player more exposure to four year colleges. That proved to be correct, as during our tenure we put more players into NCAA Division 1 schools than all the other Maricopa schools combined. We went after good students, because the college had what were called Presidential Scholarships for high achieving students from local high schools. Those scholarships were tuition waivers, like athletics had been given in the old days. We looked for great students who were really good players, and who had a chip on their shoulder about being under recruited by Division 1 NCAA schools. In the beginning years for us, they were not hard to find.
Not only did we want to know who was out there nationally, but we needed to find out who the bigshot was in our own conference. Since the split in divisions, Arizona Western, a Division 1 school, had risen to the top of the heap, followed by the other remaining D1’s in the league- Cochise, Eastern Arizona, Central Arizona, and Yavapai College. When we came in, the D2’s in the Valley were not holding up that well against those schools. It had become a two tiered conference, which had a lot of people wondering if it could really continue that way. At our first coaches meeting, Mike and I learned that the esteem in which Mesa was once held had evaporated, as we were picked to finish 11th (out of 12) by the coaches in our league. Of course, that became instantly good locker room material. It was clear, though, that Western was the target.
End of Part 1
We found out that by having summer PE classes for basketball, that we could double the amount of contact time we could provide to our players. The NJCAA rule was similar to the NCAA rule of eight hours per week. Those eight hours included any meetings, conditioning, or weight room workouts. The loophole in the rule was that if you had a PE class, those hours didn’t count against the eight. The only downside was that the class had to be open to all students, so there were always a few guys enrolled who were not going to be on the team. Regardless, these classes became one of the foundations of our teaching fundamentals to our guys, and a whole bunch of regular dudes became better city league players as well.
First impressions are always important, so this first group set the tone for our future at MCC. We gave them copies of our basketball/life philosophy and made sure that we adhered to it. If you don’t come in the door that way, it can never be recaptured. That is one of the biggest mistakes young and/or new coaches make coming in. We had to concentrate totally on that first group. We had to assume that they knew nothing, so the old line of “this is a ball” became an inside joke among the coaches. So, the first year was really about establishing our core program beliefs and figuring out the level of Division 1 NJCAA. As we were making our schedule, we had to figure out a way to play nationally prominent Division 1 schools in the non-conference portion. It quickly became apparent that it would be difficult to get teams from around the nation to come play us at Mesa. There was so much good competition in the southern and mid-western portions of the country that teams did not want to pay to come and play Mesa and maybe a couple of other Valley D2’s. So, if we were going to see what was out there, we would have to travel. Our recruiting budget was $0, and so was our travel budget for out-of-state games. That meant if we were going to go anywhere away from Arizona, we were going to have to raise money to do it.
We looked on the NJCAA website for teams who were having pre-season tournaments and advertising for participants; quickly finding one in Moberly, Missouri. The name rang a bell for me, because I knew that Cotton Fitzsimmons, a former Phoenix Suns legendary coach, had coached there. So, we figured they must be pretty decent. Little did we know that they would appear in the pre-season rankings later at #2, and were, in fact, the winningest junior college in history. Another aspect of junior college travel that we were not aware of were guarantees for tournament participants. Moberly was offering hotel rooms and cash, which was fantastic. That would ultimately be the way we were able to attract so many great teams to our Fiesta Bowl Junior College Shootout. All we would have to do is get to Missouri somehow.
Our athletic director that first year was Jeff Fore. He was an ex-coach out of Missouri, so when we came to him with our idea of getting out there to Moberly, he was all for it. Problem was, we had no money. and, as mentioned, the out of state travel budget for MCC was $0. Curiously, there is a line item in the budget that lists an amount for out of state travel, but coaches are forbidden to touch it. My guess is that it is used for something else. For the first and only time in my career at Mesa, the AD said he would spot us the cash with the provision that we would have to raise it along the way and pay him back. Can you imagine that level of trust? We did pay it back, but Jeff only lasted one year and we were never given that opportunity again. He got fired, but is now the AD at Park University in Gilbert. We really liked Jeff, because he was a visionary, which most high school and urban junior college AD's are not. They are more of the bureaucratic ilk, which means "don't bring me any problems". Money, and where to get it was an example of the problems they do not like. I think Jeff Fore is already doing great things at Park. It was a big loss for MCC, but he wanted to move much faster than they did. He brought problems, if you understand my meaning. We would have to raise the money for travel first from then on, even though we had honored our commitment.
Going in we had a very limited sense of the ACCAC, just like most people. When I had coached at Yavapai College in the 80’s, there was only one level of junior college athletics and there were over 400 participating colleges. In the 90’s, the junior colleges split into three divisions which mirrored the NCAA. In Arizona, the urban college basketball programs almost immediately dropped into division two, with one exception- Mesa. MCC for many years had been the flagship for athletics in the conference, in particular men’s basketball. There was a strong tradition and several great coaches had passed through the school, so there was a reluctance to wave the white flag and drop to division two. Neither the school nor the district imposed a demand to drop to that level, so while most of the sports on campus did make the drop, men’s basketball did not. Knowing that is what drew me to the job in the first place.
What we didn’t know also was that the district had decided not to fund any sports that decided to stay in Division 1 appropriate to that level. Back in the beginning of the conference, coaches were given a certain number of tuition waivers for their sport. Somewhere along the way- when tuitions were $325 a semester, the district froze those waivers and began calling them “athletic talent” scholarships. Tuition costs continued to rise over the years, but the talent scholarships have been continually frozen at $325 per semester. In basketball, we were allowed twelve of those scholarships, which meant that our total scholarship budget the entire time I was at Mesa was $7,800 annually. Chew on that one for a minute. I remember sitting in the locker room one time with a recruit and his mother, and she said that because her son was such a good player, we were willing to pay for one class each semester, which is about what $325 covered. Yes, ma’am but….we lost the kid.
Since we could never really talk money with prospective student athletes, we had to sell our ability to coach, our program, and the fact that as a Division 1 program we would be at a better level than our Valley sister schools, thus giving a player more exposure to four year colleges. That proved to be correct, as during our tenure we put more players into NCAA Division 1 schools than all the other Maricopa schools combined. We went after good students, because the college had what were called Presidential Scholarships for high achieving students from local high schools. Those scholarships were tuition waivers, like athletics had been given in the old days. We looked for great students who were really good players, and who had a chip on their shoulder about being under recruited by Division 1 NCAA schools. In the beginning years for us, they were not hard to find.
Not only did we want to know who was out there nationally, but we needed to find out who the bigshot was in our own conference. Since the split in divisions, Arizona Western, a Division 1 school, had risen to the top of the heap, followed by the other remaining D1’s in the league- Cochise, Eastern Arizona, Central Arizona, and Yavapai College. When we came in, the D2’s in the Valley were not holding up that well against those schools. It had become a two tiered conference, which had a lot of people wondering if it could really continue that way. At our first coaches meeting, Mike and I learned that the esteem in which Mesa was once held had evaporated, as we were picked to finish 11th (out of 12) by the coaches in our league. Of course, that became instantly good locker room material. It was clear, though, that Western was the target.
End of Part 1
