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
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
