Coaches and hoops junkies scour lists of incoming recruits to see whether a team has moved to redress a deficiency or added a talent that might change its dynamic or that of the league in which it competes.
It is a game, after all, in which one person can substantively alter an existing equilibrium, or create an entirely new one, almost as if it were a direct expression of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine’s musings about dissipative or complex structures.
Yet, oft-times it is the hiring of a new coach that is the bifurcation point in a program or a league’s trajectory, as the hiring of Dave Smart at Carleton and Chantal Vallée at Windsor have proven over the past 15 years. Doubtless there are rival coaches who might wish that time was actually reversible and that they could put those two particular genies back in a bottle. But much as classical dynamics might wish otherwise, it really does seem impossible to unboil an egg.
Only time will tell the tale as to whether any of the 12 rookie or interim coaches who joined the Canadian Interuniversity Sport ranks this past season will create a new order out of the chaos (or the sabbaticals) that compelled their athletic directors to shuffle the deck in hopes of future or continued success.
Two of the interim coaches, of course, had unbelievable rookie seasons, with Rob Smart having steered Carleton to its 12th national men’s crown in 14 years, and Patrick Tatham having been named the recipient of the Stu Aberdeen Trophy as national coach of the year after guiding Ryerson to an Ontario University Athletics (OUA) postseason title and the top seed in the CIS men’s draw.
The remainder had varying degrees of success, which only underscores that each entered the coaching ranks in unique circumstances, with some having inherited veteran squads capable of mustering more than a few wins, while others were appointed to the helm of teams that were in desperate need of a thorough overhaul.
Yet, whether appointed to lead a contender or a bottom-feeder, several of the new coaches report that there were remarkable similarities in many facets of their rookie experience at the helm.
First and foremost was the challenge of player management.
As interim Windsor men’s coach Ryan Steer notes, “at the start of the year, it was sort of building the relationships with the guys to where a head coach needs to be in terms of the trust in his players, and the players reciprocating that back.”
“Obviously, the way you deal with players is different,” adds Steer, who guided the Lancers to a 14-6 regular season OUA record, winning the league’s west division and then advancing to its postseason semi-finals. “As an assistant coach, you’re everybody’s friend and the sounding board and you can’t do that as a head coach. You have to sort of have that individual perspective, how you’re going to get every single person on board and going the right way, in terms of what’s best for the team.”
The relationship with players is significantly altered, says Smart. “People kind of listen differently and it’s kind of annoying in some ways to see it. Having been on the other side, I’m not a whole lot different. But every little thing you say, you got to be careful because players kind of take it, ‘oh, how is this going to affect my playing time?’. Half the time, it’s me just trying to help them and trying to find a way. But because I’m the head coach, all of a sudden it has more impact than maybe even it should, sometimes, on them. So I found I had to be a little bit more careful. As an assistant coach, you’re just kind of hovering around, trying to help as much as you can, and if you say something … players half the time will brush it off. But if you’re the head coach, somebody will remember what you said two or three weeks ago.”
“You have to be willing to have some hard, truthful conversations,” adds Mount Royal women’s coach Nathan McKibbon, whose Cougars finished 2-18 in Canada West Explorer division play. “It’s not something anyone enjoys but it’s definitely a necessity.”
Still others found player management an even more onerous challenge.
“Early on, it was extremely difficult to change the culture of the program because the team had been in a bad place the last two, three years, losing culture, fractured team,” says the Université du Québec à Montréal’s Nate Philippe, who guided the men’s Citadins to a 7-9 Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) regular season record and a berth in the conference’s postseason final. “Probably the first semester was just changing mentalities, changing hearts, trying to get everybody on the same page, [and believing] that winning is important, that coming to practice is important, that going to class is important, showing up to workouts is important. It sounds ridiculous but those bare minimum things were not happening. … There are players that have agendas, some selfishness to it …and aligning everybody is a challenge. We had a lot of difficult moments and a lot of ups and downs. We had to cut players mid-season. We had a player quit the team with two weeks left in the season. We had a ton of drama. It was a lot of really rough moments but the fact is that the guys who finished the season stuck with it and we gave ourselves a chance to play on the final day.”
As a corollary to player management, several coaches also say there are modifications to be made in the relationship with assistant coaches.
“The biggest adjustment is how do you delegate responsibility and really put trust in the people around you and allow them to have a voice because I do think there is a tendency as a first year coach: this is my way and this is the way it has to be. This has to be my vision and my vision only,” says McKibbon. “How do you become a little bit more collaborative with the people around you, to come up with something that’s authentic to our program?”
“It’s a lot of guys that you’re managing and you gotta learn to trust your staff,” says Smart. “You learn that you gotta step back and let people who are good at things, do their thing.”
Among other major adjustments, particularly for coaches like Philippe and Concordia women’s coach Tenicha Gittens, coming from assistant positions at well-funded private universities in Washington, D.C. (American and Howard, respectively) was having to deal with the host of other responsibilities associated with CIS coaching: administrative paperwork, fundraising, alumni relations, media relations, arranging travel, ensuring that players have adequate academic support, etc. etc..
“At the NCAA Division 1 level, you have a full-time head coach, three assistants and a full-time director of basketball operations,” says Philippe. “Here, it’s pretty much me doing all those jobs myself. … Coaching has become a 24-hour job. It never really stops. You get home and there’s still a heavy workload, emails, recruiting, video, etc.”
“I think I ran out of hours,” quips Tenicha Gittens, who guided the Stingers to a 7-9 RSEQ record.
“There’s just not enough hours in a day, especially when you walk in, you want to do everything right away. It’s just sort of picking and choosing the most important levers that are going to really move your program forward,” says McKibbon. “And then, while you’re going through that, there’s always another hour that you can devote to recruiting or evaluating your own performance or getting ready for a future opponent.”
“It often makes you feel like you’re getting pulled in a lot of different directions,” says Waterloo men’s coach Justin Gunter, whose skills-challenged Warriors finished 1-19 in OUA play but, in an obvious testimony to his inspirational skills, were playing harder at the end of the season than many a team with a better record. “You’d go home at night and there were still 10 others things to do … Especially with us. We’re in a place where we trying to sort of re-energize our alumni, engage people and get out in the local community and kind of get the Waterloo brand or the Waterloo name back out there. We spent a lot of time doing things like that.”
Beyond that comes the actual business of coaching: instructing players; running practices; scouting; countless hours watching games of Synergy Sports Technology’s web-based, on-demand video-supported basketball analytics program; crafting game plans; and of course, matching wits with legendary coaches at the highest level of play in Canada.
While there are many excellent coaches at high school and club levels, there’s no question that it’s a “tougher, more challenging, more technical, more tactical game” in the CIS, says MacEwan women’s coach Dave Oldham, who guided the Griffins to a 17-3 record and the Canada West Explorer division regular season title and their first postseason series win in history (against Victoria), before losing in the league’s Final Four.
“The biggest difference, I would say that, is the adjustments that are made. Obviously, there’s more of them made throughout a game and the depth of how you go into defending things, or the number of options that teams will throw at you, is far greater than at other levels I’ve coached,” adds Oldham, a father of two youngsters, aged four and six, who decided to return to the teaching ranks in Spruce Grove after the campaign. “I mean, these are people’s full-time jobs, and there’s technology and there’s video, and the time and resources are there, so they’re prepared and you have to be on top of your game every game you play.”
“There’s no nights off,” says Steer. “You can’t even take possessions off.”
“Game management, for me, was the biggest adjustment, because assistant coaches don’t have to do that,” says Gittens. “You move one seat over the left and it’s kind of all on you. You definitely have to be on your toes and be very, very engaged in all aspects,” of the game. That included officiating, she adds, noting that she took four technicals very early in the season before finally “mellowing out.”
Also of note is that several rookies say they were thrilled to be pitting their skills against legends.
“That was great,” says Oldham. “It wasn’t ever lost on me that I was coaching against some of best coaches in Canada.”
“It seemed like everybody I was going against had more head coaching experience,” says Gunter. “I mean, [Wilfrid Laurier’s] Peter Campbell was probably head coaching before I was born.”
Then there’s the tiny matter of learning to live with the consequences.
“Losing that many games was something that I wasn’t really accustomed to,” Gunter wryly notes.
“I always make that joke to my assistants: Your job is just to suggest things’,” says Concordia men’s coach Rastko Popovic, who guided the Stingers to a 10-6 RSEQ record. “At the end of the day, as a head coach, you gotta make the decision on the things we want to do, and how we want to do them. And then you gotta go to bed and live with it.”
“It’s a completely different experience than you ever can really expect,” says McKibbon. “You make mistakes as you go through and you just try to learn from them.”
“There are difficult decisions that have to be made, especially when you have to make a decision to cut a player,” says Philippe. “That’s like changing their lives. It might take away their opportunity to play basketball.”
What did they learn about either the game, or themselves?
“You’re going to make mistakes and it’s okay,” says Popovic. “We just got to try to correct them and improve every time we step on the floor. … And I learned that there’s a lot to learn in this game. You can’t just show up every day. You gotta evaluate how every practice went, how every game went and just try to get better every single day.”
“I think I already knew it but I’m very impatient,” says Gittens. “I learned that I need to slow down. I’m a complete competitor, so just learning that it is a process, there’s progression. As long as you’re doing the right things, you’re building and you’ll get to the goal at the end.”
“Less is more,” says McKibbon. “Not so much in just the time you devote to it but I think we have a habit as coaches just to try to over-think it. At the end of the day, we teach young women to put a leather ball in an iron ring and obviously, there’s intricacies to that and you want to have some transferrable skills from the court into their regular lives, whether it be as a student, or as a person or a member of society. But it’s very easy for us as coaches to over-think it. Even scouting reports are something very tangible that I can point to as an example. At first, you want to put absolutely everything down and prove to your players that you know absolutely everything about the competition that you’re going into and as you go through, you start to realize that they can’t absorb all of that. And you don’t want them to. You don’t want them to lose their ability to just perform in the moment. So how do you simplify that, to some very key points, to make sure not to get in their way? That applies to everything, even practice planning. What are the key things that we do? How much do we work on opposing team’s stuff? And how much do we focus on our identity? … And there’s always ways to improve. The moment you think you know everything, is the moment you officially know nothing.”
“I learned that I had to be more flexible in terms of how I was teaching because each guy learns at a much different rate, at a different level, and a different way,” says Gunter. “You might have some visual learners. You might have guys who need to do it on the court. You might have guys who need you to tell them how to do it. And I definitely learned that I have to sort of stay patient, and not get so agitated eight seconds into the game.”
“You learn new things every day about your players, about other players and how you can teach the game better, and how your players are learning, and things that you need to change up, and things that worked, right or wrong, and things that you thought were going to work perfect and they turned out to be a disaster,” says Steer. “And I learned that I needed to be a lot more organized than I thought I needed to be. … Also, you can draw up the best play in the world but if no one’s paying attention during a timeout, or one of those five guys has no clue in the world what’s going on, well, that play isn’t working anyway.”
“By the end of year, I felt like I could coach against anybody,” says Philippe. “That was really exciting for me, being able to match up against guys that I respect a great deal, [McGill’s] Dave DeAveiro, [St. Francis Xavier’s] Steve Konchalski … and be competitive and not feel like I got outcoached.”
“I gained a lot more respect” for head coaches, says Smart. “I always thought it was little ridiculous, watching my Dad [Rob Smart Sr., former men’s coach at Queen’s] or Dave, how much they couldn’t turn their brain off. It’s hard, it’s just really, really hard when you’re at the centre of it all and you just really don’t want to miss something. … And I think that I’m probably not as cool a customer as I thought I was. You’d feel yourself kind of lose that emotional edge and afterwards you’d say: I can’t believe I lost my focus there. … As a head coach, I found that you kind of gotta step back a little bit and let the game happen for the players a little bit more and that was a major adjustment. I mean, early on, I was on the sidelines, getting down in the stance, trying to get people to play defence the way I wanted them to and I just realized that, as a head coach, it transfers too much of that kind of nervous energy and if you transfer it to your players, it’s not a good thing.”
Having learned all those lessons, is his phone ringing off the hook with calls from athletic directors after winning a CIS title as an interim, rookie coach?
“Not yet.”