Cinderella Ball: A Look Inside Small-College Basketball in West Virginia doc

Here’s a 2002 roll call of the wviac schools: Alderson-Broaddus College, Bluel eld State College, Concord University, Davis & Elkins College, Fair-mont State University, Glenville State

university of nebraska press h lincoln and london

CINDERELLA

Basketball in West Virginia

BOB KUSKA

© 2008 by Bob Kuska

All rights reserved Manufactured in

the United States of America

Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 978-0-8032-1392-0 (pbk : alk paper)

1 Basketball—United States—West Virginia— History I Title

gv885.73.w47k874 2008

796.32309754—dc22 2008018606

Set in Dante MT by Bob Reitz.

Designed by Ashley Muehlbauer.

contents

list of illustrations vii

acknowledgments ix

introduction xi

1 1

2 50

3 82

4 119

5 159

6 204

7 251

afterword 279

notes 285

Following page 140

The 1941 a-b Battler media guide

A rare preseason publicity shot for the 1941 season

Kenny Grifl th

Kenny Grifl th at the free-throw line shooting underhanded

Mark Dunham and Rex Pyles

Battler Ball in the 1940s

a-b president Richard Shearer in 1956

“Run and Gun” basketball during Coach Dave Barksdale’s tenureWillie Davis drops in 2 more points

The consummate teammate Josh Allen

Celebrating the third consecutive wviac tournament championshipThe 2004–5 a-b Battlers and Zimmerman’s four freshman recruitsSteve Dye playing to lots of empty seats

Greg Zimmerman cuts down the net

This book has been a labor of love, in part because of the many interesting people I’ve met along the way There are far too many to name But I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to Greg Zimmerman, Daron Washington, and their players I’d also like to thank Dr Richard Shearer for sharing his unpublished memoir with me I hope I’ve done it justice Thanks to Rob Taylor at the University of Nebraska Press for believing in the project, and here’s to Jackie Doyle for her nice edit of the manuscript And, of course, thanks to my wife Lynn for being such a good sport about my periodic treks to Philippi, Morgantown, and Charleston Thanks And here’s to you, Ramsey I wish you were still around to watch me go

If the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville had sailed to America in the early twentieth century to chronicle its love affair with the new sport of “Basket Ball,” he would have spent months ensconced in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia Nowhere was the game more a part of the popular culture than in these three roughly contiguous states that stretch from the beaches

of Lake Michigan into the hills and hollers of Appalachia As many of this passing generation have recalled, basketball was the perfect pastime for their modest rural lifestyles The game was inexpensive, required just l ve stout men on each team, and produced more thrills than the annual town turkey shoot, once the highlight of the sporting year

Today these basketball traditions survive in Indiana and Kentucky But in West Virginia, the legacy has been on life support for decades West Virginia University, the m agship team in the state, has not had a homegrown All American since Fritz Williams in 1968 In fact, “The University,” as many call it, rarely carries more than one or two in-state players, and the same holds for Marshall University, the state’s other major college

Some attribute West Virginia’s fall from national hoops prominence

to setbacks in its once-booming coal, glass, and steel industries Since the 1950s, more than two hundred thousand people have moved elsewhere, which, factoring in changes in the state’s death and birth rates, translates to

a net loss of nearly eight hundred thousand people “Imagine two people packing up and leaving the state almost every hour of every day, and that would best describe West Virginia’s migration over the years,” noted the state’s Health Statistics Center The unfavorable demographics led to high school consolidation, shutting down legendary basketball schools such as Normantown, Mullens, and North Fork, and ending most of the heated intra-county rivalries that fueled the sport’s popularity in scores of towns too small to l eld a football team Many say that with only 1.8 million people left in the state, West Virginia will always produce an occasional pro player but will never yield the same bumper crop of nba stars as did bygone eras that brought the likes of Hal Greer, Jerry West, Hot Rod Hundley, and Rod Thorn

West Virginia’s fall from basketball prominence also involves a more recent development that is my inspiration for this book—the satellite dish The arrival of the satellite dish in the 1990s extended the all-powerful reach

of corporate America into the twangy hills of this remote state and tated much of what remained of this proud basketball tradition Just as the retail giant Wal-Mart has helped put traditional Main Street America out of business, cable television has emptied the state’s gymnasiums Small-town folks, wowed by a technology that for the l rst time put the world at their

devas-l ngertips, readevas-lized they no devas-longer needed to assembdevas-le at the devas-locadevas-l gym

to watch their beloved basketball team Now they could throw a frozen pizza into the microwave and spend the entire evening in their favorite chair, feasting on college and professional basketball on espn, espn2, Fox Sports, or any of the other myriad cable sports packages Like Wal-Mart, cable sports is cheap and convenient, and a friendly talking head always waits to greet you

Why should the Walmartization of West Virginia basketball matter in the hills of San Bernardino or the corporate towers of Manhattan? Because

it is not just a West Virginia phenomenon Cable sports has thinned the bleachers to varying degrees at high schools and colleges across the country and, as current and coming generations stay home to point and click in their rapidly evolving home-entertainment cocoons, support for local teams will continue to decline, much to the detriment of small-town America.Like Main Street shops, small-town basketball venues have traditionally served as community meeting places in winter, with the divisive issues of race, religion, and politics cast aside as entire counties unil ed under the shared identity of team Personal differences may have lingered on the street, but for two hours in that cramped and often musty gymnasium everybody could agree to “root, root, root for the home team.” Sure, schools, churches, and other local organizations remain today to unite residents But none

of these places have the same cross-cutting pull a winning college or high school team does, leaving a deep void that is difl cult to l ll

Cable tv has also stolen the thunder of many small-town stars Unlike past generations’ adulation for the town’s star players, today’s Rick Mounts, Danny Heaters, and King Kelly Colemans increasingly trot out for pregame warm-ups to tinny rap music blast over an antiquated public address sys-tem, a spattering of applause, and the demoralizing sight of a half-empty

gymnasium Unless a local player is viewed as a rising national star, most townspeople no longer feel any compulsion to follow this year’s team.The indifference is particularly chronic today at small rural colleges To put a competitive team on the m oor, most coaches now import tattooed big-city kids who do not readily connect with the John Deere–hat crowd that still congregates at the local diner Another problem is that many small colleges have become “commuter schools,” where students from the sur-rounding communities drive to campus each morning, travel home in the afternoon, and work at night None have time to attend basketball games Sadly, those still living in the dorms often do not want to be bothered with walking across campus in the rain or snow to watch a basketball game In addition to having 100-plus cable channels at their disposal, they now have personal computers, Sony Playstations, cell phones, and other digitized playthings to keep themselves entertained in their rooms.

And yet the teams play on, season after season, in utter obscurity They are the last amateurs to endure l ve months of basketball practice as a means

to earn their degrees, not to hear their names called in the nba draft What do these kids gain from playing two or four years at little-known colleges that their buddies back home ridicule for having no nationally televised games? What goes through their minds as they travel in cramped Dodge vans to games in one-horse towns that none of them could locate on a map just a few years earlier? What does the glory and honor of winning a champion-ship mean when no one but the coaches and players seems to care?

The perfect place to seek an answer to these questions is the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Founded in 1925 the wviac is home to

l fteen small colleges, eleven of which have been league members for more than eighty years Some public, some private, many are in the middle of the state and typically in small cities and towns

Here’s a 2002 roll call of the wviac schools: Alderson-Broaddus College, Bluel eld State College, Concord University, Davis & Elkins College, Fair-mont State University, Glenville State College, Ohio Valley College, Salem International University, Shepherd University, University of Charleston, West Liberty State College, West Virginia State College, West Virginia Technical University, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and Wheeling Je-suit University

If you live outside West Virginia, chances are that none of these names rings a bell But that should not dissuade you from reading further What you will discover is a proud small-college conference that, like the mighty mountaineers who settled West Virginia, rarely drew national attention but rose to become legends throughout much of the state.

In this self-contained world, the wviac blossomed into a record-setting conference by the mid-twentieth century Let us take a quiz Who was the

l rst college player ever to average 30 points or more during a season? (1) Bevo Francis, (2) Pete Maravich, (3) George King The answer is George King Playing in 1950 for what is now the wviac’s University of Charleston, King averaged 30.2 points per game to lead the nation in scoring for his second straight season Name the l rst team ever—high school, college,

or professional—to average 100 points or more per game during a season The answer: West Virginia Tech In 1955 the Golden Bears averaged 107.5 points per game, prompting future Hall of Famer Bob Davies to comment

a few years later that this undersized wviac team was l ve years ahead of the game Which college coach has the highest career winning percentage

of all time? (1) John Wooden, (2) Joe Retton, (3) Adolph Rupp The answer

is Joe Retton From 1963 to 1982, Fairmont State’s Retton won 83.4 percent

of his games, logging a career record of 473-95 As a rival wviac coach once reportedly quipped, “Retton could take his team and beat you, then you could swap teams and he’d beat you with your team.”

I mention these l rsts to raise a larger issue Basketball, like music, is

an ongoing story of experimentation with existing rules to create new possibilities Today, most basketball fans equate experimentation on the basketball court strictly with African Americans Not true Although African Americans have had a tremendous impact on the evolution of the game, experimentation and innovation do not inhere in any group or social dy-namic They apply more broadly to distinct environments where players and coaches have the freedom from intense public scrutiny to try something different This freedom existed in impoverished West Virginia in the early and mid-twentieth century in much the same way it did later on gritty, inner-city playgrounds, and that is what makes the wviac and its genera-tions of undersized kids clad in their scratchy wool warm-ups, skimpy silk shorts, and Chuck Taylor high tops such a unique historical treasure.That’s also why thousands who grew up in small-town West Virginia

from the 1920s through the 1980s fondly recall cheering with friends and neighbors each winter for their favorite wviac teams Like pancake breakfasts

at the l re hall, Saturday nights at the college gym were cannot-miss social events Everyone in town, from the mayor to the Lion’s Club president, was there doing his or her bit, and for days afterward the game remained all the talk in the meet-and-greet spots along Main Street

“The basketball game was the place to go,” said former Shepherd lege coach Bob Starkey, describing the small town of Shepherdstown in the 1970s “For the big games, you had to get there at least two hours ahead

Col-of time to get a seat Those who sat at the top Col-of the bleachers knew to open the folding windows above their heads The open windows allowed students on a nearby hill to stand on stacked cinder blocks and watch the game for free.”

But time and technology began to catch up with the league in the late 1970s The trouble started in 1979 when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird squared off for the l rst time on national television in the l nals of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (ncaa) men’s college basketball tournament Eighteen million American households tuned into the show for a 24.1 percent market share, the highest in ncaa Final Four history Then came a series of thrilling national championship games during the 1980s

By the end of the decade, the ncaa Tournament and its Final Four had arrived as a bona l de American sports tradition—and a potential growth industry that, if fully tapped, could generate billions

In 1989 the ncaa leadership, the great arbiters of intercollegiate ethics, considered the projected television prol ts—and blinked Boy, did they blink They signed a seven-year, $1 billion deal with cbs Sports that gave the network exclusive rights two years hence to broadcast what it would later market as “March Madness.” For the event, the ncaa’s annual pro-jected television revenues soared from $55 million in 1990 to an average of

$143 million a year for the next seven years By the end of the decade, their pot of gold could l ll Fort Knox: The ncaa signed a blockbuster ten-year,

$5.7 billion deal with cbs Sports that forevermore unlashed major college basketball from its traditional amateur moorings

At the same time, the major colleges began to prol t from the Brave New World of cable television In 1986 the Big East Conference signed a handsome, three-year pact with the then-m edgling espn to showcase its All

Americans on Monday nights in what Georgetown coach John Thompson reportedly declared one of the biggest things ever to happen to the league Other major college conference deals followed, and a nightly college bas-ketball game on cable soon became as common in winter as reruns of Law and Order on tnt today.

The rise of this college-basketball entertainment empire in the 1980s crippled the wviac in two key ways First, the major colleges soon over-shadowed the wviac schools in their local marketplaces As Barry Blizzard, the wviac’s soft-spoken commissioner and lifelong supporter, described the situation, “I really think 90 percent of the drop in our attendance has been due to cable television When I grew up in Bluel eld, we got one college game a week on Saturday afternoons It was an Atlantic Coast Conference game that was sponsored by Pilot Life We’d watch that game, then head out and watch Bluel eld State play in the evening Well, now, if you’ve got decent cable, there are eight games a night If I’m an average fan, I’m not going out to watch Bluel eld State and D & E, if North Carolina State and Duke are on tv, especially if it’s snowing.”

The point is not that cable television represents a social evil that must be stopped Quite the opposite The satellite dish has been a blessing to small towns burdened with decades of geographic and cultural isolation For the

l rst time, folks just about anywhere can be as plugged in to mainstream news and entertainment as anyone in big-city America The problem with cable sports in particular is it gives big-bucks, high-prol le major college and, for that matter, professional basketball an invasive and unfair mar-keting advantage in rural America The local teams aren’t allowed equal time over the airwaves and lack the l nancial means to upgrade their gyms, players, and marketing strategies to l ght back As a result, small-town fans have learned to view basketball not as a town game but as an edgy, self-promotional national subculture of reversed ball caps, gold chains, and March Madness If the local college team doesn’t face a top-twenty powerhouse, throw a killer halftime show, or sell its game jerseys in the Footlocker off the interstate, it is not worth following

The second crippling effect of the rise of the major-college ment juggernaut was that recruiting became far more difl cult The major colleges began to beat the bushes like never before to l nd their next All Americans, and outstanding players who once slipped to wviac schools

entertain-now entertained multiple offers from major colleges Neither were high school players from the late 1980s onward—the l rst generations to be raised on March Madness, Sports Center, and Michael Jordan—as willing

to play small-college basketball If given a choice between begging for l ve minutes a game at a major college or playing a full forty minutes a night for four years at a wviac school, most kids considered it a no-brainer They would take the major-college, or ncaa Division I, offer It would give them

a chance to play on television, brag to friends and neighbors for the rest of their lives about once facing an All American player, and, with a little luck, make a few cameo appearances in the ncaa Tournament

This lights-camera-action mindset among young players was especially difl cult for wviac schools to counter because none had anything even remotely m ashy to tout At some wviac schools, the best they could offer was clean air and great deer hunting in the fall As some wviac coaches grumble, try selling that to an inner-city kid from South Philly

Across the country, many ambitious small-college presidents got in line to join ncaa Division I and its greater prol ts and prestige The wviac schools, however, did not budge As mentioned, none could afford to up-grade their programs, a prerequisite for D-I membership, and many were simply nestled too deeply in the mountains of West Virginia to make the jump to another conference affordable Instead, these proud basketball schools dribbled on and, for much of the 1980s, continued to beat the odds But by the 1990s, the bloom was off the rose Most schools still preferred to sign players straight out of high school, and the quality of play continued

to slip as the quality of their recruits diminished At the same time, after more than sixty years of mostly sellout crowds, wviac gyms emptied Cable television had arrived and replaced the family dog as man’s best friend As many West Virginians then joked, the governor ought to consider chang-ing the state bird to the satellite dish because one seemed to have landed

in just about every yard

“I hadn’t been back to watch a game for a few years,” said former herd coach Bob Starkey, who retired in 1988 “When my wife and I l nally attended a game, we thought something was wrong I remember my wife whispering, ‘There’s no one here.’ We spent the l rst half counting people

Shep-in the stands, and I thShep-ink we came up with about l fty.”

And so it went from Shepherdstown in the far eastern end of the state

to Charleston and Montgomery along the Kanawha River in the west The wviac had become a nostalgic twentieth-century tradition trapped in

a high-tech, super-sized twenty-l rst-century world

In 1993 the wviac left the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (naia) after nearly sixty years in the fold The naia was in l nancial trouble, and the wviac cast its lot with the more stable ncaa Division II Although the smallest of the ncaa’s three athletic domains, D-II currently oversees more than 280 public and private colleges in forty-l ve states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico Like the big-time players in the D-I programs, D-II athletes may receive full basketball scholarships But because the average D-II player tends to be the longest of long shots to sign a pro contract, the division embraces the non-scholarship D-III philosophy of nurturing student athletes who excel in the classroom “We’re not training professional athletes,” as wviac commissioner Blizzard likes to say “We’re training professionals.”

These wviac’s professionals-in-training are your stereotypical low- and middle-income kids next door That’s what makes this book different from John Feinstein’s The Last Amateurs, the only other recent attempt to capture

the current state of the true student athlete Feinstein told the story of the Patriot League, an academically elite D-I conference, where bright kids

“speak in complete sentences,” don’t take their athletic ability—or lack thereof—too seriously, and worry more about getting into law school than getting into the nba For nearly all players in the wviac, studying for the lsat will never make their to-do list Although some will, no doubt, end

up as six-l gure cogs in corporate America, others will spend their lives as modestly paid high school basketball coaches, social workers, or small-business owners Moreover, because of its scholarship policy and looser academic requirements, the conference assembles more low-income rural and urban kids than does the Patriot League, including a relatively large number of inner-city African American players who view their four years

on campus as their only chance to earn a diploma and get ahead in life In some cases they are the l rst in their families to attend college

The coaches, although low paid and yoked to an exhausting list of sponsibilities that far exceed those of any one coach at a big-budget major college, are truly committed to helping their players succeed not only on

re-the basketball court but in life This point was driven home to me one day

in an interview with Steve Cox, the head men’s basketball coach at Concord College in tiny Athens, West Virginia On the spot and without scrolling through old e-mails, Cox could tell me where just about all his former play-ers live, what they do, their marital status, and even how many kids they have Cox has been the head man at Concord for twelve years

Such realizations make you want to let your cable bill lapse and return

to the purity of the small-college game When I mentioned spending $120 for two upper-tier tickets to an nba game, Cox burst out laughing “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he gasped, then, horril ed, repeated what I had just said to his assistant coach “Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been in basketball all of my life, and I’d never spend that much to watch a game

We could give you two sets of season tickets for that kind of money Heck, make it three.”

Tickets to most small-college games run six bucks and gets you just about any seat in the house A slice of pizza? A dollar Nachos? A dollar

l fty The quality of basketball? Surprisingly good, although it’s a different style from that of the major-college game Most teams have less depth than

do the D-I schools and tend to rely on just a few big guns They also rarely have seven-footers on their rosters simply because the major colleges snap

up all of the talented big men in the country Most teams make do with undersized but athletic six-foot-seven centers, which lends to a quicker, higher-scoring game Dunks and 3-pointers there are aplenty, but don’t look for any of the best of these kids in the nba Most are a step slow or two inches too short even to play major-college basketball Where you might

l nd them in a few years is in the over-forty league at the local recreation center, still playing for the love of the game

But to properly track the day-to-day struggles and triumphs of the league, one needs a coach, a team, and a town And that’s the idea behind this book One team, one season, one representative snapshot of small-college basketball

In June 2002 I asked Ken Tyler, the head men’s basketball coach at what

is now Shepherd University, if I could tag along with his team for a season

He graciously agreed soon thereafter over a stack of blueberry pancakes

at the town diner But the wheels had m own off the project by midseason Shepherd was limping through a losing season, and Ken, in his second year

at the college, was still very much in transition as he tried to recruit his kind of players and build a successful D-II program In the end I decided

it was unfair to write about the program’s growing pains I mention this only by way of offering my sincere thanks to Ken for his open door and keen insights along the way

As the original idea for the book soured, I felt disappointed but far from beaten As luck and fate would have it, I had stumbled onto one of the best, and least known, basketball stories in recent memory It’s the rags-to-riches saga of the wviac member Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi, West Virginia The only problem was that the team kept—improbably—winning championship after championship, forcing me to extend the book

to cover not one but four seasons That meant innumerable phone calls and road trips to Philippi, roughly a four-hour drive from my home in Shepherdstown In the end I think the additional seasons provide a much more realistic snapshot of the year-to-year crisis management that is life

in a small-college basketball program

As luck and fate would have it, Philippi offers one of the best case studies

in the wviac of the power of cable television Isolated in the green hills of central West Virginia, Philippi spent most of the twentieth century avidly supporting Alderson-Broaddus basketball Today that connection is gone, and in many ways, the college team has become as culturally obsolete on Main Street as a pair of Pro Keds There are no booster clubs, no “Go-a-b” signs displayed proudly in shop windows, and few, if any, supportive bumper stickers “The only ones who really seem to care anymore about the l nal score are the players and coaches,” some in the athletic depart-ment have noted

And that’s why what happened next was so remarkable

Rudy Wallace dribbled slowly upcourt surveying the m oor As he crossed half court, the championship game knotted at 86, thirty-l ve hundred fans rose to their feet inside the Charleston Civic Center for the l nal twenty-

l ve seconds Could Wallace’s Alderson-Broaddus College Battlers upset small-college power University of Charleston to win the 2002 West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (wviac) postseason tournament? Was

it, as some claimed, their destiny to advance to the “Big Dance” and a date

in the ncaa Division II national tournament?

As Wallace stood dribbling near midcourt awaiting l nal instructions from the bench, his coach Greg Zimmerman intently eyed the clock, his head bobbing with each tick, then rose from his seat with exactly l fteen seconds left in the game to motion for a time-out The referees immediately blew their whistles, and the lower level of the two-tiered arena promptly broke out into competing, slightly twangy chants of “Go a-b” and “u-c, u-c.” Zimmerman, tall and trim, his white dress shirt soaked in perspiration, gathered his players along the sideline and called out in his deep, raspy voice

a play known as “Stagger.” It would put the ball in the hands of his leading scorer, Kevyn McBride, on the far right wing, where, if all went well, he would have about eight seconds to maneuver for the game winner.Zimmerman, l nished with the white greaseboard smeared in bright blue ink, glanced up and asked his players if they had any last-minute questions Before breaking the huddle, he turned to McBride, a white, six-foot-four senior forward with short black hair and boyish good looks, and asked in a half-serious, half-joking monotone, “Can you make the shot, Jimmy?”Jimmy was Jimmy Chitwood, the hero of the movie Hoosiers who sinks the

game-winning shot to clinch the Indiana state high school basketball onship for his small town Many around the wviac had called Zimmerman’s team “real-life Hoosiers,” a reference to his underwhelming roster of mostly slow-footed white kids from the hills of southern West Virginia Zimmerman had even shown Hoosiers to them a few weeks earlier during a road trip, and

champi-the a-b players had jokingly embraced the image as their own

1

And now it fell to Kevyn McBride, a young man from the depressed West Virginia coalmining town of Mullens, to play the part of Jimmy Chitwood

“I’ll make the shot, Coach,” answered McBride “No problem.”

The buzzer blared to end the timeout, and McBride stepped conl dently to the far left sideline, just inside the midcourt line, and tossed the inbounds pass to Wallace in the backcourt Fourteen, thirteen, twelve seconds

-As Wallace advanced into the frontcourt, he l red a pass to his teammate Stephen Dye, who had broken free above the top of the key The skinny, dark-haired freshman from tiny Whitesville, West Virginia, pivoted and hurried the basketball to McBride, who had sprinted across the baseline and into the open along the far right sideline, standing about thirty feet from the basket

“I got the ball, saw the clock, and I just remember thinking that I had

to go,” said McBride

McBride eyed the Charleston defender crouching in wait two feet away, then took three hard dribbles directly across the court As the defender stepped into his path on the third dribble, still about twenty-l ve feet from the basket, McBride instinctively spun away from the pressure; he hesitated just a split second to freeze the defender on his heels, then exploded past him and into the clear As McBride raced into the paint, three Charleston defenders rotated a step too late into his path, swatting frantically at the ball McBride, dipping his left shoulder into the nearest defender as he ap-proached the basket, lifted awkwardly into the air, hung an extra second

to avoid having his shot blocked, then lofted a prayer toward the hoop as

he tumbled headl rst under the backboard The ball banked softly off the glass, kissed the side rim, hung there motionless for a split second, then trickled through the net as the buzzer sounded a-b 88, Charleston 86

“I shot it, and I remember the ball going down and seeing somebody stick their hand through the bottom of the net to tip it out,” said McBride

“When the refs blew the whistle, I thought they had called goaltending

on one of my teammates I slapped the m oor, because I thought they had waved off the basket Then, all of a sudden, I see our fans out on the m oor going crazy.”

“The ball went through, and a Charleston player stuck his hand into the net and tried to poke it out,” said Daron Washington, a-b’s young and usually unpaid assistant coach “We were all motioning, ‘Basket good,

basket good.’ I kind of looked over to my left, and, as that ball hit the m oor, all of our fans were on the court I looked to my right to l nd Greg [Zim-merman], and he was way down on the other end, just running around I

went and started chasing him I mean, it was just crazy.”

“I’m thinking everything,” said McBride of the moments immediately after the shot “I couldn’t believe it happened, l rst of all I was just thinking that there’s not a better story than this.”

In 1908 the Baptist ministers who operated Broaddus College had tired of the school’s cramped quarters in the small central West Virginia city of Clarksburg Eager for more space, they struck a deal with the citizens of the small coalmining town of Philippi, located along the green banks of West Virginia’s Tygart River Valley about thirty miles east of Clarksburg The ministers agreed to relocate to Philippi and give the town its own four-year college; in return, the town leaders donated forty acres on tree-lined Battle Hill and $25,000 in seed money to help build a campus where,

as one advertisement proclaimed, “beauty and culture meet."1 The school somehow made ends meet until 1932, when the l nancially troubled Alderson Academy in the far southeastern end of the state relocated to Battle Hill, and Alderson-Broaddus College was born, with 132 students

Two years later, at the height of the Great Depression, a-b hired a young go-getter named Rex Pyles to pilot their basketball team through the then newly organized wviac Pyles, a former athlete at what is now Glenville State College, would become a West Virginia coaching legend, tallying 466 career wins and 5 wviac tournament titles And, for the l rst three decades

of his career, Pyles worked his magic mostly with wide-eyed young men from the hills and hollers of West Virginia

By the 1950s, though Pyles enjoyed some of his best seasons ever, the league had begun to change with the times In one of the more remark-able early chapters in the integration of collegiate sports in the Jim Crow South, the 99.9 percent white wviac welcomed into the league Bluel eld State and West Virginia State, two newly desegregated black colleges, during the 1955–56 season Unlike the furor over integration that arose a few years later in the Deep South, the reception of these nearly all-black teams by the wviac was without incident “Heck, we enjoyed watching them play,” recalled Hank Ellis, who coached at West Virginia Wesleyan

during the 1950s Thereafter, most traditional wviac schools themselves began integrating their rosters, and, by the end of the 1960s, all wviac basketball teams were racially mixed.

At the same time, West Virginia’s pool of outstanding high school ketball talent had dried up somewhat during the 1960s, partly due to a drop

bas-in the state’s population Many wviac schools began to import more of their talent from Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other nearby states, where the game was now more popular and the pool of talent deeper By

1967 more than 30 percent of the players in the league hailed from out of state, a signil cant increase that would continue in subsequent decades.These changes placed off-the-beaten-track a-b at a growing disadvantage with conference rivals located closer to heavily populated areas Though the legendary Pyles could still l nd an occasional diamond in the rough hidden in rural West Virginia, he spent much of the 1960s in the unfamiliar position of needing to recruit players to what folks in town now called

“Broaddus Hill.” It was too much to ask of the aging Pyles, whose health had begun to decline He logged a disappointing 85-171 record during the decade, including an uncharacteristic six straight losing seasons In 1967, as his health continued to deteriorate, Pyles retired from the bench after nearly four decades at a-b He had seen the college game evolve from set shots to jump shots, from six-foot centers to seven-foot Goliaths, from static-l lled local radio broadcasts to full color, nationally televised entertainment

By 1997, when the twenty-seven-year-old Brett Vincent became the tenth men’s head basketball coach in the school’s history, recruiting top players to College Hill had become almost impossible A new generation

of high school players raised on Nike, March Madness, and the complete commercialization of major college basketball viewed the wviac as a minor league that lacked the national exposure to position them for lucrative nba careers The major colleges also had become far more sophisticated

at scouting high school prospects throughout the country These changes meant that dozens of talented small-town high school prospects, who, a generation earlier were falling through the recruiting cracks, now thumbed their noses at wviac schools and followed their dreams to big-time Divi-sion I colleges—even, in some cases, if it meant “walking on” without a scholarship at one of the major universities and sitting at the end of the bench for four years

Moreover, the wviac had recently joined the ncaa Division II, ending its nearly six-decade afl liation with the National Association of Intercol-legiate Athletics (naia) Although the switch brought the league l nancial stability and more-stringent academic standards, it also meant a-b and its fellow league members could no longer cherrypick outstanding high school and playground players who lacked the grades to qualify for ncaa-afl liated colleges, an important source of talent during its naia days.

Of the remaining prospects willing to play D-II basketball in the late 1990s, the vast majority had little interest in attending a-b The issue wasn’t the eight-hundred-student college itself, which offers a beautiful green campus and a solid, Baptist-oriented education in the liberal arts The deal-breaker was living in Philippi, population 3,100 The town is so remote that not even Greyhound stops there Recruits must endure long car trips on the interstate, followed by a forty-l ve-minute trek along a lonely, two-lane ribbon of country road that winds past doublewide trailers, rusted pickup trucks, and other familiar symbols of Appalachian poverty Upon crossing

an old-fashioned covered bridge into downtown Philippi, many recruits feel as though they have been transported back to 1950s Mayberry The town is quaint and orderly, its residents are folksy and straight-talking, and the surrounding hills are lush and teeming with wildlife They also quickly notice that Philippi is completely devoid of the familiar daily haunts of urban America The town has no megamalls, no multiplex theaters, no dance clubs, and essentially no nightlife As a recruit once remarked, “This place doesn’t even have a Burger King.”

For inner-city black kids, buying into the area can be a real challenge The town and college are more than 97 percent white, country music rules the jukebox, and hunting and l shing are the sports of choice “Players know, when they come to a-b, that they are here to do two things: go to school and play basketball,” noted assistant coach Daron Washington, an African American who grew up in Cleveland and played for a-b in the mid-1990s

“There’s nothing else to do.”

Making matters worse for Vincent, then the youngest men’s head ketball coach in the ncaa, he was a one-man show In an age when major-college head coaches assign the bulk of their responsibilities to l ve or six as-sistants, Vincent lacked the funds in his program’s shoestring, $30,000-a-year budget to hire even one paid assistant He was coach, recruiter, fundraiser,

bas-publicist, secretary, and, when needed, team manager The demands were nonstop, and Vincent did it reportedly all for $28,000 a year, a salary well below those of D-II coaches.

Vincent, a twangy, slow-talking native of Shinston, West Virginia, and former all-state prep basketball player who played for three different D-I schools, had two things going for him: a gift for recruiting and 8.5 schol-arships to close the deal And that’s all he needed to get started Vincent burned up the telephone lines to befriend high school and junior college players, hoping one or two might l nd themselves at the end of the national basketball letter-of-intent signing period in the spring without a serious D-I offer on the table and, fearing their basketball careers were over, would sign with a-b The strategy sometimes clicked, and, with a little talent and a lot

of coaching, Vincent willed the Battlers to the upper quartile of the league with three improbable 20-win campaigns in his l rst four seasons

But all was not well with his overachieving program Many of his city recruits quickly grew homesick and abruptly quit the team after a few weeks or months on campus, leaving Vincent constantly having to patch and repatch his lineup with players of lesser talent “I remember coming

big-in my freshman year, we had about fourteen guys on the roster,” said McBride, who arrived on campus in late 1998 “Here I am from southern West Virginia, and we had guys from Brooklyn, Harlem, all of those places

I didn’t know what to think But, by l ve or six games into the season, we were down to seven or eight players It was either they couldn’t l t into the system or they just couldn’t deal with Philippi.”

More ominously, Vincent lacked the unconditional support of a-b dent Dr Stephen Markwood to keep his program at the top of the wviac Their problems started during Vincent’s l rst season, when Markwood arrived as the new college president and announced a series of funding cuts that phased out a full scholarship from the basketball team As Markwood explained, he had no choice One of the college’s top academic programs had lost its accreditation, enrollment plummeted from 930 to a dangerously low 700 students, and the school was awash in red ink “At that point, obvi-ously, you’re just worried about paying your staff,” said Markwood

presi-On the surface, operating the men’s basketball team with 7.5, instead

of 8.5, scholarships would seem to be a small price to pay to keep the lege am oat But the cut marked a philosophical shift within the athletic

col-department Markwood had decided that the basketball team would have

to share in the funding cuts, too, which had never been the case when Vincent served as an assistant coach a few seasons earlier with the naia-maximum twelve scholarships In fact, because a-b hadn’t l elded a football team since the 1930s, men’s basketball had ruled the athletic roost for the last sixty years That was the tradition That was the a-b way

As Markwood explained, his new share-the-pain philosophy would keep all eight of a-b’s sports programs, including men’s basketball, “reason-ably competitive,” though he realized none would have the resources to become nationally ranked powerhouses “Sure, it puts pressure on the basketball coach,” said Markwood, an outgoing PhD with a mind for data and organizational models “He’s not going to get as many scholarships

as most of the coaches in the league But, in the same light, our baseball and soccer coaches know they’ll get scholarships that will allow them to

l nish fourth, l fth, or sixth in the conference versus eleventh or twelfth without them We just thought this approach would be better for campus morale and help us avoid a serious have-and-have-not situation within the athletic department.”

Pleasant and easygoing off the court but a win-at-all-costs competitor

on it, Vincent bridled at the new policy, for obvious reasons As his fellow wviac coaches often reminded their athletic directors, soccer coaches can get away with offering all-state players half or quarter scholarships; bas-ketball coaches can’t Full scholarships are the currency of the trade—and without them, the good players simply move on to the next suitor Vincent complained it was tough enough selling talented basketball players on four years in Philippi, but it would be nearly impossible to persuade them to come if they had to shell out a big chunk of the $21,000 annual tuition.Not one to suffer in silence, Vincent fought back According to several sources, in a live local radio interview during the 1999–2000 season, he publicly challenged Markwood to shut down the basketball program if

he didn’t plan to support it Vincent also del antly drew a large map of West Virginia on the chalkboard in his ofl ce, showing the locations of all fourteen wviac schools and listing the salaries of each one’s men’s head basketball coach “It was as though he wanted to advertise the fact that he was the lowest paid coach in the league,” said McBride

By the 2000–2001 season, the situation went from bad to abysmal Vincent

had to dismiss several big-city recruits from the team during the preseason for misbehaving in the dorms, and, by the Christmas break, the club was down to l ve scholarship players and two walk-on students.

“Coach didn’t care anymore,” said freshman center Josh Allen “He would arrive l fteen or twenty minutes late to practice Sometimes he would call Kevyn [McBride] and say he was out recruiting and to run through this, this, and this in practice.”

“It wasn’t all his fault, though,” Allen continued “We had some players

on our team who just weren’t coachable He would tell them the right way

to do things, then they just ignored him It got to the point where we’d try

to run our offense in practice, the players would do their own thing, and Coach would sit there on the bleachers and hold his hands to his face as if

to say, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’”

In March, when West Virginia Wesleyan mercifully ended a-b’s functional season in the l rst round of the wviac’s postseason tournament, Vincent had logged a 12-14 record, his l rst losing season at the college Allen and McBride said their coach seemed to be at his wit’s end But with

dys-no job offers to resurrect his coaching career elsewhere, Vincent tried to reassure them that not only would he return in the fall, but he planned to beat the bushes over the spring and summer and l nd a few good players

to help retool for another winning season

McBride and his fellow returnees Rudy Wallace and Josh Allen, however, said they knew not to hold their breath Although they genuinely liked their coach, they felt his pitched battle with the college had left him too embit-tered to care anymore about winning championships The three realized

it was up to them to transform their meager team into a winner

For seniors-to-be McBride and Wallace, winning was all the more pressing because the 2001–2 season would be their last hurrah McBride, a twenty-year-old “boy-next-door,” could have been the poster child of the ncaa student athlete Valedictorian of his high school class, McBride majored in applied mathematics, maintained a 3.97 gpa and aspires to be an engineer for nasa On the basketball court, he excelled as well, averaging 16 points per game as a junior and earning second-team all-wviac honors

Still, McBride sometimes wondered whether he should have skipped basketball altogether to focus single-mindedly on academics In fact, he

almost did After leading his tiny Mullens High to the West Virginia Class

A, or small school, championship, McBride had just two scholarship offers: a-b and its fellow wviac member Concord College “I naively thought,

‘Anybody can play in the wviac,’ laughed McBride “It’s just a bunch of small West Virginia schools What’s the point?” He looked long and hard

at the Air Force Academy, then almost enrolled at West Virginia sity, before he and his father, a sales representative for ibm, gave a-b and D-II basketball a shot

Univer-Three years later, McBride was still uncertain of his decision On the bright side, he hadn’t languished on the bench like most small-town stars

He had started every game but one, played almost forty minutes every night, and nearly claimed a league championship in his sophomore year It was the off-the-court stuff that threw the experience back in his face—the team’s lack of resources to compete, the apathy of the local community, the frustration-turned-anger of his coach, and the desperation of team-mates who wanted out

McBride was savvy enough to realize that winning is the great elixir that cures all ills That’s why he wanted to make one l nal push in his senior year

to l nish at the top of the conference “It wasn’t that I needed the team to win for sell sh reasons,” said McBride, with just a hint of his native southern West Virginia in his voice “I was committed to going to graduate school, not pursuing a pro contract somewhere I just didn’t want to look back on

my basketball career and face a m ood of bad memories.”

For Wallace, graduate school was the furthest thing from his mind Schoolwork had never come easily for him, and Wallace felt a major sense

of accomplishment just to be on track to graduate with a degree in ational leadership After college, Wallace planned to look into teaching and hoped to continue playing basketball on the side

recre-That Wallace had landed at a-b was a story in itself A product of the rough streets of Capitol Heights, Maryland, a middle-to-low-income suburb

of Washington dc, Wallace grew up hanging out with his buddies and casionally landing in trouble with the law Although a role player in high school, Wallace eventually hooked up with junior-college power Cecil Community College in rural North East, Maryland, where, as a sophomore,

oc-he averaged just under 10 points per game as a part-time starter on a 24-7 team that sent players to Rutgers, Drexel, and Florida A&M

Although Wallace had a few pending low D-I offers after junior college,

he decided at the last minute to go with the sure thing “The D-I schools had backed down, so I called Coach Vincent and asked him, ‘Are you still interested in signing me?’” recalled Wallace, a medium-complected African American who wears his hair a little long or in braids

When Vincent answered that he had a full scholarship available, lace accepted on the spot, packed his bags, and drove seven hours through the night to Philippi “I just needed a place to play,” said Wallace, whose father is a junior high school principal “I mean, it was three weeks before school started, so, when I arrived at a-b, I l gured it was the last stop of

Wal-my college career.” Now, in the l nal season of his college career, Wallace wanted to go out a winner He couldn’t stomach the thought of limping through another hapless season

McBride, Wallace, and Allen lived in the same three-story, yellow-brick campus dormitory, and they began planning for the 2001–2 season imme-diately after the West Virginia Wesleyan loss They talked for hours about staying positive, training hard over the summer, and helping Vincent l nd

a few skilled players to make their team more competitive McBride and Allen, in fact, would convince southern West Virginia high school star Stephen Dye to sign with a-b as the team’s only full-scholarship offseason recruit

Such self-reliance is unheard of at D-I schools today, largely because it isn’t a part of the job description Players at Duke, Maryland, and other D-I schools—all the way down the food chain to the Wofford’s and Weber State’s—enjoy multimillion-dollar training facilities, individualized coach-ing, personal tutors, and the myriad other perks that college presidents bestow upon their basketball teams Their job is simply to get with the program, not overcome its del ciencies Moreover, most D-I programs attract superior athletes who can single-handedly dominate games and, because of their unique talent, view the college season as a seven-month audition for an nba contract In fact, some consider their per-game aver-ages as being as important to their futures as whether their team wins a conference or ncaa championship

In a stripped-down, tough-to-recruit D-II program like a-b’s, all of the players are student athletes in the purest sense of the term All are serious about earning their degrees, because none possess the God-given talent to

seriously entertain nba ambitions Having never been wooed by recruiters, pro scouts, or sneaker companies, they lack the inm ated egos that crave the spotlight and obsess over the stat sheet Most realize that, for a-b to win, they must sacril ce personal glory, and, in the tradition of team play that once dominated the college game during the radio days of Claire Bee, Phog Allen, and Adolph Rupp, build “a l ve-man machine,” in which the sum of their parts is greater than the skills of any one player.

As the l ctitious coach Norman Dale summarized the concept in Hoosiers,

“The l ve players on the m oor function as one single unit—team, team, team Right? No one more important than the other.”2

Sitting in a dorm room overlooking the dense stands of maple and oak trees that shroud the surrounding hills and give Philippi the feel of a mountain town, two white kids from southern West Virginia and a little-recruited black point guard from the Washington dc area were about to become “Hoosiers.” “We knew what it takes to win,” said Wallace, the city kid “I mean, we knew that we couldn’t rely on one person We knew the whole team had to do it.”

But they still had to learn how to win in one of the toughest D-II

confer-ences in the country It was a tall order under the circumstances, one that would require a total commitment to team and all of the personal qualities that enter into the equation: discipline, leadership, selm essness, respect, courage, responsibility, resilience, and, above all, a passion for the game.Little did they know, it also would require a new coach

Daron Washington l rst heard the news while talking on the phone with

a buddy in his fantasy football league Washington remembers telling the friend on that Saturday evening in late October 2001 that he wasn’t sur-prised at all, and that “it was only a matter of time before it happened.” What surprised Washington was that the friend also mentioned that J D Long, the a-b athletic director, had been “asking around” for his telephone number

The next evening, Long called Washington at his house and conl rmed the story: Brett Vincent had hastily resigned as a-b’s men’s head basketball coach the day before, or roughly three weeks before the team’s season opener According to Long, Vincent told his players before practice that he had accepted a higher-paying head coaching job at nearby Lewis County

High School, wished everyone well with the season, loaded several boxes from his ofl ce into his car, then driven off for good Upon hearing the news secondhand a few minutes later, Long raced to campus, still wear-ing the dirty blue overalls that he had been wearing to split wood for his l replace, and found the players huddled in the locker room, angry, brooding, and convinced their season was over The senior McBride had already advised freshman Stephen Dye, “If I was you, I’d get out of here This is a sinking ship.”

“I came up and Kevyn McBride and two or three other kids were ready

to pack up and leave,” recalled Long, a heavyset, fatherly l gure in his late forties, who doubles as the women’s volleyball and softball coach “I mean,

we were in big trouble I begged them to take the weekend off, not to do anything drastic, and I promised them that, if they stuck it out at a-b, I’d

l nd a quality coach before the season started.”

Long told Washington that he needed a huge favor Because ington had served as an unpaid assistant a few years earlier and knew Vincent’s offensive and defensive systems, Long asked if he would l ll

Wash-in as Wash-interim coach until a replacement was found WashWash-ington balked

at l rst, saying he had his hands full working as a mailman in the small West Virginia city of Fairmont, about forty miles north of Philippi But,

in the end, he knew his protestations would be futile “I had no choice,” remembers Washington “I’m an alumnus of Alderson-Broaddus College

I had to say yes.”

The next day, the twenty-nine-year-old Washington became the only mailman in America to moonlight as an ncaa basketball coach Washington, who had jotted down a practice schedule in a spiral notebook while deliv-ering the mail, clocked out that afternoon at his usual 3:30 p.m and drove his green Nissan Pathl nder forty-l ve minutes south along the winding backcountry roads to the campus When he pulled into the small parking lot outside Rex Pyles Memorial Arena, the college’s old-timey gymnasium with blue-and-yellow, festoon-style curtains covering the windows and a vaulted wooden ceiling that looks like the hull of an old Viking ship, Long and Markwood were waiting to introduce him to the players Washing-ton, a dark-complected African American who stands six-foot-four with a muscular build and a shaved head, eyed the team’s eleven players, eight whites and three blacks As Washington now laughs, they looked like a

bad high school team—slow, skinny, and, short, with the tallest player standing just six-foot-six.

Washington immediately recognized McBride from his previous stint

as an assistant coach, remembering that McBride was one of those rare low-key, team-l rst stars who seldom went one on one during games or wowed spectators with spectacular dunks In fact, the six-foot-four McBride couldn’t jump high enough to dunk a basketball His game was a hustling throwback to that of the Boston Celtic great John Havlicek, in that he moved well without the ball, found holes in the defense, scored his points within the m ow of the offense, and rarely made mistakes McBride was also extremely versatile A back-to-the-basket post player in high school, McBride started as a college freshman at point guard

Of the others, the most impressive of the bunch was point guard Rudy Wallace, who possessed the speed, quickness, and jumping ability of a D-I player The problem was that the l ve-foot-ten Wallace played more like

an undersized shooting guard than a pass-l rst point guard He sometimes got stuck in a gear higher than that of his teammates, zooming down the court ahead of them to attempt wild, off-balance shots When Wallace got hot, he could score in bunches, and, as a junior, had several 20-point games But, like all streak shooters, he could turn as cold as ice for long stretches and l nish games with 6 or 8 unproductive points

After McBride and Wallace, Washington wasn’t sure what to expect There was Josh Allen, a quiet, redheaded sophomore center from Crab Orchard, West Virginia, who averaged 9 points per game as a freshman Allen, a devout Christian who has never tasted alcohol, slashed to the hoop, had a nice jump shot, and showed good athletic ability But, at six-foot-six and 175 pounds, Allen was more of a wiry small forward than a hefty center, and the league’s ample supply of six-foot-eight, 220-pound bruisers would push him around like a rag doll, meaning that the team would likely have

no presence inside to score or stop opponents

Another question mark was Stephen Dye, the six-foot-two freshman from Whitesville, West Virginia, population 520 Dye had been a deadly long-range bomber in high school But he had starred as a prep on the Class

A level, facing the state’s smallest schools, weakest competition, and est athletes “You saw maybe one dunk a year in Class A,” remembered McBride, who also played Class A high school basketball “It was almost

poor-worth stopping the game to take a picture.” It was anybody’s guess how the rail-thin, somewhat slow-footed Dye would adapt to the college game and its superior athletes.

The l fth and l nal scholarship belonged to Quincey Hodges, a four forward from the Washington dc area who had decent skills around the hoop Although friendly, Hodges was a bit reclusive and sometimes wandered the campus laughing, singing, and talking to himself “Quincey

six-foot-is a little weird,” one teammate bluntly stated Hodges was also a lackluster student, and whispers would soon begin about him falling behind in the classroom

After practice, Washington pulled McBride aside to get the inside scoop

on the past few weeks McBride painted a bleak picture of a coach who had quit on his team He said Vincent had signed two junior-college transfers over the offseason, who, unlike unproven Stephen Dye, could step in and immediately solidify the roster One lasted less than a week in Philippi before returning to Chicago; the other never showed for classes

That apparently was the l nal straw for Vincent While players at rival colleges underwent intense grinds of preseason running, weight lifting, and other conditioning programs in hopes of winning championships, McBride said Vincent instructed the team not to bother Vincent report-edly explained that, because his starters would likely log close to forty minutes each game, he didn’t want to risk wearing down their legs in the preseason “Our motto is ‘No preseason equals no postseason,’” McBride recalled joking to his friends

“Kevyn, what have you guys done in practice so far?”

“Nothing, we’re not even in shape.”

“Tell you what,” said Washington “We have a few weeks before the season starts, and we’ll just get in shape and go from there.”

While Washington bonded with the team, J D Long had found a possible new head coach His name was Greg Zimmerman A former basketball star at a-b who also had briem y played on Long’s softball team in the 1970s, Zimmerman had spent seventeen years as a high school basketball coach, most recently at Cleveland’s highly regarded Saint Edward High School

In the late 1990s, however, Zimmerman had been grappling with a few personal problems, resigned his position, and landed about as far away from

basketball as a coach could He was the plant manager of a small “l lling” business run by his wife’s cousin in the Cleveland suburb of Streetboro.

“We put things into plastic bottles—soap, shampoo, hand lotion, ever was needed,” explained Zimmerman, a trim, forty-seven-year-old

what-“regular guy” with thinning black hair, a stubbly moustache, and a stoic, working-class demeanor

Although happy with his career change, Zimmerman said the a-b job grabbed his attention Breaking into the college game had been a longtime dream, and, as a native of rural southern Ohio, where he grew up on a hundred-acre farm, Zimmerman preferred the slow pace of Philippi to the daily bustle of Cleveland With Long’s encouragement, Zimmerman agreed to drive the four hours to Philippi with his wife, Heidi, and discuss the position with President Markwood That day, Heidi gave him a quick good luck kiss outside Markwood’s ofl ce, and Zimmerman entered to a round of questions that he answered politely but seemingly with no desire

to sell himself as the right man for the job

When the interview l nished, Long emerged from Markwood’s ofl ce feeling a little frustrated He didn’t have any other strong candidates, and Zimmerman seemed ambivalent about the job Neither had Zimmerman made much of an impression with the players “Oh God, we’ve got this old guy,” Wallace reportedly groaned to McBride, hoping Long would l nd a youthful clone of the popular Vincent

As Zimmerman mingled for a few minutes outside Markwood’s ofl ce, Long and Heidi Zimmerman started to chat, a panoramic view of the autumn leaves outside the glass wall The conversation quickly turned serious “J D., let me tell you something about Greg,” Long remembers her saying “He’s not the type to talk about himself, his accomplishments,

or why you should give him the job But he will win for you If you want

to offer him the job, you should do it now, so we can go home and think about it.”

“Well, there it is,” Long answered “I’m offering him the job.”

Greg Zimmerman said the drive back to Cleveland was agonizing He knew that former high school coaches rarely land college head-coaching jobs, and Long’s expectations seemed reasonable to him As Long had explained, a-b just needed a coach for the 2001–2 season, and there would

be no pressure on him to return for a second season

As enticing as the offer was, Zimmerman also wondered what on earth

he was thinking He’d have to swallow a 40 percent pay cut, and, more dauntingly, Heidi and his two teenaged daughters would remain 260 miles behind in Cleveland Heidi, a high school administrator, couldn’t l nd a comparable job in notoriously low-paying central West Virginia

“I didn’t know what to do,” recalled Zimmerman, in his m at, class, southern Ohio cadence “I talked with Heidi that night, and she l nally just said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go.’ But, when I left for work the next day,

working-I was just miserable working-I really wanted to take the job working-I got to work around

8 a.m., and I still didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“I came in on that morning and couldn’t reach Greg by phone,” Long recalled of this fateful Thursday morning “His cell phone must not have been working, so he faxed me a one-page note with the words, ‘J D., I’m sorry I can’t come.” I picked up the fax and threw it in the trash I was just so frustrated About an hour later, I called him back and said, ‘Greg, you’re all I’ve got There’s nobody else.’ He paused and said, ‘Okay, I’ll take the job.’”

“I l nally just thought, ‘If I don’t ever try this, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life,’” said Zimmerman “So, I called my wife, then I told the owner of the company By the time I got packed and everything, I started

my l rst practice on a Sunday [November 4].”

Waiting to welcome the new coach was Daron Washington The two shook hands and exchanged small talk, then the mailman delivered the bad news from his one week on the job, “There’s slim pickings out there, I’m gonna tell you that right now They won twelve games last year; they’re slow, and they can’t jump But there’s one thing they can do—they can shoot.” Pausing for a second and raising his voice for emphasis, “They all

can shoot.”

“Well, we have something to work with,” Zimmerman answered brusquely, catching Washington off guard and making him feel a little awkward

Zimmerman l nally motioned for the players to gather around him, and Washington, who had agreed to stay on as an assistant for the $5,000 that he was offered as interim coach, stood sizing up the new head coach Zimmer-man was, in basketball parlance, obviously “old school.” He didn’t rely on

rousing speeches or feel-good, New Age coaching gimmicks to motivate his players His words were as direct and as biting as a gym teacher’s, and his expectations about as straightforward: Work hard in practice, obey team rules, make no excuses It also didn’t take long to realize that Zimmerman was as organized as an accountant The practice was timed down to the second, and he instructed with careful attention to detail, always observing and at times tartly correcting their mistakes.

The new guy also seemed to know his basketball As Washington would later learn, Zimmerman was strongly inm uenced by Ohio high school coach-ing legend Charlie Huggins, an a-b alumnus and the father of then University

of Cincinnati coach Bobby Huggins Zimmerman played against the elder Huggins’s teams in high school, later coached against him, and eventually spent fourteen years working at Huggins’ annual summer coaching clinic There, Zimmerman said he developed an appreciation of fundamentals, teamwork, and just what a work of art the game can be when it is played correctly

This do-it-right mindset became apparent by the end of the l rst practice, when Zimmerman thanked them for their effort, then dropped the bomb that the eight remaining practices before the season opener would revisit the basics—how to dribble, pass, rebound, and play defense “I’ve got to

be honest: You guys don’t know how to play,” he said “You have no idea how to practice You have no idea what it takes to be a good team.” For Zimmerman, as tedious as it was to teach fundamentals to college players

on scholarship, there was no alternative “How do you expect to play if you don’t have a foundation to build on?” he later explained to them “You can’t just come down the court and shoot the ball every time.”

Zimmerman’s blunt assessment left the players cold Several marched straight to Long’s ofl ce to demand the college pull out all the stops to coax Vincent back to campus Long, who sat in on the l rst practice, listened to the complaints then told the players to try to make the best of the situa-tion But in the locker room after each practice and out of Zimmerman’s earshot, the players bantered cruelly about “the new guy.” “Because of his moustache and German last name, we started calling him ‘Hitler,’” admitted McBride “I mean, we thought he was going to kill us with his three-hour practices It just seemed like they would never end.”

McBride said it wasn’t that he and his teammates were averse to hard work

After all, they had spent their summer working extremely hard and vowing

a winning season But, in the aftermath of losing their coach and assuming their season would be canceled, the players had lost their enthusiasm for the game Their goal was simply to show up, have fun, and survive the season without suffering further humiliation Diving on the hardwood m oor for loose balls in practice as though they were scholarship players at an Atlantic Coast Conference school just wasn’t a part of their equation

After each grueling practice, while Zimmerman settled upstairs in his ofl ce, Washington would position himself downstairs in the locker room, quietly listening to McBride and his teammates badmouth “Hitler” and his stupid drills “We were all like, ‘This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’” said McBride “We’ve been playing basketball all of our lives, and

we already know how to do this stuff.” When the conversation reached

a lull, Washington invariably would add in his soft, measured, fact tone, “Yeah but, he’s your coach,” or “You just need to give him a chance.”

matter-of-On a team dominated by small-town, southern West Virginians, who are taught as youngsters to respect authority, Washington’s rejoinders struck a chord They grudgingly gave the new guy the benel t of the doubt, though the players remained unswayed that dribbling drills would do them a bit

of good One of the walk-on players from the previous season, ing that his “heart wasn’t into it,” abruptly quit the team Their numbers dwindling and their coach seemingly out to kill them, McBride said he and his teammates just tried to suck it up

explain-“We didn’t know what bad thing would happen next,” said McBride “It was to a point where we just had to stick together We didn’t know what else to do I remember talking to Rudy about it and wondering whether

we would even win a game.”

Unbeknownst to the players, Zimmerman, too, had his doubts that his team could win a game At Cleveland’s Saint Edward High School, Zimmerman had coached several outstanding, twenty-win high school teams and groomed future college All-Americans Steve Logan and Sam Clancy He had seen big-time talent up close and personal, and this a-b team seemed to have none “I was shocked at the talent level after that

l rst practice,” said Zimmerman “I couldn’t believe these guys were good enough to make a college team.”

Neither was Zimmerman particularly impressed with his team captain and top returnee “People kept talking about ‘the McBride kid,’” laughed Zimmerman “They told me he had averaged 20 points a game as a junior and had been all-league and that You know, I watched him on the court, and I just didn’t see those types of numbers in him I honestly didn’t see them.”

Although it was tough to be four hours away from his family, and the winter boded many long, humiliating nights on the court, Zimmerman felt at peace He was back in his Nike sweat suit, talking basketball and coaching a team again “I said to him, ‘Greg, just try to have the kids enjoy the season,’” recalled a-b president Stephen Markwood “I said, ‘I’m not worried about wins and losses, because you’re not even in a situation where

I could even think about that.’”

Zimmerman acquiesced, saying his only goal heading into the season would be to make amends for Vincent’s abrupt departure and “have the players leave a-b saying that they were glad that they came to school here.” But still ingrained within him was a gnawing, old-school work ethic that wouldn’t allow Zimmerman to loaf or accept a paycheck that he hadn’t earned The new coach vowed that, even if a-b lost by 40 points every night, he wouldn’t stop coaching, he wouldn’t stop teaching, he wouldn’t stop doing his job The big question was: Could “Hitler” also get his ten forlorn players to buck up and do their jobs, too?

On Friday, November 16, 2001, McBride, Wallace, and crew faced job one:

to win the opening game of the University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown’s annual Promistar Bank Tip-off Classic Their opponent that evening was Roberts Wesleyan College, an 1,800-student Christian liberal arts school

in Rochester, New York Roberts Wesleyan had an undersized but decent basketball team that would l nish the season with an 18-16 record But the Lancers were a bad opening-night match-up for an unsettled team like a-b because they already had four games under their belt and, as their 89-points-per-game average attested, their offense was clicking at midseason form.Having spent little time in practice working on its defensive schemes, a-b stumbled badly in the opening minutes Roberts Wesleyan shot 71 percent from the l eld, including a sizzling 75 percent from 3-point land to take a 58–44 halftime advantage “I remember at halftime thinking, ‘This