by Bob Hurley
It put it out there that we were a different team than we’d been just the year before. Same guys essentially, but a different team. A championship team.
At last.
10.
2010–2011: CHAMPIONSHIP HABITS
FATIGUE MAKES COWARDS OF US ALL.
—Vince Lombardi
YOU’RE NEVER A LOSER UNTIL YOU QUIT TRYING.
—Mike Ditka
The story of our 2010–2011 season started to write itself a couple years earlier, with the economic downturn that cut spending and confidence all across the country—in our inner cities most of all. Parochial schools in our area were closing left and right. Families were hurting.
What this meant in basketball terms was that the balance of power kept shifting. All of a sudden, there was all kinds of talent, bouncing around different schools. And it wasn’t just a Jersey City phenomenon. It was happening all over. Kids would begin their high school careers in one program, and then that program would shut its doors and those kids would have to scramble.
At Paterson Catholic, money was tight. Enrollment was down. School administrators weren’t sure they could keep the place open. We’d had similar worries at St. Anthony, but we’d always managed to raise just enough money at the last possible moment to meet our expenses. One of our biggest challenges each year, apart from trying to raise the money we desperately needed, was keeping all this talk away from the students. It would get in the way of what we were trying to do, what we were trying to build—not just among our student-athletes but across the board—because it’s tough enough to teach young people without having them think the rug is about to be pulled out from under them. It’s tough to give them a sense of place and purpose if they can’t even count on their school being open the next year.
And yet, despite its money troubles and enrollment concerns, the Paterson Catholic boys’ basketball team was having an outstanding 2009–2010 season—a season that would turn out to be the school’s last. They finished the regular season as the third-ranked team in the country. A big reason for that was that they had one of the region’s top sophomores, Kyle Anderson, probably the best pure talent to emerge out of our area in a generation, and an outstanding junior named Myles Mack, a terrific point guard. Their starting lineup also featured Fuquan Edwin, who’d go on to lead the nation in steals the following year at Seton Hall; Derrick Randall, a six-eight junior signed to play for Rutgers; and Jayon James, a playmaking small forward on his way to Iona. That’s five starters destined to make an impact in top-level Division I college programs just from this one team, and when we drew each other in the state semifinals that year, it was as if we were playing for the state championship. Paterson Catholic was undefeated, at 28-0; we came in at 25-2. The winner of the game would take the North Jersey championship and face off against the South Jersey champion, Trenton Catholic. Our game was on a Thursday night; Trenton Catholic had won its game on Tuesday, which meant they’d have a couple extra days to rest and prepare for the finals on Saturday.
No disrespect to Trenton Catholic, but our side of the draw was a little tougher that year, our climb a little steeper. Paterson Catholic and St. Anthony were both nationally ranked, so it was generally assumed that the winner of the North Jersey final would go on to take the state title.
Didn’t exactly work out that way.
We played great in our game against Paterson Catholic, ended up winning 63–49, leading the whole way. Not a dominant performance, but a strong, gutsy performance, and as we left the building that Thursday night our guys were feeling pretty confident about our chances. It was a big win, a big night—but it was also late for a school night. The game had started at eight o’clock, and I don’t think we left the gym until ten, ten-thirty, so it was after midnight before most of our guys got back home. We couldn’t really do much more than a light workout the next afternoon at practice, so I just kept them for about an hour. Normally, we’d have gone over our scouting report the day before a big game, but these kids were fried and frazzled, so I sent them home and figured we could do it the next morning before heading out to the Ritacco Center in Toms River for the game.
Didn’t exactly work out that way either.
What happened instead was, we brought the guys to the gym that Saturday morning about an hour before the buses were scheduled to take off, went over the scouting report, had a forty-five-minute walk-through, and thought we were all set. I didn’t stick around to wait for the bus to show up. Short-hop trips like the drive to Toms River, I like to take my own car, so I left the gym ahead of the team and hit the road. Eric Harrield, one of our assistants, stayed back to ride the bus with the team, along with a couple other coaches, but I like to get where I’m going as soon as I can. On this day in particular. The weather was lousy. A giant nor’easter had been forecast for our region, and the rain was coming down hard, but Chris and I made decent time to the facility. Ben Gamble was in his own car as well, and he also made good time. But there was no sign of the team bus, so we called one of the coaches to get an estimated time of arrival.
Turned out the bus was on the Jersey Turnpike, just passing exit 11, which meant they were headed in the completely wrong direction. Somehow the driver had it in his head that the game was being played at the RAC, on the Rutgers University campus, instead of at the Ritacco Center in Toms River.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more embarrassed as a coach, waiting for our team bus to arrive. I mean, this was the state finals. Talk to people in basketball, talk to guys who’ve played in NBA championships, NCAA championships, and a lot of them will tell you that the biggest game of their careers was when they played for their high school team in the state championship back home. It’s huge. And here we were, ridiculously late, keeping the tournament organizers waiting, keeping the fans waiting, keeping our opponents waiting. There were games scheduled behind us all afternoon, so there would soon be other teams, other fans, waiting too. It felt to me like the whole state was watching. I was furious, frustrated, frantic, fidgety … but there was no sense fuming. Mostly, I just paced the gym, trying to get my head around the fact that my guys were due to play the biggest game of their careers in just a few minutes and they were still on the bus, driving through a ridiculous storm.
I was on and off the phone to Eric, trying to figure out the mood of our players, but Eric said most of the guys were asleep. They were so flat-out tired, they didn’t even know they were running late, which I took as a good thing. It’d be tough enough getting them dressed and stretched without having them all stressed and anxious about the time, especially considering that the Trenton Catholic players had been ready to go for over an hour.
The game was scheduled for two o’clock that afternoon, and now that I had all this extra time to worry and overthink, this struck me as outrageous. We’d just played a tough semifinal game on Thursday night. Our guys didn’t get home until after midnight. Meanwhile, Trenton Catholic had played its semifinal game on Tuesday, so their guys were rested, recharged. I’m never one to make excuses, and I would probably have never focused on it if we hadn’t had this screwup with our team bus, but the turnaround time made no sense. You shouldn’t ask a team to play a late game on Thursday and then to move on to a state championship game on Saturday afternoon, unless their opponent is going through the same thing.
I only mention it here to show the kinds of thoughts that were bouncing around in my head as I waited for the bus to double back and make it to Toms River. I should have been thinking about the matchup with Trenton Catholic, the few words I’d have a chance to say to my guys as they’d hurriedly dress and get warm, but my focus was off. I was stuck on what might have been, what should have been … instead of on what was.
Our guys got to the Ritacco Center … eventually. That “Tom Coughlin time” I talked about earlier? That full hour I liked to give my guys to relax and stretch and get themselves mentally prepared for the game? Well … that just wasn’t happening. Biggest game of the year for
us, and it just wasn’t happening.
The game finally got going at about 2:45. We went out to a nice lead, and we were up by twelve with time running out in the second quarter, but then Trenton Catholic hit a long three at the buzzer to close it to nine points heading into the half. They left the floor with all kinds of momentum, while our guys kind of shuffled their feet as they went into the locker room, and I turned to Ben Gamble and said, “I think that’s gonna come back and hurt us.”
And it did. Trenton Catholic came out sharp in the second half, cut the lead to four points going into the fourth quarter.
Then they tied the game at the end of regulation, so we went into overtime.
At the end of overtime, the score was still knotted up.
Second overtime, same thing.
Third overtime, Trenton Catholic had edged out in front, 57–56, to win the state title.
Just like that, we were done.
Paterson Catholic announced a couple weeks after the state tournament that the school was shutting its doors—the latest closing in a troubling trend. It was the third season in a row that a school we’d played during the season had to close the next year, following St. Joe’s of West New York and St. Al’s of Jersey City.
(The year after that it would be St. Mary’s in Jersey City—and the year after that St. Pat’s of Elizabeth.)
I hear a piece of news like that, my first thought is for our own program, our own school—but at St. Anthony’s we keep dodging that bullet. We keep finding ways to make our enrollment and hit our budget numbers. Just a couple years ago, for example, the former football coach Bill Parcells, who’s been a great friend and supporter of St. Anthony High School, stepped up with an eleventh-hour donation of $100,000 to keep the place running, but there was no guardian angel to save Paterson Catholic—and as a Jersey City native, I hated to lose another big-time rival. You grow up playing high school basketball in the area, you go on to coach high school basketball in the area, it’s not just a headline to you when you read about these school closings. It scratches at the memories of all the times you went up against those guys in a big game—and it tears at the heart of the city.
My second thought was for the returning basketball players on that team, hoping they all would find a place to play. It’s like one big game of musical chairs, but each year, with more and more schools closing, there are fewer and fewer roster spots to go around. At St. Anthony, we don’t look at these school closings as any kind of windfall for our program, a chance to add some top talent, because we don’t recruit. We don’t dream of this or that player who may or may not join our program. However, a lot of families might look to us to see if we might offer a good opportunity for their son, and when that happens, we might get excited about adding a particular player to our program, and that’s just what happened here.
Ben Gamble got a call from Kyle Anderson’s father, Kyle Sr., just a day or two after the news broke about Paterson Catholic, telling him he wanted to consider St. Anthony for Kyle. School was still in session, but Kyle’s dad wanted him to start doing some weight training with our group so he could catch up to what we were doing and hit the ground running if and when he enrolled.
Kyle’s decision on where to finish out his high school career was a big developing story in the area because he was such a prominent player, and when folks learned Kyle was leaning toward St. Anthony, a lot of the coverage gave the story an “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” spin. After all, Kyle’s team had been undefeated until they met up with St. Anthony in the North Jersey final, so it was an easy hook to suggest he was hopping to the one team that had his number. But it wasn’t like that. Kyle was from North Bergen; he knew every player on my team; he’d been to my camps, my clinics; I knew his parents, and they knew me. There was a good fit all around. It made sense, so I was thrilled when he decided to throw in with us—not just because it gave us another big-time player, but because I truly thought it was the right place for Kyle, a place where he could thrive.
From a purely competitive standpoint, we were extremely fortunate to be able to add a player of Kyle’s caliber to our roster. Even at fourteen, fifteen years old, you could see this kid had all the tools. Forget that he was six-seven and growing. Forget that he could handle the ball like a point guard and go strong to the basket like a power forward. Forget that he played with an extremely high basketball IQ. Just his ability to pass alone drew your attention. He’d be a real game-changer for us, no question.
Already, we were a little concerned about our returning core from that 2010 team. Jordan Quick and Lucious “Lucky” Jones were still juniors, but they’d struggled down the stretch, and I worried if they could be the cornerstone players we’d need to make it back to the state finals, and if they could lead us back to the state finals as seniors. With Kyle in the mix, though, Jordan and Lucky wouldn’t have to be franchise-type players for us—just important pieces to our puzzle. It would take a lot of the pressure off of them.
Some players (even some great players) perform a whole lot better when you’re not looking to them to carry the team, when there are teammates to help with the heavy lifting—and here I’d started to think Jordan and Lucky fit into this category.
A week or so later, I started hearing that Myles Mack might be looking to St. Anthony as well. This was no sure thing, however; Myles was looking at a bunch of schools, and his folks were worried about the transition to our program. Myles was from Paterson, which meant he’d have to take the train to Hoboken each morning, and then switch to the light rail to Jersey City; all told, it would take him about an hour each way, which was a whole lot different than how things were at Paterson Catholic, where his mom dropped him off at school. He didn’t really know any of my players; he didn’t know me. Yeah, he knew Kyle, so that was a big plus in St. Anthony’s favor, but he was also looking at schools closer to home—and as much as we might have wanted to see him in a Friars uniform, I really couldn’t say that our school was the best fit for him.
That was for Myles to decide—but happily, he did join our program.
We usually start our spring weight training a couple weeks after the season. That’s how it goes in high school basketball these days—it’s become a year-round sport, but the emphasis changes at different points in the year. I tell my guys that from April to November is when individual players develop. Our goal as a team—always, always, always—is to make it to the postseason and win the state title, but their goal as individuals is to earn a scholarship to college, to lift their own game to the highest level, and to work themselves into the best possible shape. So we didn’t really have to think about integrating Kyle or Myles into our program just yet. Everybody was moving at his own pace, and it worked out that Kyle and Myles were busy playing on their own AAU teams the first part of that summer, so our focus was on our returning players and plugging the holes left by our graduating seniors—Derrick Williams, who was off to play at Richmond; Elijah Carter, who’d lead Rutgers in scoring as a freshman the following season; Devon Collier, who committed to Oregon State; and Ashton Pankey, who’d sat out his entire senior year with an injury but still earned his way to a scholarship at Maryland. That’s a lot of talent, but there was a lot of talent left; we were bringing back Jordan Quick and Lucky Jones and expecting them to grow their games and emerge as team leaders. We were bringing back Jerome Frink, who’d played a lot for us as a sophomore. Jimmy Hall was stepping up from the junior varsity, along with Rashad Andrews, and I was counting on each of them to take on a big role. And then there was Tyon Williams, who’d suffered a knee injury and had rehabbed as a junior, but we were expecting him back as a senior and figuring on him to be an important player for us.
In June we attended a team camp at Linden High School. Myles and Kyle weren’t able to play with us just yet. The Paterson Catholic coaches hadn’t placed a whole lot of emphasis on the team camp program, and their players were doing a bunch of different things in the off-season—USA Basketball, AAU, NBA
Players Association camp, and on and on. This meant that Myles and Kyle had other commitments they needed to honor, which was just as well because I wanted to see how our returning group might come together as a unit. The Linden camp was the perfect opportunity to do just that. We’d play two-a-day games over a stretch of four days, so in a short time we’d find out a whole lot about our team.
Lately, the way it works is, I hang back during our summer sessions. I want my assistants to get the experience of running our practices and working our sidelines, but I’m there the whole time. I’m taking notes, thinking ahead, looking at the ways we’re coming together as a unit. I’m like Red Auerbach toward the end of his career with the Boston Celtics, when he was the general manager. I might huddle with my coaches away from the floor, tell them some of the things I want them to work on, but I try to leave them alone in the gym. I give them the whistle and let them coach—and to judge from this first team camp, they had a lot to work with.
The way it’s set up at Linden, it’s like a workshop tournament: you play your games at five o’clock and seven o’clock in the evening, or at four o’clock and six o’clock. You stick around and watch the other teams play—not to scout so much as to take everyone else’s pulse.
The outcome of each game is not nearly as important as what you take away from each game, what you learn about your players. But there’s a clock, and a couple refs, and a scoreboard … so at the same time we’re playing to win. Here we won our first seven games that week, which put us up against St. Patrick in the last game of the tournament. St. Pat’s was a local power, led by star forward Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. Folks around the country now know Michael as one of the major pieces of Kentucky’s 2012 NCAA championship team. As I write this, he’s just declared for the NBA draft, following his standout freshman season under John Calipari, and a lot of basketball analysts project him as a high-end first-round draft pick, but back in the summer of 2010, Michael was merely one of the best high school players in the country.