Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room

by Michael Perry

  Cronin sent his team back to Murray State the next morning and drove to a Five Seasons Sports Club between Cincinnati and Dayton, where he met with UC Athletic Director Mike Thomas and Deputy Director of Athletics Bob Arkeilpane.

  “I didn’t know either one of them,” Cronin said. “I had no time to prepare. To be honest, I figured it was a token interview so they could say they did interview me. I told Mike Thomas that. I figured anybody tied to Bob Huggins had no chance. He said, ‘That has no bearing on anything.’’”

  Cronin was a Cincinnati native and graduated from La Salle High School and UC. He worked for Huggins for five years—one as video coordinator and four as an assistant coach.

  The talk started with Xs and Os, academics, and how Cronin would run his program. Thomas and Arkeilpane then shifted to sales mode. They wanted Cronin to know Cincinnati did indeed care about its basketball program. Cronin left that interview wondering if anyone else was interested in the job. As he drove back to Murray, Kentucky, he pondered the conversation with his assistants four months earlier on the bus after the Bearcats loss:

  “Whoever takes that job next is screwed.”

  Thomas said other coaches were considered.

  “We did have interest in the position,” Thomas said. “We had vetted other candidates and talked to other candidates. I think Mick was a good fit in a lot of ways. He was obviously born and raised in Cincinnati. He went to school there. He had a long history there with Huggs and understood the university and the community. He knew Cincinnati and the region. And he had been in some battles himself as a head coach.”

  A WILD WEEK

  After returning to Kentucky, Cronin then left to recruit at the National Junior College Men’s Basketball Championship in Hutchinson, Kansas. Other schools showed interest in Cronin. On one hand, he was receiving calls from Cincinnati boosters and Big East Conference officials urging him not to take another job because UC was going to make him an offer; others, however, were concerned going back to UC was a bad move.

  “Everybody professionally was telling me not to take it, saying whoever got the job was going to get fired and that I should be the next guy after that if I wanted to go back home,” Cronin said. “They said it could be career suicide.”

  Louisville coach Rick Pitino, another Cronin mentor and one-time boss, advised that Cronin stipulate in his contract a certain amount of time to rebuild Cincinnati’s program. “It’s going to take you five years,” Pitino told Cronin. “There’s no other way to fix it.”

  “He was right on the money,” Cronin said. “Once I felt confident I was going to be given time to do it the right way, I thought I couldn’t turn down the job I really wanted; I thought I may never get the chance again. I figured I was going to get beat up for three or four years, but I could take that if it meant I was going to be able to be the coach at my alma mater and go home.”

  “It wasn’t as joyous as you would think,” Cronin added, “because I knew how brutal it was going to be. I knew I wasn’t riding in on a white horse with the band playing. It wasn’t like Coach Huggins retired and everybody was happy. It wasn’t how you would want it to be.”

  On March 24, 2006, one week after Murray State was eliminated from the NCAA Tournament, Cronin was introduced as the head coach of UC’s men’s basketball team.

  RUDE AWAKENING

  A few weeks after accepting the job, Cronin walked through campus near UC’s baseball stadium with recruit Mike Williams when a man wearing an Elder High School shirt turned to Cronin and said, “Hey Mick, welcome home.”

  Cronin was feeling good, but the man continued: “You’ve got absolutely no chance. They don’t care about sports here. They’re tearing this place apart. They won’t support you. I don’t know why you came back.”

  Williams’ jaw dropped. But he still signed with UC.

  HOOSIERS LOSS, BEARCATS GAIN

  Indianapolis native Deonta Vaughn initially committed to Indiana University while he was attending Arlington High School in his hometown. But, he said, he backed out when rumors started circulating that Indiana coach Mike Davis was not going to stay in Bloomington. (Davis did resign as the Hoosiers’ coach in February 2006.)

  Vaughn also was not yet academically eligible for college, so he transferred to Harmony Community School in Cincinnati for the 2005-06 school year, when he became better acquainted with the Bearcats.

  Vaughn got the test scores he needed but was not heavily recruited after suffering a high ankle sprain at Harmony, even though he averaged 17.4 points and 6.6 assists while playing for former Bearcat Rodney Crawford.

  “When I got the job, I had a list of every unsigned player in the country,” Cronin said. “I knew what [Vaughn] was capable of. I saw him play in the Nike camp before he committed to Indiana a year and a half prior. I went to Harmony to see him right away. His ankle was still swollen.

  “My goal was not to sign a high school player just to make it look good in the media. I was only going to sign a high school player I knew was good enough—and I knew he was good enough. Extenuating circumstances made him available.”

  Vaughn would become instrumental in UC’s rebuilding process.

  IT HAS TO START SOMEWHERE

  UC started the 2006-07 season 3-0, with victories all coming at home against Howard University, the University of Tennessee-Martin, and High Point University out of North Carolina. In the morning shoot-around before the Bearcats’ fourth game, against Wofford College from South Carolina, Cronin gave Vaughn the news he would get his first college start.

  “I didn’t tell anybody, though,” Vaughn said. “I didn’t tell my parents, who were coming to the game. I was surprised. We had a point guard named [Timmy] Crowell with us. I thought he was going to start because he was more experienced at the college level.”

  There were two surprises in the game:

  1. UC lost 91-90, only Wofford’s second victory over a Big East team in its history.

  2. Vaughn delivered an eye-opening performance. He scored 33 points (22 in the first half) and finished 9-of-17 from 3-point range. He also had six assists.

  “It was a super exciting game for me,” Vaughn said. “Everything just worked. I was running the team. I was coming off screens and popping open, shooting 3s. I felt like I couldn’t miss. That game made me realize I belonged here.

  “The first couple of games I was nervous. You don’t know if you’re going to be able to play at a big-time school like Cincinnati. Once I got the opportunity to prove I could be here, I never looked back.”

  NOT A PRANK CALL

  Around 9:30 p.m. on Selection Sunday 2008, Mike Waddell, then associate Athletic Director at UC, received a call on his cell phone that sounded like it was from the inaugural College Basketball Invitational, a new postseason tournament that would choose teams left after the NCAA and National Invitation Tournaments announced their fields.

  The battery in Waddell’s cell phone was all but dead; he had to go to his car and plug his phone into a charger in order to return the phone call.

  “I thought it was a prank,” he said.

  It wasn’t. The CBI was inviting the 13-18 Bearcats to its tournament.

  Waddell collected the information and called Thomas. Thomas told Waddell to call Cronin, who was in the middle of putting his daughter to bed.

  “I thought you had to have a winning record to get invited,” Cronin said. “I told Mike Waddell that if Mike Thomas is OK with this—we’ll never do this again—but for what these guys have done for us, if they want to play, we owe it to them. I called the guys and asked if they wanted to play. I remember how excited they were. They started running back and forth to each other’s rooms saying, ‘Hey, we can still play!’”

  Waddell called the CBI officials and said the Bearcats would play. However, UC could not host a game and insisted on playing on Wednesday instead of Tuesday.

  UC was first going to play at Penn State, but CBI officials called Waddell and said Penn State had backed out a
nd asked again if UC would host a game. The answer was still no.

  Waddell was then given four opponents from which to choose, including two that were far away. It came down to Bradley University or Wichita State University. Waddell said Cronin had him pull up statistics of both and compare 3-point percentages.

  Ultimately, UC chose to play Bradley in Peoria, Illinois. Bradley won 70-67 and UC finished 13-19. It has not had a losing season since.

  “We were a mess—all beat up and injured,” Waddell said. “We ended up losing late. We bussed there and back, and when we returned that night, Fifth Third Arena was on lockdown for a Barack Obama rally.”

  Waddell continued. “A CBI banner never quite made it up to the rafters. Mick joked that we should put a Post-It note with CBI 2008 on it next to the two national championship banners. We all laughed and agreed to never be in that position again to have to go to that event.”

  “It certainly was not where we wanted to be,” Thomas said. “Let’s face it: That’s not the standard that Cincinnati basketball was used to.”

  IMMEDIATE ADVERSITY

  In February 2007, Cashmere Wright verbally committed to attend Clemson University, during his junior year at Urban Christian Academy in Savannah, Georgia. But he decided to open up his recruiting process and six months later committed to the University of Cincinnati. Larry Davis, named a UC assistant coach in 2006, was previously the head coach at Furman University, where he had recruited Wright.

  “He was the first coach to recruit me from any school,” Wright said. “I had a relationship with him. He just seemed like a straight-shooter. He said, ‘We want you to play [at UC], but we’re not saying you’re going to come in here and start.’”

  Wright came from a graduating class of eight. The idea of being on television and playing in the Big East Conference was intriguing.

  His freshman year at UC was the first time Wright was away from home. Everything was going well until the first official day of practice in the fall 2008. The Bearcats had two workouts. In the final drill of the second practice, he was getting back on defense in a 3-on-2 drill when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.

  “It was just a simple drill, the same thing I had been doing my whole life,” Wright said. “Before that, I never even turned my ankle.”

  Within the week, he underwent surgery and would be sidelined his first collegiate season.

  “Mentally it kind of tore me down,” Wright said. “I was ready to go home.”

  He said that for two or three weeks he isolated himself and did not talk to anyone. He did not want to attend practice. He didn’t want to do anything associated with basketball. “There were days I just locked my room and sat there,” Wright said. “No class. No nothing. Just sitting around.”

  Cronin sent a student manager to Wright’s room to force him to attend practice.

  Ultimately, Gene and Patricia Wright each took a leave of absence from work to visit Cashmere in Cincinnati; they weren’t about to let him give up on his dream of college or basketball. His father told him: “You can’t come home. This is what you chose to do, so you’re going to finish it.”

  “It helped me grow up,” Wright said.

  “The first two months were horrible for me—once my parents left I was all by myself. After surgery it’s more painful because you have to go through training your muscles again. At first I couldn’t even lift my leg up. The first time I walked again I felt better. That was maybe two months later. I started to see the light ahead.”

  SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

  After the 2008-09 season ended, Vaughn said he was “about 80 percent” certain he would declare himself eligible for the NBA draft. He asked Cronin to get him the paperwork he needed to sign. Cronin said he turned in the forms to an advisory council which contacts NBA general managers and in turn reports back to the players.

  Deonta Vaughn, left, and Lance Stephenson celebrate the University of Cincinnati’s 69-66 victory over Louisville in the second round of the 2010 Big East Tournament. Stephenson (12.3 ppg) and Vaughn (11.7 ppg) were the Bearcats’ top scorers during the 2009-10 season. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

  “They came back, told him late second round at best, probably undrafted,” Cronin said. “I told him if you’re going to go, go. I’ll support you. Back then you could test the waters. You could put your name in and pull it out.”

  Cronin told Vaughn: “You need to come back for yourself if you think you need it and want to be part of our team.”

  Which is exactly what Vaughn did.

  BORN READY

  Lance Stephenson arrived at UC with more hype than any player in the Cronin era.

  The six-foot-six McDonald’s All-America player from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., was rated among the Top 15 high school players in the country. He averaged 28.9 points, 10.2 rebounds, and 3.9 assists as a senior and left high school as the top scorer in the history of New York State, with 2,946 points. Also, he had already been featured in an online documentary series called BornReadyTV.

  He became part of Cronin’s fourth UC team.

  “Knowing you were ranked high and you’re coming into a situation where you’re just learning how to play college basketball and everyone is expecting you to do great, it was tough,” Stephenson said. “That’s when I got with the coaches to try and learn the game and help me be more comfortable on the floor.”

  Cronin tried to alleviate pressure on Stephenson. He did not allow the media to talk to Stephenson until the second half of the season. He also had him room with Sean Kilpatrick, another New Yorker from White Plains Senior High School who was redshirting that season.

  “Sean was extremely mature for his age, but his game needed development,” Cronin said. “Lance was the dead opposite. He was a typical 18-year-old immature kid, but his game and his body were extremely developed.”

  “Whenever you’d see Lance, you’d see me a couple of steps away,” Kilpatrick said. “Coach would call us Frick and Frack. We were good for each other on and off the court.”

  Kilpatrick said he wanted to be a teammate, friend, and brother to Stephenson.

  “There were times I would be at his door saying, ‘Come on, we’ve got class.’ That’s what best friends do,” Kilpatrick said. “They make sure their friends don’t slack off when it comes to taking care of their business.”

  Said Stephenson: “Sean came from the same environment I came from. We bonded as soon as I came to the team. He was one of the reasons I came to Cincinnati. At an all-star game back home, he was like, ‘Man, you should come to school with me.’ We were laughing and joking about it. I am so happy I decided to go there.

  “Sean definitely helped me adjust. He was always doing the right things, making sure he did his work, making sure he went to class. He helped me focus. When you have somebody around you doing everything right, it helps. He definitely was a role model for me.”

  MODEL WORK ETHIC

  Turns out, Stephenson’s work ethic served as a model for his teammates.

  “Energy level off the charts,” Cronin said.

  “Out of all the people I have played with in my life, he may have been the hardest worker I have seen on a daily basis,” Wright said. “When you hear about Lance, you’re thinking he’s going to come in here big-headed not thinking he has to do the work. When he got here and you started to see him practice and work out and how he was always in the gym, then you see why he gets what he gets.

  “Right now he’s doing well [in the NBA] and I’m not surprised. You could see that happening when he was here. He may be the only person I’ve seen who works hard at everything he does. No matter what drill it is, you’re going to get 100 percent out of him.”

  Said Stephenson: “I just tried to be the first one in and the last one out. I had a goal. I wanted to become the best player and be in the best shape I could be.”

  That’s what makes this story so interesting:

  Stephenson recalls his
first day of conditioning when he had to run “ladders”—a series of sprints. On this particular day, the Bearcats had to run 13 ladders.

  “You get timed,” Stephenson said. “You get almost no rest. We went to 13. I couldn’t finish. I just broke down. It was my first college practice. Ever since that day, I knew I had to work harder and be in better shape. That was one of the toughest practices I ever had. I just gave up on the practice. I couldn’t even go anymore.”

  REDSHIRT YEAR

  In the fall prior to the 2009-10 season, Cronin looked at his roster and saw a glut of shooting guards. Vaughn and Stephenson were locks to start. Dion Dixon and Larry Davis were veteran reserves. Cronin just didn’t see an opportunity for Kilpatrick to get a lot of minutes.

  So he called Kilpatrick into his office and recommended that he redshirt his freshman year.

  “I was hoping he wasn’t going to say what I thought he was going to say,” Kilpatrick said. “I was really eager to play. He brought up the redshirt process. I told him no. That was my first instinct. That was one of the hardest moments of my college career.”

  “I told him, ‘Look, I don’t want you to transfer. You’re not ready to play,’” Cronin said. “These other guys are older. They were ahead of him, and he was struggling a little in practice early on. I told him, ‘I believe you’re going to be a great player, and I don’t want you to be a great player for somebody else. I’m worried if you don’t redshirt, everybody back home is going to tell you to transfer. You’re going to be the captain of my team and you’re going to be my best player. But I think this is the right move for you.’”

  Cronin gave Kilpatrick the choice, but reiterated he needed to trust him. Kilpatrick left the office and Cronin called Kilpatrick’s mother to break down the scenario.

  Kilpatrick’s mother told her son: “This might be a good thing for you. At the end of the day you don’t want to waste a year of basically not playing. Next thing you know your time is up.”