Given time, any good college coach worth his or her paycheck is going to produce better results, but not because they manage to survive the speed bumps and blind corners along the way. ADVERTISING Given time, any good college coach
Given time, any good college coach worth his or her paycheck is going to produce better results, but not because they manage to survive the speed bumps and blind corners along the way.
Rather, they grow into their jobs and figure out smarter ways to work around the troubles arriving at their door on a regular basis. The art of coaching is seeing past and navigating beyond the trouble spots that are as much a part of the college game as sweat and elbows.
This doesn’t come as a news flash to GE Coleman, the University of Hawaii at Hilo men’s basketball coach, but as he gets ready for his third season with the Vulcans, he’s dealing — for the first time as a head coach — with a real-time example of the program-shaping decisions that require immediate attention.
Tre Johnson, the 6-foot-8, 225-pound returning big man, recently signed a professional contract to play in Austria, removing the Vulcans’ top inside threat and most imposing shot blocker. The Montana State University transfer averaged 15.5 points and 7.3 rebounds as junior last year and was recognized as a second-team all-Pac West Conference select.
He was expected to be headed toward all-conference honors, at least, in his senior season before he decided after discussions with his family and Coleman that he needed to begin drawing paychecks in Austria.
That’s like a large, unseen pothole on a dark road at night. You feel the clunk, you know it isn’t good but you just have to keep going.
Don’t worry, the coach gets it. Coleman, by the way, comes from an odd family tradition in which his grandfather was called GE, his father, Gilbert Eugene, was called GE and now Gary Elee Coleman, the Vulcan’s coach, is also GE. This GE is currently invested in diagramming a wider offense, increasing the pace a bit and involving some other people to make up for the loss of Johnson.
“You can’t really replace a guy like him,” Coleman said, “but you can open up some things for others and get the contributions coming from different areas.”
Not a great situation, to lose a potential all-conference big guy just before the season, but Coleman, who grew up around the game as the son of a coach who assisted the revered Dean Nicholson (one of 17 coaches with more than 600 wins when he resigned ion 1990), at Central Washington University, has already been through worse than this in Hilo.
Two years ago he was a head coach for the first time, it was July 1, and he had four players on the roster, roughly 100 days before the first practice. The four returning players were from a team that had won six times the previous season.
“It was like a state of panic, only 24/7,” he said the other day, smiling now at the memory. “We had a roster to fill and not a lot of time to do it, so it wasn’t the best situation, but you take it and go for it.”
There were times Coleman felt he might have to take a player or two he had never seen in person, relying strictly on the advice of others. Do you take a kid now you’ve never seen on the advice of another or do you wait to confirm updates on players you have seen but aren’t completely sold on?
“There were a lot of things to think about when I would finally get a chance to sleep,” he said. “Not an ideal situation.”
But he developed a logical plan, playing the cards he had in the deck. You can only teach what you can control, so he came up with a plan, spending lots of practice time on widely different defensive arrangements.
Coleman’s confusing defenses bought his under-talented team some time. It wasn’t great, but it was all he could do. His first team won seven games, managed four conference wins, each an improvement.
Last season, the Vulcans benefited from Johnson’s presence inside, almost broke even with a 12-14 record, won nine conference games, had a home winning record for the first time in a few years and also recorded two wins against top-25 teams, the first time that has happened at UH-Hilo since 1998.
Stay tuned, it’s a bumpy road, but they have a coach familiarized with negotiating difficult terrain.
