Judged by the common physical labels used to define basketball players, Dena Evans comes up, shall we say, a little short.  I never saw her play – but if she played with the passion, purpose and intellect that she teaches, she lit up a lot of folks.  And her basketball pedigree – Texas player of the year as a high school senior, three trips to the Final Four in four years at Virginia and professional stints in Australia and New Zealand – proves this beyond question.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Since the USA finished sixth in the world games 13 months ago, I’ve been on a crusade to find out where we’ve gone astray with youth basketball in America.  I’m ashamed to admit that as a high school coach, it has been a recent epiphany that without precise passing, catching and pristine footwork skills, it really doesn’t matter what offense one is running … the kids will turn the ball over in record numbers.

Somewhere, the simple skills of how to think the game and play the game have been trumped by the often-used word that makes college coaches drip at the mouth: athleticism.

My quest took me to the Point Guard College.  And, believe me, when they say college, they really mean college.  It’s a basketball baccalaureate.  It’s a finishing school where you learn all the things that good players know, but someone forgot to tell you.  It is for serious players who want knowledge that will change their game.  If basketball is just a hobby, or you’ve never been called a … gym rat … cross Point Guard College (PGC) off your list of camps.

Evans took over PGC from the late Dick DeVenzio.  His basketball treatise, “STUFF Good players should know,” is esteemed by most players and coaches as a sacred text.  It is the rosetta stone that unlocks the inner workings of how basketball must be played.  Dr. James Naismith, as he relaxes alongside the Apostle Peter, is reading a copy of Stuff.  It really is heavenly wisdom.

After a standout high school career in central Texas, Dena marched off to Charlottesville, Va., to play for the Lady Cavaliers.  She came ever so close to winning a national championship but was denied by Stanford and Tennessee.  Ironically, she strongly considered Stanford as a high school senior.

When she was about to try out for a berth on the USA national team, she wrote DeVenzio a letter thanking him for what his book had meant to her as a player.  That letter spawned a teacher/student relationship.  “Aside from my Dad,” says Dena, “I learned more about basketball in the six weeks that I spent with Dick than I had learned from any other person ever.”

After DeVenzio’s untimely death at the age of 52, Dena embraced the mantle and began carrying his simple message about ‘thinking the game’ and ‘playing the game’ to a wider audience.

I’ll tell you when it hit me that this was no basketball clinic, but really, a college —we were in a lecture hall at Texas Women’s University— 29 miles north of Fort Worth on I-35.  It’s one of those tiered rooms that seat about 100 or so folks.  The audience is basketball players—white kids and black kids, mostly, more boys than girls-- ranging from 13 to 19 years old.  Dena lectured on basketball for a solid hour and a half.  I had full view of the audience.  There was no nodding off and certainly no sleeping.  Every kid was feverishly taking notes.  Boys from towns with names like Big Springs and girls from Choctaw Indian reservations were filling notebooks with words and diagrams.  When Dena spoke, the students were silent, hanging on her words.  This is a basketball coaches’ Nirvana.

I had a Star Trek moment:  I wanted to beam one teacher from each high school represented in the room.  What they would see would energize them as educators.  There was no short attention span here—everybody was alert – and, get this, it was right after lunch.

My father loved hoops.  Of course, he spent so much time working, he rarely watched or played it.  He did, however, offer me this truth:  Basketball is such a simple game, one needs help to misunderstand it.  It is us – the coaches - who complicate matters by wanting to show how much we know, often at the expense of muddying the waters and obfuscating the elegant simplicity of the game.

Dena avoids overcomplicating the game the same way great history teachers talk about the past – they make it come alive ... they make it real, vibrant, emotional ... they create situations and place you inside.  It might be distant, but it is neither abstract, nor mundane.

Here is a Dena story:

“How many of you know that Adolf Hitler, back in the ’20s, was a young basketball coach?  That’s what he was doing before he got into genocide and trying to take over the world.  He believed in pressing defenses —the 2-2-1, the 1-2-1-1, and the 1-3-1—all that stuff.  He was so obsessed with it that he wrote a book entitled ‘Blitzkrieg Basketball—101 Pressing Defenses.’

His mission was to take over the basketball world.  In fact, he was beating everybody—trapping teams into submission and winning by 30 and 40 points.  No one wanted to play Hitler’s team.

“There was another young basketball coach in that decade that began to study ‘Blitzkrieg Basketball.’  His name was Albert Einstein.  This was before he went on to become famous for the theory of relativity and splitting the atom.  After studying Hitler’s book, he decided ‘Blitzkrieg Basketball’ was a bunch of B.S.  Einstein concluded that all zone presses, no matter what cute names you call them, existed on the same foundational principle.  And, once you understood that principle, you could violate any press or trap at any time.  Here is that principle …”

I was riveted from the word go.  (I won’t share Einstein’s theory about handling pressure with you, but let’s just say I’m getting more layups off presses than I ever have before.)  Hitler, Einstein, and how to attack pressure defenses mixed into the same conversation.  How can you not remember it?  What a beautiful way to reach kids – take something they’ve heard about ... something they know about ... and blend them to teach a new concept.  Nothing earth-shattering, just simple stuff demonstrated to perfection.  And when you add it to your game, Presto… you’re a player with knowledge.  You’re someone who can compete.

Basketball coaches exist in a Twilight Zone between paranoia and an uncanny obsession with finding the next “big thing.”  Five years ago, it was the backdoor cut and Pete Carrill’s Princeton offense…three years ago it was Tex Winter’s Triangle offense (popularized by Phil Jackson but created during the Harry Truman administration).  This year, it’s Jim Boeheim and the Syracuse 2-3 zone (popularized, possibly, by Phog Allen—but refined by John Chaney).

           COACHSPEAK

ACT I, SCENE I. A BENNIGAN’S RESTAURANT - NIGHT

COACH JOHNSON AND COACH SMITH BUMP INTO EACH OTHER AT A BENNIGANS — COACH JOHNSON IS LEAVING AND COACH SMITH IS ARRIVING.

           COACH JOHNSON:

(STARING AT THE WHITE ADIDAS JACKET WITH THE SCHOOL LOGO PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED IN GOLD — THEY CAN’T BE SPONSORING HIS PROGRAM — HOW COME THEY’RE NOT SPONSORING OURS).

Hey coach, how ya’ doin – I heard you guys are gonna be real good this year.

           COACH SMITH:

(GRIPPED WITH FEAR... HE’S THINKING:  WHAT DOES HE KNOW THAT I DON’T KNOW.)

Uh, Coach, I don’t know where you heard that from.  We’re real young, we’re gonna struggle all the way through conference.  There’s only a couple of people on the schedule that we can beat.  It’s you guys that everyone’s talking about.

           COACH JOHNSON:

(HEART SINKING IN HIS CHEST...WHO HAS HE BEEN TALKING TO...WHO TOLD HIM THAT)

I thought early on we might have a shot at being OK, but, you know, we’ve already lost a couple of kids to grades and another kid tells me his parents are thinking about sending to a different school.  Plus, you know everybody else got better this year.

           COACH SMITH:

(RACKING HIS BRAINS, FURROWING HIS BROW...EVERYBODY’S BETTER?  WE’RE NOT BETTER, WE’RE WORSE.  I WONDER WHO HE’S TALKING ABOUT.)

Coach, I know what you’re talking about, Washington Tech has that new kid that transferred in from Rancho Cucamonga.  I heard he can really go.

           COACH JOHNSON:

(SHOCKED, HE KNEW THEY WERE TRYING TO GET THE NEW KID, BUT HE DIDN’T KNOW HE HAD ACTUALLY ENROLLED.)

You’re right ... he is good … what are they doing to get kids like him?  I wish we had somebody that good.  (Pause) Good seeing you, Coach, I better get on out to the car.

They shake hands, but avoid eye contact.

           END OF EPISODE

It is this simmering cocktail of paranoia, and the quest for the next new thing, that creates an environment where kids can respond to someone like Dena.

She takes the game back to fundamentals with demonstrations of good/bad examples, credible, insightful commentary on why things work and why they don’t, and lots of opportunities to practice the correct behaviors and get feedback along the way.  Moreover, it’s bookended with the coolest mental tag lines I’ve ever heard.  She reinforces the concepts with visual reminders like ‘hunt the paint,’ catch and peek, and, my personal favorite, ‘boom: one, two.  (Like all good coaches, I have stolen every one of her phrases and sprinkle them throughout my conversations).  The long-term effectiveness of the mental tag lines is that they are linked to a specific and executable behavior.  It’s all about action.  It’s about learning to think so that you can learn to do.  If Dena taught math in a public school, everyone in her class would score 800 on the math portion of the SAT.  If she was in charge of the Post-War strategy in Iraq, the troops would’ve been home by Flag Day.

“Great players take pride in sacrificing for the game,” Dena said, “they take pride in getting up forty-five minutes earlier to work on ballhandling or shoot an extra 300 jump shots.  You can’t get extraordinary performance from ordinary effort.  I ask the kids in this camp one question:   Are you practicing according to your aspirations?”

Forget “Just Do It.”  If I owned a shoe company, that would be my slogan:  “Are you practicing according to your aspirations?”  It is not didactic, but illuminative.

One of my best friends played basketball in Brazil for seven seasons and Argentina for five.  I’m sure that Buenos Aires was culture shock, because he grew up in a suburb of Waco, Texas.  I think it was one of those Texas towns with a marker that said, Population, 1124: Water Supply Approved.  He said that his high school basketball coach turned his life around and was responsible for him going to college.  He said his high school coach taught him that being smart and fundamentally sound was the greatest thank-you he could offer to God for blessing him with a 6-foot-8 frame.  He said that his high school coach told him that you could learn about life between the lines of this 74x50 piece of hardwood.

I thought about my friend’s high school coach as Dena began to talk:

“The purpose of Point Guard College is about basketball, but it is bigger than basketball.  There are life lessons that I want to impart to kids.  You’ve got to shape your environment and make everyone around you better.  That’s a personal choice that you make.  When you understand great basketball teams, you understand that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  You come to know that the game is bigger than just one person … the game is selfless.”

Basketball is full of paradoxes:  Be quick, but don’t hurry.  Race, don’t rush.  Offense wins games, but defense wins championships.

One learns the game by playing the game.  Structure, as a foundation to learning the game is good.  Too much structure – like 15-year-olds playing 60 and 70 games over the course of a summer— can be restrictive moving toward onerous.

You learn the game on the playground, at the rec center, in someone’s driveway, or shooting at a basket that’s attached to a barn.  You start off one-on-one, then two-on-two, and move to three-on-three.  That’s where you learn to compete.  That’s where you learn to respect the game.  Being alone with the game creates a brooding sense of intimacy with the game.  Like a good marriage, intimacy is forged in time spent alone with each other.  I am not dissin’ structured basketball experiences – I am advocating a more balanced approach.

“My whole life,” Dena says, “ I just loved basketball.  When I was a kid, it was about being the best that I could be ... when I was in college, I woke up every day thinking about what I could do that day that would help me win a national championship.  I loved to feel the ball in my hands, I loved the sound the ball makes in an empty gym.  Today, it’s about learning more about the game so that I can teach the game.  I love how kids send me an e-mail when they get back and play their first game after being here.  I love seeing the light come on with kids.  I love when I get an e-mail that says, ‘Coach, this really works, ’ and lastly, I love Dick DeVenzio.”

The 2002 World games officially ended our basketball Age of Innocence.  Argentina and Yugoslavia ushered in the New World order of global hoops.  We’re losing our battle as world leaders in basketball because we’ve lost our way.  Sure, we’ll easily race to gold in Athens in 2004.  And, I want us to.  I just hope that we realize that in winning the battle, we’re in danger of losing the war.  The farther we stray from the simple approach of teaching fundamentals, and demanding excellence in their execution, the more sixth place finishes that lie in wait.

I never met Dick DeVenzio in person, but I feel like I know him through his writings.  I honor him because of his commitment to the game.  He’s smiling now, knowing that his protégé, Dena Evans, is keeping the fire burning.  Thanks Dick and thanks Dena, for creating a place where kids can learn to “think the game” so they can “play the game.”

The Original Dick DeVenzio/Dena Evans Point Guard College

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