College Coaches Cannot Be Contained
ATLANTA
— Drew Speraw, a Kansas State assistant coach, found himself in an
unenviable position near the end of the Wildcats’ tight win over the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, last Sunday: He had to
physically grab his boss.
Bruce
Weber, Kansas State’s head coach, is a defense-first guy. In the second
half, while his team was on defense against U.M.B.C., the action was on
the other end of the court from the Kansas State bench. As Weber yelled
instructions and imprecations to his players over the noise of the
crowd, he inched closer and closer to midcourt like a salmon traveling
upstream in spurts and, like plenty of other coaches, even wandered onto
the court itself sometimes.
Those
are no-nos in college basketball, grounds for a technical foul, which
is a terrible thing during a close game. Just ask Kentucky Coach John
Calipari, who got whistled for drifting beyond the coach’s box in his
team’s loss to Kansas State Thursday night.
In
Kansas State’s game last weekend, Weber had already been warned.
Fortunately, Speraw is used to it, and he knows the responsibility that
goes with his position by Weber on the bench.
“I’m the closest one,” Speraw said after Sunday’s game in Charlotte, N.C.
On Wednesday, Weber said that while he is a frequent migrant down the sideline, one boundary is clear.
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“My thing is, if you yell at the refs, you should get a technical,” he said.
But
, he defended his intention — leading his team to victory — and actions
— shouting, pacing, pushing the limits of the coach’s box.
“If we’re coaching our guys,” he said, “that’s what we’re paid to do.”
The
N.C.A.A. doesn’t necessarily disagree. This is the first season of an
expanded coach’s box, which is the area the head coach may patrol during
play. Vigorous sideline generals received an extra 10 feet this season;
they may now roam from the baseline all the way to a mark 38 feet away.
That’s a midrange jump shot from midcourt, which is 47 feet from the
baseline.
“I have had officials tell me that it was expanded for me,” Weber said.
College
basketball coaches are easy subjects for ridicule. N.B.A. fans scoff at
their hyperactivity and point to professional coaches’ comparatively
calm mien, even though N.B.A. coaches may stray as much as 43 feet from
the baseline. Casual observers wonder why these blustering, nattily
dressed bombasts can’t stay cool.
The
college coaches say they deserve sympathy. Their charges are younger
than most players in the N.B.A. Their teams can feel especially far away
while on defense, seeking crucial late-game stops out of vocal range
for even the loudest coach. Most coaches are former players with decades
of experience who now watch mostly helplessly as post-adolescents try
to implement months of training in a few essential seconds. Their antics
also make for great TV.
Yet
they have to stay inside an invisible box during games or risk a
penalty that could tangibly hurt their team. The correct call for a
coach’s box violation after a warning is a Class B technical foul,
giving the other team one free throw and the ball, inbounded where it
was when the foul was called.
“I
have a young team, and sometimes they don’t talk,” Alabama Coach Avery
Johnson said last week between first- and second-round games. “You can
hear it in my voice. I’ve got to talk for them. I got warned yesterday,
and, probably, going to get warned tomorrow.”
Despite plenty of yelling and straying, Johnson and Alabama lost to Duke Sunday night.
In
a world where referees “T-up” coaches for far more subjectively
determined violations, there is an argument that the coach’s box is
extraneous, even condescending. Anecdotally, there appear to be few T’s
actually called (the N.C.A.A. said it did not keep the statistic).
Kansas Coach Bill Self complained that he had been whistled once this
year “for sticking my toe two inches outside the box.”
“We
represent universities,” South Carolina Coach Frank Martin said in a
phone interview. “We’re grown men. We’re employed. We get treated like
we’re immature. We’ve got to be in this small little confined area.
We’re not going to go to the other bench and instigate something.”
This
understanding was partly why the box was expanded, according to Art
Hyland, secretary-rules editor of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball rules
committee. It is also why referees are instructed to first give the
bench a warning.
“People felt empathy that the coaches really needed a little more room in order to do their job correctly,” Hyland said.
An
extra 10 feet turns out to be a lot, Self said Thursday in Omaha before
the Jayhawks’ round of 16 game. He thought it was a “pretty
insignificant change” when it was announced last June, but now that it
has been in place for a season, he said, “It’s been a great rule.”
“You feel like you can actually have a little bit more communication on the other end of the floor,” he said.
On
Wednesday, before Thursday night’s violation, Calipari blamed the tight
strictures of the old box for one of the most infamous coach’s box
technical fouls in the college game.
In
1992, Calipari’s Massachusetts team was playing Kentucky in the round
of 16 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The Minutemen had made up most of
a double-digit deficit late in the second half when a referee called a
technical foul on Calipari for a coach’s box violation. The referee “was
50 feet away from the UMass bench when he called it,” The Baltimore Sun
reported.
The call swung the momentum back the Wildcats’ way, and they won. (They
lost the next game to Duke on Christian Laettner’s famous
buzzer-beater.)
“At
the Spectrum where they had all those lines,” Calipari said. “I’m
standing there and the guy calls a T from 90 feet away. ‘You’re out of
the box.’ And I really wasn’t out of the box, but it looked like it.”
Calipari had no such defense or excuse Thursday night.
In
practice, there is frequently a live-and-let-live dynamic between
referees and hyperactive coaches. Warnings are issued; actual fouls,
less so.
Ed
Hightower, a retired referee, said officials often find that assistant
coaches are better interlocutors for conveying the warnings. Speraw,
Weber’s assistant, said that the referees had spoken to the staff at
halftime of the U.M.B.C. game.
When
warning coaches that they were in danger of violating this rule,
Hightower said he would often say, “You don’t want to make me do
something I don’t want to do.”
“Ninety
percent of the time, I would say, the coaches are just so caught up in
the moment, coaching their kids,” Hightower said. “It’s an emotional
sport.”
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