MEN’S COLLEGE BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT RESULTS

March 2010 edition of the Arizona Men’s basketball Newsletter.

As conference, NCAA and NIT/WNIT tournaments get started… this little gem helps us keep it all in perspective.

The Strength of a symbol

When Ross Deutsch read the advertisement, it seemed too good to be true.

For a fee, he could go to Las Vegas with some friends and attend Michael Jordan’s Flight School, essentially a summer camp for basketball-crazed adults. It was a place to live out one’s hardwood fantasies for a few days and receive instruction from NBA and college coaches, Hall of Famers among them.

Mike Krzyzewski and Ross Deutsch first met in 1997 at a basketball camp in Las Vegas.

It was 1997, and Deutsch was working in the financial world in Chicago. He was 36; he had the money and an interested friend; and his wife, Mindy, had no objection. He was certainly passionate about basketball and, as a Chicago native, had a love for all things Michael Jordan. He had three young sons — Rory was the oldest at 6; Robbie and Rickey were younger — but it was for only a few days, and besides, what kid wouldn’t get a kick out of his dad playing hoops for a few days as though he were a star?

A few days later, Ross and his friend David Duckler found themselves in Las Vegas on a Bally’s court. They had just finished a few drills and were attending a makeshift draft where they were to be divided into their teams, selected by the coaches in attendance. Across the court, Duke coach and fellow native Chicagoan Mike Krzyzewski, already a two-time national champion, evaluated Deutsch and Duckler and decided to go local, selecting the two friends for his team.

Neither Deutsch nor Krzyzewski knew at the time that those fortuitous circumstances would mark the beginning of a lifelong friendship, that the two would bond in a way that few men do in adulthood. They were new acquaintances then, player and coach for a few days, but Krzyzewski would soon be supporting Deutsch through something no parent can ever imagine after looking into the eyes of a healthy child at birth.

“There were talks that we would have that you don’t have very much in your life, and for the two people involved, you become brothers,” Krzyzewski said. “There’s no way you don’t have a bond for life.”

The connection began during the first game at the camp. Their team was getting smoked, and when they gathered for a halftime talk, Coach K let them know what he really thought of their performance.

“He ripped us pretty good,” Deutsch said.

“I blew them out like they were my own team,” Krzyzewski said.

It worked. They came back and beat a team coached by Gene Keady and Eddie Sutton. But as soon as the game ended, Krzyzewski felt guilty. This wasn’t really his Duke team. These 35-and-older men had paid thousands of dollars to play, not to get yelled at for 10 minutes. Or had they?

“He starts apologizing to us for getting on us, but we told him, ‘No, that’s what we wanted,’” Deutsch said. “We wanted to be treated like we were Duke players.”

Not everyone at the camp felt the same. In one instance, Deutsch said, Larry Brown was railing at a player when the camper interrupted the Hall of Famer and said, “Coach, I’m just a dentist.”

“We ended up winning the whole thing,” Krzyzewski said. “Ross and I had one of those player-coach relationships.”

“It was at that moment that I knew there was an instant connection of a friendship,” Deutsch said.

Coach K remembers it fondly.

“I saw these guys, and they were like the Jewish Columbos of Highland Park and Skokie,” Krzyzewski said. “We just hit it off. There was enough of an age difference that they could see me as their coach. They were genuine guys. And we won, too. We weren’t supposed to win; [we] had an upset, and it ended up being a cool thing. We ate together and went out a little bit. We got to know each other as people. We found out we were very similar guys, with very similar family and friends, and once those family and friends met each other, it was easy.”

When the camp ended, players and coaches went back to their normal lives and daily routines. Ross went back to Chicago and his family and returned to the financial world. Krzyzewski headed back to Durham, N.C., to coach Duke.

And then Ross and Mindy’s world stopped.

It was February 1998, six months after the camp ended. Deutsch’s 6-year-old son, Rory, had gone to a park district activity class on a Saturday, where he played tennis. On Sunday, he complained that his arm was hurting. Initially, Ross and Mindy weren’t overly concerned. What parents haven’t heard some complaining from their child after physical activity?

The following day, Deutsch came home from work, and as usual, Rory wanted to hang out with him, sit on his lap and work on his computer. He tried to lift his right hand to move the mouse. But it didn’t work. His left wrist went limp, and he couldn’t make a fist. He couldn’t move his wrist without raising his arm.

Ross and Mindy immediately called a friend nearby who was a pediatrician. They were told to bring Rory to the doctor. Rory got a physical exam, and while testing his strength, doctors were concerned enough to call a neurologist. Next stop was Children’s Memorial Hospital. Anxiety, fear and horror were all filling their heads. Various possibilities were being thrown around, from a tumor to a virus to a blockage to a stroke.

Then the brain scan came back.

“It was over these next 40 hours where his symptoms, before our very eyes, the difficulty swallowing or breathing and his right side was dragging,” Ross said, his voice trailing a bit. “The tumor was in the area of the brain stem. It was in the area that controls life’s necessary functions. They did the MRI and explained to us how aggressive a tumor it was.”

The Deutsch family was told the tumor was inoperable. Like an hourglass filled with sand, Rory’s life would begin to slip away, grain by grain.

Rory was diagnosed Feb. 13, 1998, Krzyzewski’s birthday. The occasions aren’t comparable, but the date is burned into Ross’ memory nonetheless. He can’t forget it.

“The problem with many of these illnesses is that they come back, and when they come back, they come back with a vengeance,” Ross said. “You couldn’t radiate at his age and in the location. So we were told to bring him home.”

To this day, Deutsch isn’t sure how Krzyzewski found out about Rory’s illness. Krzyzewski said someone from the camp contacted him to let him know. He called to see what he could do, putting the Deutsches in contact with the Duke Medical Center and Dr. Henry Friedman, a brain tumor specialist, to see whether there was any other treatment. They were told the medical professionals were doing all they could.

Krzyzewski and Deutsch would talk a few times over the next couple of months before Deutsch went into a shell. Rory was in his bedroom, a hospice-like situation. He couldn’t communicate. Mere months after the diagnosis, after Rory had turned 7 years old, he was going to die.

Deutsch sat at Rory’s bedside in an almost catatonic state, watching his firstborn’s life fade away. He wasn’t answering the phone during this time. But one time it rang and, for some reason, he picked it up. It was Krzyzewski.

“He said: ‘Ross, in basketball we define success by winning and losing, but with Rory, with this sickness, you don’t define it with a cure or no cure. The definition will be how you handle it. You have handled the most horrific illness as winners.’ It was a little thing. And it wasn’t like I needed to hear this from Mike Krzyzewski. But it was the perfect thing to hear from him at the perfect time.”

The next day, Ross and Mindy established the Rory David Deutsch Foundation for brain tumor research.

“I think when we started talking, he felt that I would tell him the truth,” Krzyzewski said. “He knew he could be completely honest and forthright and straightforward about everything. It was very emotional stuff. We are really, really close friends.”

Ross didn’t hold back when he would talk to Krzyzewski. If he had to cry, he would let it all out.

“He could show weakness to me, emotion that he couldn’t show as a man to his family because he had to be strong,” Krzyzewski said. “I can remember telling him for us to be strong together. I told him to let it out. I said whatever you need to let it out, let’s get through this together. …

“How do you recover from that? How do you make something positive from that, or does it ruin your life? Ross and Mindy, the way they’ve honored Rory’s life and memory is to keep it alive and talk about it,” Krzyzewski said. “To me it’s beyond belief. I don’t know if I could. I tell him he’s a mensch. He’s a mensch, no question about it.”

“Mensch” means “person” in Yiddish, but the figurative meaning is much deeper. It’s someone you would want to befriend and be with because you feel genuine when you’re in their presence. A mensch is said to make others feel good.

Being with Deutsch, talking to him, going through the hell he had to endure as a friend, and sharing an enriching relationship with him through the foundation has touched Krzyzewski beyond words.

Rory was born March 9, 1991. He died July 22, 1998, five months after his diagnosis.

“It’s the worst thing that a parent can experience — the loss of a child,” Krzyzewski said. “The foundation has become a huge part of the healing process. There still is a healing process.”

For Deutsch, the healing process began with a commitment and a hope to find a cure for brain cancer. Needing a symbol, something to carry with him and show the world who Rory was, he came up with the idea of a pin. Engraved with a picture of Rory with a baseball cap bearing his name, the pin is engraved with the words of the foundation he and Mindy started: “Rory Foundation For Brighter Tomorrows.” They wear it every day.

A month after Rory died, Deutsch, encouraged by Mindy, returned to the Jordan camp in Las Vegas and reconnected with Krzyzewski. He would return every year until 2004, playing for Krzyzewski three times and actually serving as an assistant coach in ‘04 after a hamstring injury prevented him from playing.

In August 2001, Mindy and Ross were having dinner with Mike and Mickie Krzyzewski at a restaurant in Las Vegas when Coach K told Ross he wanted to do something to honor Rory’s memory. With the help of the Krzyzewskis’ daughter Debbie, they planned a fundraising event in Chicago at the Standard Club. On Oct. 4, 2002, 400 people attended the charity dinner to hear Krzyzewski speak.

At the conclusion of his speech, Coach K held up the pin that Deutsch had given him and talked about pride and what it meant to be a part of something bigger than you. To achieve that, he said, you need something symbolic.

Coach K always has Rory's pin on his lapel while he coaches.

“It needs a uniform, it needs a letter jacket, it needs something,” Krzyzewski said during his speech. “What I’m going to do is something very symbolic and I’m not going to tell the press about it or anything else. What I would like to do and what I’m going to do, and we get on TV more often a lot or more than ‘Friends,’ or whatever. I’m not saying anything about it, except my team will know. If you turn the game on for even one minute — and they show the sidelines for every game we play — I’m going to have on my lapel Rory’s pin.”

For the first time since the fundraiser in Chicago, Krzyzewski and Deutsch agreed to talk about the pin. Since its inception in 1998, Rory’s foundation has raised roughly $7 million, according to Deutsch, without any corporate sponsorship. It has no salaried employees and operates solely through the generosity of its volunteers. There is no plan to change that.

Ross and Mindy also serve on the advisory board of directors for the brain center at Duke Medical Center and are involved in causes close to the Krzyzewskis, such as the Emily Krzyzewski Center in Durham, an organization named after Coach K’s mother that is dedicated to inspiring economically disadvantaged students in the area.

Rory would have been a freshman in college this year. Deutsch has become a coach himself, serving as an assistant for the past eight years at Highland Park, a high school in a North Chicago suburb. He recently took his two sons, Robbie, now 17, and Rickey, now 14, to Durham for the Virginia Tech game. Ross and Mindy also have two girls — 10-year-old Reggi and 8-year-old Roxie Cameron, who is named after Cameron Indoor Stadium.

“I can’t say enough about Mike and Mickie’s friendship and love,” Deutsch said. “I was 36, and he was 50. It was 13 years ago. You don’t think that you’re going to make new friends at a certain age. We all face our own adversity at some point, and to me what will define you is how you respond. From that moment, Mindy and I decided we were going to do whatever we could. No family should have to hear those words: ‘Your son has a brain tumor and a very, very bad one.’ As long as we’re able, as long as we’re able to dedicate support and research, we will. There are people now who know Rory, who never knew Rory.”

Krzyzewski won another national title in 2001, his third. His team won Olympic gold in 2008 in Beijing. But he swears that he found better perspective in life after Rory’s death and the experience with Deutsch.

“That’s why I wear the pin on my jacket,” Krzyzewski said. “I’ve worn it every game since because I’m proud of it. It puts the game in perspective. How can a game ever be that difficult? It can’t ever be more difficult than what the Deutsch team went through. Wearing this pin is one of those things that makes you feel good about being a human being.”

Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com. The Rory David Deutsch Foundation can be visited here.

Here’s Charlie’s latest projection through games as of Feb. 21.  Scroll over a team name for more analysis. Records reflect Division I competition only.

Automatic bids are in CAPS.

This is the absolute best time of the year for talking basketball with everyone.

Bids by Conference is going to make some people edgy…

• Big 12 (8)
• ACC (7)
• Big East (7)
• SEC (6)
• Big Ten (3)
• Atlantic 10 (3)
• Pac-10 (3)
• America East (2)
• Sun Belt (2)
• Colonial (2)

I love the ACC, was part of it for 4 years.  It is arguably one of the Top 2 Conferences in the country year after year… but, 7 bids is high!  I say 5.  UNC and Maryland are all questions and NC State is on the cusp.  Each of those teams are currently 5-7 or 6-6 in the ACC.  If you allow all of them in, how then do you say no to Wake Forest and maybe Boston College?  Both are either 5-7 or 6-6 and Wake Forest is a head of UNC and Maryland in the ACC standings.  don’t go to the RPI and Strength of Schedule… it’s all comparable.

Why not give the Atlantic 10, Colonial or Mountain West a 4th, 3rd or 2nd team in, respectively.   Maybe give one or two of the MAAC, MAC, America East or Missouri Valley and 2nd team in.

Everyone screams for more parity in Women’s Basketball.  You can’t have parity if the Top 5 Conferences hold 31 of the 64 spots in the NCAA tournament every year.  Those coaches will never be able to consistently convince (recruit) top prospects to play in conferences where only one team goes to the NCAA’s year in and year out.

We’ll see…

Major Grassroots Changes Coming (UPDATED)

by Adam Zagoria

Grassroots basketball will undergo some major changes again this summer.

Reebok will not hold its annual Reebok All-American Camp in Philadelphia in July because of a “change in marketing strategy at the grassroots level,” said a source with direct knowledge.

“It just means that college coaches will have to work a little harder to see high-level talent play against high-level talent under one roof, “  the source said.

Chris Rivers ran the Reebok All-American Camp for two summers as an extension of Sonny Vaccaro’s old Reebok ABCD Camp at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. That camp featured legendary grassroots players like LeBron James, O.J. Mayo, Sebastian Telfair and Lance Stephenson.

When Vaccaro retired from he sneaker business in 2007, Rivers, pictured above with Mayo, moved the camp to Philadelphia University in 2007 and ‘08. Pat Coombs ran the event in 2009.

Last year’s Reebok camp included uncommitted junior LaQuinton Ross, Joe Jackson (Memphis) and Patric Young (Florida).

Rivers left his position as Director of Basketball at Reebok and now works for adidas, for whom he worked before 2003.

Adidas will still hold its annual adidas Nations event in August for the classes of 2011 and 2012. The site has yet to be determined.

The other major change on the grassroots horizon involves the LeBron James Nike Skill Academy.

A new set of NCAA rules could be passed in April which would prohibit any grassroots event from behind held on Division I campuses that did not have a contract in place before Oct. 29, 2009.

The NCAA recently voted on this matter and decided to table it until April, when it will be voted on again.

If the rule is passed, numerous events, including the LeBron camp at the University of Akron, would not be permitted on Division I campuses.

Numerous other such events — the Bob Gibbons Tournament of Champions, previously held at Duke, North Carolina and N.C. State; the It Takes 5ive event held at Cincinnati; and the Pittsburgh Jam Fest held at Pitt — also wouldn’t  be permitted at those locations.

No word from Nike just yet on where the LeBron camp might take place.

Graham Hays does an exceptional job of capturing “who” Jim is and what his relationship is with his players.  As you read this one thing jumps off the page… the article is being written about him and all he talks about is his players, the university and how fortunate he is to be part of their existence.  Humility.  This isn’t just because Jim had a brush with death, it is who he has been since I met him in 1983.

There is no question that if Jim had stayed at Marquette they would be the “UConn” of the Big East as well.  Jim has the plan and the process and Dayton is his vehicle.  Enjoy this.

Jabir making most of second chance

Five seasons after dealing with cardiac issues, coach has Dayton on brink of NCAAs

By Graham Hays ESPN.com

HANOVER, N.H. — Kendel Ross embodies just about everything Jim Jabir believed Dayton women’s basketball could be when the school gave the veteran coach a second chance seven years ago. But for any of those plans to come to fruition, Jabir first needed to receive a second chance at something far more substantial than a profession.

Tim G. Zechar/Icon SMI Jim Jabir hasn't taken a team to the NCAA tournament since 1995 (Marquette), but his Flyers are 17-5 overall and 5-2 in the A-10.

Dayton’s coach admits he’s harder on Ross, now a senior, than just about any player on a Flyers team that remains in control of its postseason fate despite a loss last weekend at Atlantic 10 leader Xavier. Coming out of Canada four seasons ago, Ross was, in Jabir’s words, “the first kid we shouldn’t have got that we got.” He expects excellence out of her, and her mistakes pain him more.

For lack of a more accessible comparison, she is Dayton’s Shane Battier. She does everything that shows up in the box score and half a dozen things that don’t. For better and occasionally worse when stubborn will meets stubborn will, she has a motor and a competitive streak that will not shut off. Tell her you need 15 rebounds in a game and the result is predictable.

“She’s gonna get you 15,” Jabir said. “It’s like clockwork; she’s going to do what you ask her to do. Or she’ll die trying. So it’s this great intensity, it’s this intangible — this will is tremendous. I mean, she’s got this will — and sometimes it works against her, but for the most part it’s been beneficial to us. And I tell her this all the time, too, I love her and I hate her. I mean, she’s so stubborn, you know what I mean? I literally love her and I hate her. There are days I want to kill her and days I can’t get enough of her.”

Mostly though — and this is the most important part — there are just days.

Live a little and die a little. That’s the life of a coach, for whom a job comes down to 30 or more annual public assessments stretching from late fall through spring. It’s an agonizingly brief opportunity to show what all the unseen hours practicing, recruiting and teaching were about. It’s also a painfully prolonged grind through which to experience emotions rising and falling with every executed offensive set and every turnover, let alone every win and every loss.

Wednesday’s game against Charlotte was No. 650 in Jabir’s career, ample opportunity for a lot of winning and a lot of losing. For a long time, there was more of the former than the latter in Jabir’s case. After a successful stint at Siena, he led Marquette to back-to-back 20-win seasons and a pair of NCAA tournament appearances. But when the Big East came calling, he took the job at Providence, a rebuilding project that might as well have been Pompei by basketball standards.

And he lost — a lot. The Friars won more than 11 games just twice in his six seasons. A career coaching record that had stood 37 games over .500 when he left Marquette was three games below the break-even mark when he and Providence parted ways after the 2001-02 season.

Enter Dayton, which eschewed up-and-coming for down-and-out when it hired him.

“I work really, really hard at this, and I love my job and I love Dayton,” Jabir said. “I love that they gave me a chance. I was kind of a down-and-out coach. I left Marquette when it was great and stupidly left like a top-15 recruiting class, top-12 recruiting class, went to Providence, worked my butt off for six years and couldn’t get it turned around. And then I’m kind of like, ‘OK, I’m a used car salesman.’

“I mean, I lost for six years at Providence, so I go to Colorado for a year [as an assistant coach] and then [former and current Dayton athletic directors] Ted Kissell and Tim Wabler gave me a chance. They recycled me; they gave me a chance, so I’ll be forever in debt to them for that. I knew what I was capable of; I just needed a place to prove it and they gave me an opportunity.”

The Flyers were in better shape than Providence was when Jabir took that job, but they weren’t an Atlantic 10 juggernaut by any stretch. They had just one winning season in the decade preceding his arrival. His first team went 3-25. And before Jabir could coach a game his second season, he found himself asking assistant Greg Williams for a ride to the hospital after suffering chest pains. He was diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia (a genetic condition, not specifically related to job stress) and had to have a defibrillator implanted to shock his heart back to a normal rhythm when necessary. He also had to take a leave of absence from the bench and face the prospect of losing something far more meaningful than a game or a job.

“I really thought, without getting too dramatic, I thought I was going to die,” Jabir said. “It’s a really, very lonely experience to go through. I was in the hospital for about three or four weeks, and in that process, it really kind of felt like I was going to lose everything I really, really loved.”

First and foremost, that meant his family at home. But it also meant his basketball family.

“All I could think about was losing my family and then feeling like I wasn’t going to get to do this thing,” Jabir said of turning around Dayton. “Because I knew what we could be. And I felt remorseful that I wasn’t going to get a chance to finish what we started.”

He did get the chance, returning to the bench after a month away and helping lead the team to a nine-win improvement and a 12-16 record. But despite a 17-12 record in the 2005-06 season, Jabir said it wasn’t until the last three years that he felt his players embraced and took ownership of the culture he wanted. That coincided with the arrival of Ross for the 2006-07 season and a talented freshman class last season that quickly learned to follow her lead.

“I feel like he demands excellence,” Ross said. “Not just in how you do stuff but it’s all about hard work. I think that is kind of like the heart of our program.”

Ross is a talented writer who pens a blog on the team’s Web site, but this was not a case of well-placed irony. From the outside, there aren’t any signs of Jabir’s brush with mortality. He’s as animated as any other coach, particularly when he and Ross knock heads. But even a guy who once viewed himself as a pick-and-roll Willie Lohman and who owns a stubborn streak every bit as wide as his Canadian import’s had to take stock of his affairs.

“It’s weird — like I have a defibrillator and a pacemaker, so I’ve been shocked a couple of times,” Jabir said. “And I’m very, very, very fortunate because I’ve not been shocked as often as other people. I think about, like I’ll be driving too fast down a highway and I’m thinking, ‘I could get shocked like right now.’ So that’s always in my head. And because of that, I think, I try to really enjoy right now. And I have to practice, to tell you the truth.

“When I was in the hospital, I was making a lot of promises, praying a lot and saying, ‘Hey, you get me out of this and I’ll change.’ And then you get back to — not the grind, but you get back to working too much and pushing and trying to be what you want to be, and sometimes I forget those promises. You get caught up in what you’re doing. But I’m really grateful that I do what I do, and I think we have a chance to be special.”

Jabir hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 1995, but with Ross and leading scorer and sophomore forward Justine Raterman leading the way for a team that plays as many as 12 people in its rotation during the normal run of play, that should change. Players talked about the intensity that translates into practice this season, just as their coach noted that for the first time, anything less than an NCAA tournament would feel like a disappointment. But that drive is all-consuming only within the gym walls.

“It’s harder for me to be the hard-ass during practice,” Jabir said. “Because I love my team — I love being around them. I love laughing. We have a good time, and I really enjoy every minute with them. I’ve got a lot of keepers. It’s harder for me to be the hard-ass … but I think they demand it and for us to be what we can be, I have to be. But I love the time I spend with the kids off the court. I think it’s probably more the reason I coach. I just love being around them. I love seeing them grow up. I love helping them when I can. They’re a lot of fun.”

You live a little and you die a little. And you’re thankful to have the chance.

Today’s Play of the Day comes from Seton Hall Men’s @ UConn last night.

First is a Seton Hall ATO play, perfectly executed at the end of the first half for a lay-up.  The easy basket cut the UConn lead to 3.

PLAY OF THE DAY

I have not figured out how to take clips from ESPN360.com, but I am totally hooked on watching the games there.  I can get in two games a day easy.  Best part…. haven’t lost one yet!

Enjoy.

Simple, but true.

Thanks to Mark Thomas for sharing this with us.

Watching San Antonio vs. Washington.

Saw a nice inverted High Split used as a pressure release for PTG:  Used with good passing center (Duncan), with Back Door action into inverted High Split.

CLICK for DOWNLOADABLE / PRINTABLE Play

Maya Moore, Tina Charles, Stanford’s Jayne Appel, Ohio State’s Jantel Lavender and Virginia’s Monica Wright.  The 2009 – 10 Pre-Season ALL-American Team.

I couldn’t be happier for Monica.  I don’t know the other players like I know Moni… she is the nicest, most humble person.  Follow her on Twitter… everything you see is who she really is, there no BS.  I feel like a proud papa!… and I know one who is!

Back in 2006, this was the scene:  three of the 5:  Moore, Charles and Wright were USA Today 2006 Prep All-Americans adn they haven’t disappointed on the college scene.

Monica Wright became the first Virginia player to earn preseason honors since Wendy Palmer in 1995-96.  Wright was surprised to learn she had now joined her coach.

She has also been selected as the ACC Pre-Season Player of the Year.

Monica led Virginia and the ACC with 20.5 points per game last season and will lead her team in all facets of the game.

Wright was an honorable mention AP All-American and a first-team All-ACC pick last season.

From the Daily Progress.

“This is a great All-America team because everyone of these players has earned it over what they’ve done through their careers,” said DePaul’s Doug Bruno, who has coached all five players during different stints with USA Basketball. “It’s especially great for Monica Wright, who has flown under the radar.”