October 20, 2004: Features

 

(Photo by Ricardo Barros)

Home again holding court
Basketball coach Joe Scott ’87 looks for stability at the place he knows best

By Brett Tomlinson

Last March, Joe Scott ’87 was a hot coaching commodity. Young and talented, with one of the most impressive turnarounds in college basketball on his résumé, the Air Force Academy head coach seemed destined to move on to a bigger program in a bigger conference. When his team made its first NCAA tournament appearance in 42 years, a handful of athletic directors at those programs began looking at Scott.

But when Scott gathered his players together in late April to tell them he was leaving, his destination was not in the Big 12 or the other power conferences in college basketball. It was in the Ivy League. He had decided to return to Princeton, taking over for his former teammate, John Thompson III ’88, who left for Georgetown University a few days earlier. Scott came to lead one of the most successful programs in college basketball history, one where he could find uncommon stability in the itinerant world of coaching.

“I didn’t want to be waking up in March every year and be saying to my wife, ‘What jobs are open?’” Scott says. “If you’re the coach at Princeton, do you ever want to look at another job? We had a coach here who never did [Naismith Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril]. ... That’s the power of this place.”

As top assistant to Bill Carmody, right, in 1998, Scott helped the Tigers to a 27—2 record and a top-10 ranking in the national polls. (Photo by Beverly Schaefer) Doctors suggested surgery for Scott’s ailing knee during his senior year, but he played on, helping Princeton win six of its last seven games. (1987 Bric-A-Brac/Princeton University Archives)

Compared to the job Scott took at Air Force in 2000, Princeton must seem like a basketball paradise. The Falcons were 8—20 the year before Scott arrived; the Tigers were 20—8 last season. The Falcons had never won a conference title and had gone more than two decades without a winning season. Princeton has won 25 Ivy League titles and has not had a losing season since 1985. With most of the players from the defending Ivy championship team returning, Scott hopes to raise the program’s already lofty expectations. And according to those who know Princeton basketball best, he is up to the task.

Northwestern University coach Bill Carmody, Princeton’s head coach from 1996 to 2000, marvels at Scott’s preparation and toughness. Air Force coach Chris Mooney ’94, Scott’s former assistant, says he is one of the best coaches in the country, and Northwestern assistant Mitch Henderson ’98, who played when Scott was an assistant at Princeton, calls him a tireless instructor. “As long as the playing field is reasonably equal to what it’s been,” says Carril, Scott’s former coach and mentor, “he will do as well as anybody that’s ever been here, including me.”

Scott has earned the respect of his fellow coaches, but his job depends on earning the respect of his players. With an experienced team, getting the players to understand Princeton’s style of play is not an issue. Getting them to adjust to his style of coaching may be. “He’s going to be tough,” Carril says, “but not as unbearable as I was.”

The adjectives people use to describe Scott – tough, energetic, tenacious – also conjure up his demeanor on the sideline, which Mooney diplomatically calls “very demonstrative.” Scott evokes memories of the animated Carril, who paced the Princeton sideline for 29 years before retiring and joining the NBA’s Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach. But according to Princeton assistant coach Howard Levy ’85, the similarities are ingrained, not imitated. “You’ve got to coach to your personality,” Levy says. “I think Joe’s personality is probably the most like Coach Carril’s, compared to John and Bill, but he’s not going out of his way to try to be like Coach Carril.”

Like his immediate predecessors, Scott teaches the “Princeton offense,” the distinctive system developed by Carril that has gained popularity among college and professional teams in the last five years. The offense involves constant movement and frequent adjustments, depending on how the defense reacts. To be successful, each player needs to be skilled in passing, cutting, screening, and reading the defense. Being able to shoot from the perimeter is also a huge plus. If the opposing defense lays off, shooters can make them pay with a three-pointer. If the defense plays too tight, the Tigers can cut behind, toward the basket, for a backdoor layup, the signature move of the Princeton offense.

In one Wednesday-morning workout session in September, Scott and his staff gave freshman Kyle Koncz a crash course in the Princeton offense, with help from Will Venable ’05 and Judson Wallace ’05. Cutting and passing with no defenders on the floor, Koncz, a slender forward with a soft shooting touch, turned his head from teammate to teammate, trying to track each movement. He received a pass on the wing and shot a glance toward the foul line. Venable darted toward the basket, and Koncz delivered the pass for an easy layup.

“Stop!” Scott interjected with a hint of gravel in his voice, walking toward Koncz’s passing lane. “You just knocked the wind out of your defender! You threw a chest pass right into him!”

Learning the Princeton offense is difficult enough without having to contend with an imaginary defender, but Scott’s practices are not designed to be easy. Every movement is important. Every step, every angle, every dribble is open to critique. As he paces from station to station, Scott has a comment for each player. When he sees a need for improvement, his first instinct is to grab a ball and demonstrate. Strong and lean at age 39, he looks as if he could still play 40 minutes at point guard.

As an assistant coach at Princeton from 1992 to 2000, Scott was demanding. Gabe Lewullis ’99, now a fourth-year medical student at Drexel, remembers working with him on the same left-handed dribble drive every day before practice for two months. When Lewullis finally executed the move late in a close game against Dartmouth, converting the basket and drawing a foul, he looked to the bench for Scott’s approval. Scott nodded and offered one more bit of advice: “Just make the goddamn foul shot.”

Coarse at times and invariably intense, Scott is also pedagogical on the court. When a player makes the wrong cut, he asks the player to explain what he did wrong, what he should have done, and why he should have done it. The goal, he says, is to build a team that can make its own decisions on the court. To Levy, who played with Scott as an undergraduate before joining him on the coaching staff, it’s the combination of Scott’s traits that makes him an effective coach. “He’s tough, he’s fiery, he’s smart, he’s creative,” Levy says. “He knows how to communicate, knows how to get his message across.”

Scott’s coaching style has been shaped by experiences dating to his childhood in the tiny Barnegat Bay town of Pelican Island, N.J. He chased foul balls for his father, Bob, who coached a junior-college baseball team for more than a decade. He excelled in football, basketball, and baseball in high school and blossomed as a basketball player at Princeton. At the University he concentrated in history, writing his senior thesis on the rise and fall of the Black Panther party.

Playing for Carril was an integral step in Scott’s development. At Toms River East High School, Scott had earned a reputation as a high-scoring point guard and a tremendous dribbler. But when Carril first came to watch him play, the opposing team decided to neutralize Scott with a box-and-one defense. One player guarded Scott, while the other four played a zone defense, double-teaming Scott whenever he received the ball. Scott struggled to find shots. He fought through the defense, using every dribble move he had to find open teammates. The exhausting display demonstrated that Scott was a complete player and a dogged competitor, and it made an indelible impression on his future coach. After the game, Carril drove to Trenton for a late dinner with Carmody, who had spent the night recruiting in Pennsylvania. “The guy didn’t make any shots,” Carril told his assistant, “but I love him.”

Scott loved the idea of coming to Princeton. He knew all about the Tigers’ basketball tradition from watching Princeton-Rutgers games on the New Jersey Network as a kid, and while the other schools recruiting him were excellent academically, each was a notch below Princeton. When it came time to choose a college, Scott says, “It was sort of a no-brainer.”

As a freshman, Scott came with a willingness to learn. He backed up Bill Ryan ’84, a team captain with a remarkable command of the Princeton offense. Ryan rarely led the team in scoring, but he did everything else well, demonstrating the leadership that coaches hoped Scott could duplicate. In his sophomore season, when Scott entered the starting lineup, he proved to be a fast learner, running the offense with confidence and becoming one of the Tigers’ top scorers as well. Two years later, he was the team’s captain.

During Scott’s senior year, a recurring injury threatened to cut his career short. After examining the painful deterioration of cartilage in his left knee, doctors recommended surgery. Scott had a different opinion. “He just said, ‘The heck with it, I’m playing,” Carmody recalls. “And he played great.” With his leg wrapped and taped from calf to thigh, Scott helped the Tigers win six of their last seven games in 1987 and finished his career with a storybook ending, hitting the winning shot on a three-point play against Brown with five seconds left in his final game. Carril uses the story as an illustration of toughness, but Scott downplays his own heroics, saying he just did not want to finish his career on the bench.

After graduation, Scott decided to attend law school at the University of Notre Dame. According to friends, he loves to argue and rarely loses, so the career choice seemed a logical fit. But his first job, defending clients such as Trump Casinos in personal-injury lawsuits, failed to provide the job satisfaction he craved. “It didn’t seem like I was helping anybody when I was a lawyer,” Scott says. “As a coach, I have a chance to help in the development of these kids to make sure that when they’re 22, they’re the best they can be at that point in their lives.” Carmody was never surprised that Scott wanted to coach. It was more surprising, he says, that he wanted to be a lawyer.

Scott paid his dues as a volunteer assistant at Monmouth University before taking a similar position at Princeton. He worked for a local lawyer on the side to make ends meet and spent his summers running a family business of boardwalk game booths in Seaside Heights. Two years later, he was promoted to full-time assistant. In 1996, Carril’s final season, Scott was part of a staff that included his three immediate predecessors (Carril, Carmody, and Thompson), and the Tigers finished the season with a dramatic Ivy playoff win over Penn and an upset win against UCLA in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. In 1998, the Tigers posted an astounding 27—2 record, including an undefeated Ivy run and an NCAA first-round win over UNLV. During the same period, Scott met his future wife, Leah Spraragen ’92, then an assistant coach for Princeton’s women’s basketball team.

Princeton’s national success provided new opportunities for Scott, who was Carmody’s top assistant. After two years of casually looking at head coaching jobs, he saw an opportunity at Air Force, a traditionally dreadful team in a challenging conference. He heard advice from both sides, coaches who told him that Air Force was a dead-end program and others who said he would love the commitment and discipline of the academy cadets. Scott decided to take the job, confident that the Princeton system could resuscitate the Falcons.

When he arrived in Colorado Springs, he saw that he had underestimated the problem. The team’s long record of futility had infected the program to the point where the players almost expected to lose. The school, which generates overwhelming support for its football team, viewed the basketball season as an afterthought. To succeed on the court, Scott would need to change the whole culture of the basketball program. He laid out a series of goals.

Year one was devoted to teaching the offense and recruiting more players who could run it. The results were hardly encouraging: The Falcons won just two conference games, and recruiting was a tremendous challenge. Other Mountain West schools offered full scholarships and the possibility of playing pro basketball. Cadets attend the Air Force Academy free of charge, but they have to commit to eight years of military service after graduation, including at least five on active duty. Seeing that service over scholarship would be a tough sell, Scott searched for players that the other schools had overlooked.

In his second year, Scott and his staff concentrated on defense. The losses were closer – three-point defeats against New Mexico and Colorado State, and overtime setbacks against Utah and Wyoming – but the coach took little solace from coming close. Scott returned to the recruiting trail, and in his third year, the Falcons finally made significant progress, winning 12 games and establishing themselves as one of the best defensive teams in the conference. He expected 2003—04 to be the Air Force’s first winning season since 1978. But he never predicted 22 wins.

After an early loss at Auburn, the Falcons won 13 straight games, drawing attention from the national media. By season’s end, Air Force had improved to 22—7 overall and 12—2 against Mountain West opponents, earning the regular season conference championship and receiving an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. For Scott, winning was only part of the satisfaction. How his team won was even more impressive. On the road against California, the Falcons trailed by six points with seven minutes remaining, but the players never panicked. “We just executed,” Scott says. In eight possessions, Air Force converted seven of eight shots. Three were backdoor layups, and four were open three-pointers. The Falcons won by five points.

At Princeton, Scott wants to instill the same kind of precision, execution, and self-sufficiency. His biggest test this year may be living up to the expectations surrounding both the coach and his team. The defending Ivy champions lost one player to graduation and return Venable and Wallace, both All-Ivy players. History lends additional pressure: Each of Scott’s four most recent predecessors won at least a share of the Ivy title in his first year.

With the season opener at the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic less than a month away, a potential second-round meeting with national-power Syracuse, and a schedule that includes Duke and Temple on the road, Scott was anxious to start full practices in mid-October and learn what his team has to offer. “I’m going to have 15 freshmen,” he says, “and I think that’s a good thing. Freshmen are eager. They’re yearning to learn, and they’re always on their toes because they don’t know what to expect.”

Brett Tomlinson is a PAW associate editor.