A Hall of Famer

Last night, I went to the ceremony honoring my basketball coach Rich Maack.  They put him in the Region 4 Hall of Fame.  It was a nice ceremony.  For me, I got to renew my acquaintance with his son Sam.  My father was the AD and Coach was his first hire.  When Sam, his brother Rick, and I were little kids, we’d go to practice and games and play in the gym.  Our families have been great friends for years.

Another old friend was there as well. Brad Waller was one of the best high school basketball players in the nation back in 1980.  He’s a judge now in DeKalb, and recently had a heart transplant. He’s doing well, running five miles a day.  He wound up playing college hoop at NIU, but rest assured if there was a three point line back then Brad would have been at a school like Duke.  I don’t know what he averaged a game, but it was well over 30 ppg and he was dangerous as soon as he crossed the half court line.

We had a good time remembering people and the past.

Coach Maack was a different kind of coach, especially for the time he coached.  In an era where the practices of Coach Bobby Knight permeated almost every coaches repertoire, Coach Maack went the other way.  He’d encourage you to do stuff and if you made a mistake, you weren’t penalized for it.  I never saw him ever raise his voice or get really mad, even when you were screwing up.

Interestingly, when they asked him what his greatest thrill was it wasn’t coaching the All-American players he had.  It was coaching his son Rick.  That says a lot.

He played high school ball at a school that is legendary in Illinois basketball, Collinsville.  He played in college at Northeast Missouri St.   He coached all around the state of Illinois prior to coming to Triton.

I think his biggest challenge was keeping guys eligible.  You have to understand that most of the team came from, to put it nicely, less than stellar academic backgrounds.  Everyone of them thought they were going to the NBA and almost none of them went to class.

One game, we lost every point guard on our team to academics.  Coach looked at me and said I was going to play point guard.  I had never played point guard in a game.  I could handle the ball, but shooting guard and point guard were two totally different positions.  Another guy on our team was going to help me bring the ball up, Chris Theodore.  He had played at Maine South and won a state championship, but he was a post player.

I think I had 10 turnovers and Chris had 11. Coach said he wasn’t ever going to do that again.  At least we won the game.

He also had another challenge.  Recruiting.  Triton played in a converted truck garage.  There were massive posts at half court.  There was no room on the baseline out of bounds.  The court was tile, with taped lines.  The locker room was horrible. There wasn’t a training room per se.  I can remember teams coming in and making fun of us because of where we played.  We beat almost everyone.

My freshman year, I think we were something like 27-3.  We routed everyone.  Unfortunately, we blew it in the tournament losing to a team we had beaten by more than 20 a few weeks before.  We had put 106 points on them.  Remember, no three point line.  That really hurt because we wanted to go to the finals.  I still can remember Ken Amlet shooting the ball from the right side of the top of the key.  I crashed the board and tipped the ball.  It hit the back of the rim and bounced out.  I remember after the game, no shouting, no blaming, no talk of next year because in JC ball, that’s not the way it is.  Coach just had us go about our business and we went home.

The next year, our team wasn’t as good.  We were something like 22-9.  But, we opened up the new gym Triton plays in today.

I had left the US Air Force Academy and wound up playing two years at Triton.  My USAFA coach, Hank Egan is the godfather of NBA GM’s.  An 18 year old kid often doesn’t make good decisions and my leaving USAFA was certainly that.  But, I was lucky to land in the hands of Coach Maack.  I got to befriend some cool people like Kirby Puckett who played baseball for Triton (#29 on your scorecard) and is in the Baseball HOF (and the Region 4 HOF).

I played.  I carried 18-22 semester hours every semester and the last year aced everything.  That got me into Illinois Gies College of Business and I was lucky to land there.

He changed a lot of kids lives.  I run into old teammates occasionally.  Playing for Coach Maack they realized they had a future.  One guy from my sophomore year, Miguel Curl, totally changed the direction of his life.

He really built a program at Triton.  Last year, they won the national championship.