I don’t know DP personally but do communicate occasionally with people who could be classified as insiders.
I talk far more often to people I’ve gotten to know in basketball circles — if you are a halfway decent reporter, you build up a lot of contacts over 20 years — and I have never heard from anyone who thinks DP is anything but an excellent teacher of the game who demands excellence from his players on the court, in the classroom and in the community.
I know this will make me sound like a douche, and I don’t mean to, but the fact that you think “most” coaches are detail-oriented made me chuckle when I read it.
Based on long experience dealing with a variety of coaches, I’d say the vast majority of college and pro coaches are control freaks. There’s a subtle, yet significant difference between that and being the type of coach who cares deeply about his players practicing, playing, studying and generally living their lives in a way that will help them become successful adults.
That is what I mean by detail-oriented and believe me when I say “most” coaches aren’t that. Many of them care only about their own success and either climbing to a better job or keeping the one they have — period. They only value their players to the extent that they help toward that objective.
It goes so far beyond helping up a teammate after he takes a charge or sprinting on and off the court. DP emphasized those teaching points early when he was rebuilding a broken program culture that was seriously lacking in accountability.
You think you’ll ever see one of our players sitting on the bench flipping through a cell phone during a game or cutting up during a blowout loss? Those are just two glaring examples. There are a million other less obvious things that go into building a healthy program with young men who are both good players and good people.
I, like many people, am mystified by the undisciplined, uninspired play we have seen from our veteran guys for long stretches of our first 10 games. Mainly because when DP came to Fairfax he was known as a blue-collar coach whose teams played hard and didn’t do stupid stuff to beat themselves.
I was frankly worried in the early going that he was too intense and would wear on guys. Maybe he has and they’ve started tuning him out? Maybe it’s simply that some guys we were counting on are either injured or aren’t performing up to their capabilities. Who the hell knows?
