BILL FENLON – RETIRED DEPAUW UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 1003

Website –  https://depauwtigers.com/sports/mens-basketball/roster/coaches/bill-fenlon/60

Email – billfenlon22@gmail.com

Twitter/X – @CoachBFen

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Bill Fenlon, the winningest head coach in DePauw University men’s basketball history amassed 585 wins, 6 NCAA Tournament appearances, and 7 conference championships in 37 seasons overall as a collegiate head coach including 30 at DePauw.  Fenlon previously coached seven seasons as a head coach at Sewanee, Rose-Hulman, and Southwestern University (Texas).  He retired in 2022 as the 4^th winningest active coach in Division 3.

Fenlon was recognized as the 2021 Jack Bennett Award recipient which is presented annually to a non-Division I head coach who achieves success on the basketball court, while displaying great moral integrity off of the court as well.

Fenlon’s impact has been felt beyond the student-athletes he’s coached as he has annually led student teams to Belfast, Northern Ireland to work with PeacePlayers International on conflict resolution and peace initiatives.

As a player, Bill earned three letters as a member of the Northwestern Wildcats basketball team. He was an all-state high school player at Marist High School in Atlanta and was inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame in 2006.

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Be prepared with a notebook and pen as you listen to this episode with Bill Fenlon, retired Head Men’s Basketball Coach at DePauw University.

What We Discuss with Bill Fenlon

• Growing up in Brookfield, Wisconsin playing sports in the neighborhood
• “The reality in today’s kids is somebody’s telling them what to do all the time. There is an adult prescribing every movement in their basketball lives.”
• How the demise of pickup basketball has impacted kids’ ability to communicate
• Seeing Kareem, the Big O, and Al McGuire while he lived in Wisconsin
• His high school experience in Atlanta after his family moved there from Wisconsin
• “I want to go to the best school that wants me.” Playing his college basketball at Northwestern
• “I was a second line guy on a lot of people’s lists.”
• Playing both high school and college basketball with his friend Randy Carroll
• Working for JC Penney in New York City his first year after graduating and realizing he wanted to coach
• His first two jobs as a head coach at private high schools in Florida
• Getting a college job at Austin Peay, but having the job disappear when the head coach left before he had even spoken to him
• The break that led him to the University of the South
• Getting the Head Coaching job at The University of the South after two years there as an assistant
• The shot clock and three point line being added back to back in his first two seasons as a head coach
• “I was just kind of was kind of too dumb to know how hard it really was. I was just having fun.”
• How a phone call from Rose Hulman abut his assistant coach led to a realization that he was way underpaid and eventually led to him becoming the head coach there
• His one season at Southwestern University in Texas
• What attracted him to the job at DePauw
• “There’s just all kinds of really good coaches that were no longer going to get considered for the division one level, just because people weren’t going to take a chance. They’d rather take an assistant from a power five conference than take a chance on a guy who’s got a great record as a small college coach.”
• “I don’t think because you’re a great student it has to necessarily preclude you from being interested in being a really good basketball player. So we were able to find a lot of guys who cared about both things.”
• “We had high level academics and a really high level of competitive, small college basketball.”
• “A lot of the things that you do in the off season and that sort of stuff really had to be player driven.”
• “I did not want our guys to see themselves as stereotypical athletes. I wanted them to see themselves as guys who were trying to become citizens of the world.”
• GCF – Good, Clean, Fun – do something fun that you might not really recognize as fun, but if you do it, you might have some fun.
• “You’re getting through to kids and players when they start repeating the stupid things that you say.”
• TATGOD stands for these are the good old days
• His article on fouling when you’re up by three

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THANKS, BILL FENLON

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TRANSCRIPT FOR BILL FENLON – RETIRED DEPAUW UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 1003

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight. And we are pleased to be joined by Bill Fenlon, retired head men’s basketball coach at DePauw University, among lots of other stops in his coaching career. Bill, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:20] Bill Fenlon: Thanks. Good to be here.

[00:00:22] Mike Klinzing: So thrilled to have you, looking forward to diving into all the things you’ve been able to do in your career. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball. What made you fall in love with it?

[00:00:36] Bill Fenlon: Well, it’s funny that you would ask me that as the first question, cause it probably about a month ago, I drove up, when you’re retired, you have time on your hands and you can like you can actually say yes to stupid things that you wouldn’t normally do. And I drove up to a, I was in Chicago for something else.

And I drove up to Wisconsin, which is where I spent some formative years as a kid and to a, to a kind of grade school reunion. And saw a bunch of guys that I played 6th, 7th, 8th grade sports with and drove by my, my home court, like the outdoor court that I first started playing. And that was in Brookfield, Wisconsin.

I was probably. The first year that I played organized basketball, I think I was in sixth grade. You know, now they start when you’re six years old. Right. But this was in the stone ages and you couldn’t be you had to wait to be on a team, right? Like you had to, before that you had to just go out and pick teams and fight and argue about calls and do all of that kind of stuff.

But I was able to go back and kind of whip around, give myself a little, a little a little history tour. And it was really fun, brought back a lot of a lot of interesting memories. So my, my first year of being on an organized team was the sixth grade. And I was involved with the team every year.

For the next 50 some years, except for one year, my first year out of college, I didn’t coach. So just growing up in Wisconsin, it’s snowing, you had to find a way to get inside. So the hoops gets you inside.

[00:02:35] Mike Klinzing: That is definitely true. So tell me a little bit about just that experience of growing up with pickup basketball and obviously the culture today, much different for somebody who’s growing up as a young basketball player.

in the country today compared to what it was like when you were a kid or when I was a kid. So tell me a little bit about just your experiences with pickup basketball and how you feel like it influenced you maybe as a player and then ultimately maybe even as a coach.

[00:03:06] Bill Fenlon: Well, I’ve actually thought a lot about this. I think that pre AAU days and all of those kinds of things. You know, the players maybe weren’t as talented and they didn’t have all the, all the doodads and all the ways to get better, all the training and that sort of stuff. But when you talk to coaches, one of the things that you hear almost constantly is kids, they don’t know how to communicate and they don’t.

We really need some leadership and all of those kinds of things. And I think those things get formed when you’re figuring it out on your own. Right. So when you’re picking the teams and calling the fouls and you want to have a game on a Saturday afternoon, well, you got to get on the phone and you got to find enough guys to play.

Right. And I think the tools that you develop when you have to do that, right? Like when you have to settle arguments and, and, and be the last guy picked and be the first guy picked and, and all of those kinds of things, I think are things that kind of become part of your basketball DNA a little bit.

And it does solve some of the, some of the issues that I think we as coaches find pretty prevalent today, because The reality in today’s kids is somebody’s telling them what to do all the time. There is an adult prescribing every movement in their basketball lives. And so whether that’s here’s what team you’re going to play on.

We’re going to take you to practice. Here’s the tournaments that we’re going to play in. And I think it’s the fact that people are flying to the other side of the country on an AAU team to, and if, if you got an AAU team with 10 guys on it, and you’re trying to play guys the same amount of minutes, these guys are maybe playing 60 minutes, 70 minutes over the course of a weekend. And if you stayed home and you went down to the park, you can play 15 hours, right? You’d have the ball in your hands all the time. Right. And I think that, that there’s some great experiences involved with the travel and being on organized teams and those kinds of things.

But I think the thing is just kind of. It’s just kind of grown into this speeding train that we can’t seem to stop at this point in time. And I think because of that, guys just aren’t developing some of those tools that I think that guys in my generation had an opportunity to do.

Because we didn’t know any better, right? There weren’t any other options. So we just had to go figure it out on our own.

[00:06:09] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I see that. Not only just from a basketball coaching standpoint, but I see it as a elementary phys ed teacher where picking teams and getting kids to be able to play and understanding how to win and to lose graciously and just being able to communicate when something doesn’t go perfectly the way it’s supposed to or the way they think it’s supposed to.

You end up with lots of arguing and lots of people that don’t know how to sort of navigate all those things that You learn and I learned on the playground or in the backyard or on the sandlot, whatever it might’ve been, you kind of had to figure it out, as you said. And to me, I think that that is something that is, has been lost when we talk about just the sort of parent driven format that we have for youth basketball today.

As you said, It’s very, very rare that a kid does anything in any sport without mom or dad sitting on the sideline and certainly without a coach. It’s very, very rare that kids get the opportunity to experiment and just do some of those things that we got to do as a kid. And yet, I do think that there’s a lot of positives to it.

In terms of, as you said, the access the kids have to drills, in some cases, much better coaching, although not always. You hope that they, if the parents make a good decision, you figure out who the best coaches are in terms of development and helping kids to get better. You have all those opportunities. So it is certainly a different landscape than it was when you were a kid.

As you move up into becoming a high school player, what do you remember about just Your relationship with your coaches and your teammates as a high school player.

[00:07:59] Bill Fenlon: Well, like I said, I kind of had my early years in Wisconsin, but between my freshman and my sophomore year in high school, my family moved to Atlanta.

So I became the new kid, right? So my experience was a little bit different in that I wasn’t around a bunch of guys that I’d been around my entire life. So I was able to catch on pretty quickly. My dad built a full court in the back of our house.

So we moved in at the end of the school year, my freshman year, and we didn’t know anybody. And I had a brother who was a year younger than me, who was also a player. And I wasn’t I hadn’t really blossomed yet as a player and he and I played one on one full court basketball for three straight months.

And when school started, I was all of a sudden pretty good and things kind of, things kind of took off from there. So I played in a on a really good team at a, at a really good school in Atlanta. And my sophomore year, we had four sophomores that started on the varsity and we were all really good friends and played together all the way through and just kind of blew an opportunity to win a state championship in the semifinals and had a great experience.

In fact, one of the guys that I played with, he and I ended up playing college basketball together as well. So we were on the same teams for seven straight years. And still, one of my best friends. I’m 67 years old now.

And this is a guy who I still hang out with, who I was sitting in the backseat of his car when he had his learner’s permit and his dad was his dad was driving us to summer league games. And so Atlanta was a really good opportunity for me to kind of reinvent myself as a player, had a pretty good high school coach who was. I was a point guard and was really good about just kind of letting me figure things out on my own. And, and most of the time it kind of worked out for us and had a terrific, terrific experience as a high school player.

[00:10:34] Mike Klinzing: When did the idea of. playing college basketball, get on your radar.

Was that something that you were thinking about from the time you were a young kid back in Wisconsin, or did it become more of a reality as you got to Atlanta and started to really experience your high school career?

[00:10:50] Bill Fenlon: Well, when I was in Wisconsin that was so my dad had partnered up with Maybe one or two guys.

And we had pieces of season tickets to the expansion Milwaukee Bucks. So I was there and able to see games when they drafted Lou Alcinder, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and then they traded for Oscar Robertson and won an NBA championship. And I was able to go to those games and see Jerry West and watch these unbelievable players.

And at the same time Marquette was coached by Al McGuire and that was their heyday as well. And in fact, Al McGuire’s son, Ali was the counselor at our park in the summer, and I used to like rebound for him all summer long. And so we were kind of surrounded by basketball and when you’re a kid, you’re always dreaming, but I wasn’t a dumb kid. So at that time I knew I wasn’t going to be, I knew I wasn’t good enough to play at those levels. At least I didn’t feel like I was on track for that. And then eventually I kind of did get on track for it.

So it worked out pretty well, but that was a really fertile time to be in a great place to be a kid who really was interested in the game of basketball, for sure.

[00:12:27] Mike Klinzing: There are three pretty big names in the game of basketball. When you start talking about Kareem the Big O and Al McGuire, people that, again, anybody who is involved in the game is very familiar with those names.

And for you to kind of have that firsthand experience. Growing up there in Milwaukee obviously has a big impact on you. What’s your thought process in terms of choosing a school? Who’s helping you to navigate the process? Because obviously, back at the time you’re being recruited, the information that’s out there is not like it is today, where you can go on the internet and you can try to figure some things out.

If you don’t, know or have anybody who has experience in the recruiting world, it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s happening. So what do you remember about the recruiting process and just how you went about making your decisions?

[00:13:19] Bill Fenlon: Well, thank God it wasn’t as sophisticated back then, or I probably never would have gotten the same opportunity.

I would have been found out a long time beforehand, but what’s interesting is so I’m, A 1975 high school graduate, right? I mean, I never played on another team that wasn’t my high school team. Your high school team maybe played in the summer league or something like that, but recruiting just wasn’t like it is today.

It’s not, I mean, it doesn’t even resemble what goes on today at every level from the small college level up to the highest levels. It is a completely different animal. My thought process, I was actually at a private school, probably the top one or two private schools in Atlanta from an academic standpoint.

So I had a little help in school and in my mind, I always thought, what, if I get the opportunity, I want to go to the I was smart enough to think maybe I want to go to the best school that wants me. Right. So I had a few different people coming after me and I was really sort of a back then guys would have lists, right?

So if you’re in this case, it’s Georgia or Georgia Tech or whatever, and they would have the first line guys that they wanted. And then if we don’t get this guy and we don’t get that guy, then they’ll go to the second line guy. So I was a second line guy on a lot of people’s lists.

So I was getting strung along by Georgia and, and, and Georgia tech. And a lot of smaller schools were talking to me and then just sometimes in life things just work out strangely. So the guy who coached the freshmen basketball team. At my high school his brother in law was a freshman at Northwestern and he sent some, we didn’t even know it.

So he sent some film up there and wrote the staff a letter and they liked it. So, they brought us up for a visit and when I say us, I’m talking about this guy, Randy Carroll who was my teammate, still one of my best friends. So we were people always thought we were a package deal, but I didn’t care what he did and he didn’t care what I did, but it was kind of cool that we were able to do it together.

And so they brought us up for a visit and worked us out probably illegally, pretty sure. But they’d never seen us in person and they kind of threw us in there with some guys and sat up in the top row and peeked around a little bit and ended up offering us. And Northwestern, as I was podcast today is the number nine US News and World Report has them as the You know, as the number nine ranked school in the country from an academic standpoint.

So. I was able to get play in the Big 10, go to a unbelievable school and get a degree that I was too stupid to figure out how to monetize. But all my other friends that went there made a whole bunch of money but they tended to kind of live vicariously through me a little bit.

[00:17:05] Mike Klinzing: There you go. All right. So clearly in your process, academics was important and obviously basketball, an important piece of it. What were you thinking about career wise as you headed to school? Were you like a typical 18 year old that had no idea what you wanted to do? Was coaching already on your radar?  What were you thinking at that point?

[00:17:30] Bill Fenlon: Well, you know what, when I went to school, I thought when I was in high school, I thought I wanted to coach. And then when I get to, got to college We weren’t very good and I wasn’t very good. And I was also in an environment where all of these people are going to go be masters of the universe.

I mean, I went to school with some very bright people who have had unbelievable careers in business and all kinds of other areas. And so you get influenced by what’s going on around you. So I thought, well, maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do too. Right. And so I kind of got away from the notion and it took a year, took that first year out of school for me to kind of go, eh, you know what?  I forgot what I really wanted to do was this other thing.

[00:18:24] Mike Klinzing: Right.

[00:18:25] Bill Fenlon: And the ball started bouncing in October and I’m like, Oh, I’m not, I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And So I ended up kind of kind of rethinking my path a little bit. And actually came down here.

I’m in Florida right now. I came down here and I was gonna, because it’s warmer and I lived that first year and worked in business in New York city and then came down to Florida. My wife, who was not my wife yet, she’s from here. And I was going to take some classes, get certified to teach and be a high school coach and teacher.  That’s what I set out to do.

[00:19:11] Mike Klinzing: What’d you do during that intervening year when you were in, when you were in New York, what was the job?

[00:19:16] Bill Fenlon: I worked for the JC Penney company in their corporate headquarters, like right in the middle of Manhattan.

[00:19:27] Mike Klinzing: Decided you didn’t want to sit in an office.

[00:19:30] Bill Fenlon: I did not want to do the office thing and I knew it right away. I knew it within a month. Right. And I stuck it out for, I don’t know, about seven, eight months or something like that. And just cause I was just afraid of like how it would look to quit two days after you start.

So I hung in there as long as I could and then bailed and just started the journey of trying to become a coach . At the time thinking I was going to teach English and coach basketball.

[00:20:12] Mike Klinzing: So that first experience that you get as a coach, you’re in Tampa, you get a head coaching job at a prep school.

What does that look like? How did you know right away? Conversely, okay. Two days into your job in New York, you knew you didn’t like it. Two days into your coaching, how’d you feel about it?

[00:20:32] Bill Fenlon: Yeah, I felt, I felt I knew that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And, and what’s interesting. So I came down here and I was taking some classes at the university of South Florida to try to get certified to teach. And cause I’d never took an education class in at Northwestern cause that’s not what I was going to do. And, and so while I was doing that, I met some people and there was a Catholic grade school down here that needed like a PE guy and a coach.

And I’m like, I’ll do it. Right. So this was, this was like half, halfway through the year, they had lost somebody. And I’m like, and I said, I’ll do it. So I was coaching three basketball teams and a soccer team. And I didn’t know, I still couldn’t tell you what offsides is. Really? I don’t know anything about soccer, but I was able to bluff my way bluff my way through that.

So I got, and then that year I got married. And then the next year I got a head coaching job and a teaching job at a private school where I didn’t have to be certified. And so I stopped taking classes because I didn’t have time to take classes because I was teaching like every period in the day.

They’re like you can teach, they had me teaching three different English preparations, and I’d never taught a class before or taken an education class. Right. And one of the, one of the, the classes was, was AP sophomore English. There were nine kids in the class, right? Eight of those kids went to Ivy league schools.

Honest to God, I was exactly one day ahead of those kids all year. Like the, the, the only the, I mean, they were all smarter than me, but you know, the good news is they, they were, they didn’t know it because they were only 15 years old at the time. And so I, I plowed my way through that year and then they, and then they said, and you can make an extra $1,000 if you teach this PE class during your free period. So I’m like, okay, I’ll do that and I didn’t even have a period off, right? So I was teaching every period of the day and, and then trying to figure out how to coach. And this school had just started. It was about seven years old.

And they were, they were literally renting space on the university of Tampa campus. Tampa prep is the name of the school. And now they have a, an absolutely beautiful campus that is across the street from the university of Tampa. And so at the time the school didn’t even have a gym. So we would rent a gym three days out of the week.

And then I would have to run over to the park after my last class and, and try to stake out the court so we could practice outside for an hour before the public school kids got there and started laughing at my kids. And so it was a, it was a, it was a pretty wild year. And then the next year I took a job at another private school, mainly because they had a gym and it made things a little bit easier, but it’s always helpful.

Yeah. I mean, it did make it easier. You didn’t have to worry about where you were renting a gym and all of that kind of stuff. But, but so in between, so that next year, I don’t know who had the job at Tampa prep that following year, my, my brother graduated from college, my younger brother.

Five years, like five years younger than me. And I got him an interview at Tampa prep and he has been there ever since.

[00:24:54] Mike Klinzing: Wow. Holy cow

[00:24:55] Bill Fenlon: So he’s been there 40 some years. His name is on the court. He has won a state championship. He’s had all kinds of division one players and he is the winningest all time the all time winningest high school coach in the state of Florida.

He’s won like. 860 games or some crazy number like that. So it’s kind of weird how things work out for, for you and others. You just got to keep your head down and keep plugging away.

[00:25:26] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. All right. So you’re spent, you spent two years now at these two different prep schools. And then how do you make that leap to college basketball and get that assistant coaching job at the university of the South for the first time?

[00:25:42] Bill Fenlon: Well we’re going through my history thing right now, which I’m, which I’m happy to do, but I don’t think that anyone who’s listening should try to duplicate this pathway that I took because it’s pretty I do a lot of mentoring. I talk to a lot of kids and there’s way better plans that you can have than the plan that I had, that’s for sure. So the second year I was a high school coach down here. I had a really good team and we got to the, I think the final eight in the state. And I was the named the coach of the year in Tampa and blah, blah, blah. So I, I thought I had it going on. And so my wife is a theater artist and she kind of went through the same thing.

She thought she was gonna be a master of the universe. And then she decided, you know what, what I really want to do is be an actor. And. So she went back to school. We got married and she went back to school. So we were literally just barely scraping by down here. And then after that second year, she got an opportunity to go to Louisville, the, there’s a place called the Actors Theater in Louisville, which is one of the top regional theaters in the country.

And she had an opportunity to go there for a year and be part of their apprentice company. Where you just kind of learn everything about the theater, right. And and she’s like, I’m going, I need to do this. I’m going to do this. And so that summer I had been part of, it was kind of the beginning of the AAU stuff.

So at the time, and I know that, I don’t think they have this anymore. They used to have an AAU category that was 19 and under. So you had guys that had just graduated from. You, you could have some, some guys that were going into their senior year, but you could have some guys, a lot of guys that were already graduated and committed.

So I was involved helping coach a team, this team called Team Florida in the 19 and unders. So we had the best players in the state and six of those guys ended up playing in the NBA and, and we played the Russian junior national team. We took these guys to Central America. We won the AAU national championship and, and it was an unbelievable experience.

And through that, I met a bunch of people. Well, one guy offered me a job cause I’m thinking I don’t know, I really like teaching. First of all, I really enjoyed that and I could have kept doing but I was also thinking, well if I think I might want to coach in college, the part I don’t know if I, if I’m going to like is the recruiting.

And this guy offered me a job. And at the time you guys maybe aren’t old enough to remember, because the NCAA likes to change up how they, how they figure out the staffs and all of that kind of stuff. So at the time they had, they had part time guys and GAs and full time guys and whatever.

And so this guy was going to give me the part time job, but. I was gonna be recruiting. So I don’t re even remember how that was supposed to work, but that was the, that was the deal. And this was at Austin Peay State university, which is in the Ohio mid major Ohio Valley in Tennessee. I think it’s Clarksville, Tennessee.

So my wife’s going to go to Louisville. And so we, we’d have been about two hours apart and I’m like, yeah, you know what? Okay. I’ll do that. So I give up my high school job and we’re going to she’s going to Louisville and I’m going to Tennessee. And I am literally moving her into her. Apartment in Louisville.

And then I’m supposed to go to, go to Clarksville, Tennessee, and they’re going to put me up in some place. And I I don’t even know what I’m doing and I take a break from moving. I’m sitting on the curb outside of her apartment, reading the USA Today sports page. So this is all pre internet, pre cell phone all of that stuff.

And you know, the first thing you do, if you’re a sports guy, the first thing you would do is go to the sports page and you’d open it up and you’d look at the inside page which has all the transactions, right? Who got traded, who quit all of that stuff. So I, I open up the sports page and I see that the guy who’s hired me has resigned and I’m like this can’t be good. And to this day I’ve never talked to the guy.

[00:30:52] Mike Klinzing: Wow.

[00:30:54] Bill Fenlon: He doesn’t have phone, right. He doesn’t have it’s like, first of all, it’s harder to get ahold of people. Right. And so I call the office talk to the assistant and he’s like, yeah he’s known he was out for a while and you can come up here if you want, but he really hasn’t, he was supposed to fund this position through like the booster club or something like that.

And he’s like, We don’t really have anything for it. And I’m like, and now it’s too late. I can’t get my high school job back. It’s the end of August, 1st of September, something like that. School starting everywhere. And I’m sitting there thinking, Oh man, I don’t even know how to bartend.

It’s like, I don’t even know how to make a drink. I think I went there. And the thing was so messed up. I was just like, this, I can’t they, they said you can, you can come and work and volunteer, but you know, we can’t pay you or feed you or anything. I’m like, I’m not going there.

And so I go back to, to Louisville and I’ll never forget. I had a big paper cup full of quarters cause my wife didn’t even have a phone working in her apartment down on the corner. And I got my little my little address book with everybody’s phone numbers and I’m just dialing, right.

I’m feeding change into this phone and dialing people up cause I couldn’t email them or text them or whatever it’s just harder to do all that stuff. And so I got ahold of a buddy of mine who was a GA at Cornell in the Ivy league and he was working for and what’s interesting is that He happened to be a DePauw grad, and I didn’t even know where DePauw was at that point in time, and I ended up working there for 30 years, but he’s working for a Knight guy.

So a guy named Tommy Miller, who had been with Knight when they won the championship in 76 and so he was kind of clued into everything that was going on with Knight. So he happened to know that that a guy who was working with Krzyzewski at Duke was his top, was one of his top guys when he was with, at, when he was at Army.

And then he went with Krzyzewski his first three years at Duke, had just taken this job at the University of the South in Suwannee, Tennessee, which wasn’t very far from where I was right then. And he said, I’ll call him. I don’t think he’s got an assistant. And strangely he calls the guy.

I get hooked up with the guy a day later, I drive there. I spend the day with him and he offers me a job and I worked for him for two years as his assistant. The first year he had just gotten married, just got out of division one. And he’s like you can do this for a year or two. And you know, we’ll find something else for you.

Cause I’m going to stay here for the rest of my life. He thought they might make him the AD and, and that kind of stuff. But you know, division three, especially back then, I mean, it’s better now, but especially back then it was not division one. I mean, you were driving vans and you were, as a coach, you were driving every single mile.

You know, and the first year got over and he said if you want to stick around, you can probably get this job cause I’m gonna get out of here as fast as I can. So we go through year two and he can’t get out. Like he’s been trying to get out and he just hasn’t.

Hasn’t hit the thing that he wants to do. And we’re getting ready to start practice in year three. And I’m like, it’s time. I got to get out of here. Right? Like this, this is not where I want to stay. And we are probably two weeks from the start of practice, maybe three. And he gets an assistant AD job at William and Mary.

A guy who was the track coach at army or something had become the AD at William and Mary and knew him and hired and the Suwanee, the place where we were they were kind of up against it. They didn’t really have much choice. They had to, they had to hire me. So I’m 26 or whatever. And all of a sudden I’m a college head coach.

So don’t try this at home kids. It’s a little riskier than you’d want it to be.

[00:36:05] Mike Klinzing: What was that transition like? I mean, you obviously went through two pretty big transitions in a short amount of time, going from first high school to the college level, and then going from an assistant coach to being a very, very young head coach.

So what do you just remember about that sort of transitional period of your coaching and kind of who you were as a coach at that point?

[00:36:34] Bill Fenlon: Well, the good news about it was I had already been a head coach for two years. I mean, it was high school, but I had already been the, voice in the practice sessions and those kinds of things.

Right. So from a comfort standpoint, I was pretty comfortable being that guy. As far, as far as knowing what I was doing, I was clueless. So I was faking it like crazy and  as fate would have it the first year, I kind of get this mixed up, but the first year I’m going to say was also the shot clock, right?

So beyond trying to be a head coach in college when you’re only four years older than your seniors, right? Now you got to, you also got to adjust to the shot clock. I mean, the good news is when the shot clock started, it started at 45 seconds. So it felt like a week anyway, right? You didn’t, it really wasn’t as difficult as you, as you might think.

And then the second year was the three point. So those were like back to back maybe the two biggest changes in college basketball in the last. 40 years, right, were my first two years as a head coach. So there was a lot of stuff to navigate. And when you’re leading I think it’s okay to be transparent you don’t know things, but you also if you don’t know, sometimes you got to act like you know until you figure it out. So I did I did quite a bit of pretending and quite a bit of late nights and trying to make sure I was making the right decisions and those kinds of things. You don’t always make all the right decisions when you’re, when you’re starting out.

Well, even when you’re ending, you don’t make the right decisions, but it was fun. It was exciting. I was just kind of was kind of too dumb to know how hard it really was. I was just having fun. I was really, really lucky because the players were very receptive.

Right. I mean, I’m a young guy. I had different roles in the system. And the three guys that were seniors on that first team of mine are three guys that I still keep in contact. And, and I just saw them all together in March. And they’re all three still really active with the school.

In fact, one of them was the chairman of the board. So it was an amazing experience. So I was the head coach there for three years before I moved on.

[00:40:04] Mike Klinzing: Then when You had to Rose Hulman in Indiana. Is that a move to closer towards Wisconsin? Is that a move because you thought that the school was going to be a better fit?

Was that a move for…what was the process? What was the thought?

[00:40:23] Bill Fenlon: Well, division three was. I mean, when I was a college player, I didn’t even know there was a division three, I didn’t know, I believe you, I completely, I didn’t know anything about it and, and it was you know, this is the early mid eighties and generally speaking, these schools, they were not really investing in athletics, right, for the most part, some were, but a lot weren’t, and the place that I was at, at that time really, really was not right.

So I finished year three. We just had our second child and I’m out working camps all summer to try to make some extra money. Right. And I came back from working camp and I’m like I’m probably only going to be able to do this one more year. I mean, they weren’t paying me.

And I didn’t have any idea what the going rate was. I just thought nobody was getting paid. Right. I mean, I just didn’t know any better. And I mean, I wasn’t getting paid as a private school high school coach either, but I didn’t have two kids then either. And I was just starting out, but I wasn’t getting paid any better as a college head coach.

I’m like I’ll do this one more year and then I’ve got to maybe give it up, maybe go do something else. I don’t know. So strangely within that week, within that week of me coming to that realization, I got a call from an athletic director at Rose Hulman who we happen to be in the same league and he was calling about my assistant.

So they had a long time head coach who was retiring and he was just kind of vetting different people who had who he thought might be interested. And he’s a guy that I knew because he had been on the football staff at Northwestern when I was there and the football coach at Rose Hulman had been a football player at Northwestern who I knew.

And so they’re just trying to pick my brain and he’s telling me about the job and then he tells me what it’s going to pay. And I’m like, really? And so like what it was going to pay was a 70 percent pay raise from what I was going to make, what I was making. 70 percent is a lot, right? That’s pretty good.

[00:43:16] Mike Klinzing: That’s a pretty good raise.

[00:43:17] Bill Fenlon: Well, it’s a good enough raise where you don’t have to think, Oh, I got to get out of coaching. Right. And cause that was kind of what was on my mind at the time. I just I can’t afford to do this. And, and I’m like, well to hell with my assistant. What about me?

And he he’s like, well, would you be interested? And I’m like, hell yeah, I’d be interested. So I went up there and interviewed for the job they offered us and me, and I came back to, because I liked where I was at. I just wasn’t getting paid. And I went to the AD and I said, here’s what’s going on.

We were getting progressively better and I had just recruited the kid who’s still the all time leading scorer and he had been a freshman and we were getting it figured out. But he basically was like, well, good luck and, and because we’re not, there’s no more, there’s no more money for this spot.

And so I loaded the troops up and this was. This is late now. This is September, right? So it happened really fast. And it was a really good move for us. That was a great place. We were able to win some games. We made the NCAA tournament and had some terrific experiences.

[00:44:50] Mike Klinzing: You’re one season at Southwestern?

[00:44:54] Bill Fenlon: Yeah. I knew I shouldn’t have sent you that resume. Got all the info. Well, that they sort of, we had, we had some pretty good some pretty good teams at Rose Hulman. And I think starting to develop a little bit of a reputation and, somehow they got my name and they were an NAIA school that was going division three. Right. And  they wanted to get a coach because basketball was kind of their thing. They didn’t have football and they wanted to get a guy with some D3 experience that coach some winning teams and to help them kind of navigate.

Cause none of them knew what that was. Right. Right. Have any idea what, so they were moving, they still had kids with scholarship money and all of that kind of stuff. So they were moving to D3 and were, they kind of thought they were going to get in this in this league that was basically the same league we were in.

And it turned out two years later, it turned out that they did. I’m down there. And at the time there are only three division three schools in the state of Texas, right? So you’re going to have to take this job and it’s going to be, you’re going to be independent the first year, but they’re telling me, yeah, but the next year we’re going to be in this league, right?

Well, I take the job and then they get rejected from the, for the league. So now I’m in Texas. There’s nobody to play Texas is, you guys have probably been there. It’s really big, right? And you’re really far away from lots of stuff. And, and so you can play, you can be a D3 and play an NAIA schedule and just get beat up on by all these scholarship guys and stuff like that.

So it was not going to be what I thought it was going to be. I liked it. And we we had a great year that first year I was there and really had some good success and some good experiences and I could have figured it out, but strangely DePauw kind of came after me. And that was a place that I was familiar with.

I knew people there. We had competed against them when I was at Rose Hulman and just the tenuous aspect of, of where Southwestern was at that point just made me feel like maybe the smartest thing would be to not hang around. So it was a weird time because we were down there for 11 months.

So, we moved from Terre Haute, Indiana to Georgetown, Texas, which is right outside of Austin. And then we turned, we built a house. It was designed by my father in law, who’s an architect, never moved into it, sold it before it was finished. And this is 30. Five, four years later. And I only hear about it once a week now from my wife said we never moved into the house…

[00:48:34] Mike Klinzing: Did she know what she was signing up for?

[00:48:39] Bill Fenlon: She had no idea, that was not a good time. She didn’t want to go, she didn’t want to go back. It was all when we had two really little kids at that time. So it was a crazy time.

And then you realize, well that’s, that’s when you need stuff like that to happen to you when you’re young, cause you still have the energy to be able to kind of plow your way through it and kind of manage it. But it’s still a blur when I think back on it, that was just a lot of things going down really fast.  And all of a sudden we found ourselves back in Indiana.

[00:49:28] Mike Klinzing: All right, so when it comes to the DePauw job, what did you see as being the opportunity there? And then what did you see as being the challenges, if you can think back to the beginning of your tenure.

[00:49:41] Bill Fenlon: Well, they had been really good. So the guy who was coaching them was a guy named Royce Waltham, who had been a Knight assistant and Royce. Ended up going to the university of Indianapolis, killed it there, and then got the Indiana state job and was the head coach at Indiana state. Took him to the tournament a couple of times and, and was a really, really good coach.

And he did a great job at DePauw. And so I thought certain, I thought the things that you need to win were, were in place. And very often when you’re looking at things from the outside, they’re, they don’t look exactly the same. Couldn’t you kid on the inside, but you know, that’s neither here nor there is still a good, good place.

And at the time I thought I was now I’m maybe 34 or 33, something like that. And, and I’m thinking early on in my career, my dream was to maybe coaching the Ivy league. Right. And so I thought, well, if I could get there and win big And, and have some luck I might, I might be able to do that because this was still pre internet, pre ESPN all of that stuff, coaches were still not making a lot of money.

Right. And it wasn’t, there wasn’t a lot of TV exposure. There wasn’t all of those things that you. That you see today that kind of took off when cable TV became a thing and, and ESPN became a thing that all of a sudden coaches are making all kinds of money. And, and then decisions get made differently because of the money.

But back then you would see guys jump levels. In fact, the guy before Royce Waltman at DePauw, he got the Dartmouth job. And gave it back, like went out there, did the press conference, decided he didn’t want to do it and came back. And then a year later, he got the East Carolina job. So he got two division one jobs, boom, boom and Royce Waltman went and got a division two job that led to a division one job.

So it, at the time that didn’t seem crazy. Right. But you know, later within, honestly, within two years. The landscape just completely changed. Right. So you look at guys like Bo Ryan, who won like four or five national championships at Platteville. He, he couldn’t get a sniff forever to get, to get to the division one level.

And there’s just all kinds of really good coaches were no longer going to get considered for the division one level, just because people weren’t going to take a chance. They’d rather take an assistant from a power five conference than take a chance on a guy who’s got a great record as a small college coach.

And you still see that today. You just don’t see that sort of movement in the business. I really think that all changed when TV kind of took over.

[00:53:13] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you said, it’s, it’s rare that you see that kind of, that kind of move and you obviously get settled in at the paw and to spend your the bulk of your entire career there.

So let’s just start with what do you think were the keys to. The success that you were able to have, if you could point to two or three things that you can kind of sum up what you were able to do at DePauw, what were the keys to your success?

[00:53:47] Bill Fenlon: Well it, it really helps to be in a great place.

So DePauw is really, really good school academically. So we were able to, to, to attract extremely bright kids who they, I don’t think because you’re a great student, that makes, it has to necessarily preclude you being interested in being a really good basketball player. So we were able to find a lot of guys who, who cared about both things.

And that kind of fit my personality. And I was able to relate to those guys, I think pretty well. So I think the number one thing being in a good place, because I think. If you’re not in a good place, it, especially at the small college level at the highest levels, you’re selling yourself in your locker room and your facility and those kinds of things, because typically that’s what the kids care the most about you know, at the small college level, you really got to sell the whole package.

And you need to have a good package to sell. And we did have that. We had high level academics and, and really high levels, competitive, small college basketball. And I think those two things were the, were the keys to, to getting good players. It’s like anything else. It’s cycles. You know, we were always pretty good.

And sometimes we were really good. And sometimes we were really, really good. If you don’t have those things, then you might spend a few years. If you do it long enough, you have a few years where you’re really bad. That’s no fun.

[00:55:38] Mike Klinzing: No, it’s not fun when you’re, when your team is not winning, it definitely is not nearly as enjoyable of an experience.

So when you got the players. On campus, the recruiting process is over. Now you got guys that are part of your team. How did you think about developing them, not just as players, but also as leaders? Because I know when you talk about, especially at the division three level, then you talk about the off season and just the fact that guys are kind of going their own separate ways.How did you develop leaders in your program?

[00:56:12] Bill Fenlon: Well, you know, now it’s changed a little bit, right? So I was a, On the NABC Congress, I was doing a bunch of things trying to be involved nationally with having a voice through the Coaches Association to try to get at least some out of season contact with, with players.

So typically, basically for my entire career, you, from the last game to the first practice the next year you, you had to be hands off with guys. They could come and see you, but you couldn’t do anything with them, so you If you were walking through the gym while they were playing pickup, technically you were in violation.

Right? So I think those things are really were really tricky for a long time. So a lot of the things that you do in the off season and that sort of stuff really had to be player driven. So that’s why establishing your culture and the way you want things to be And the way you want the players to think of themselves and that sort of thing is really important because at our level, it had to sustain you through the off-season, right?

If you otherwise you’re reinventing the wheel every year, but you don’t necessarily get to be the driver of that all the time, right? Because you just didn’t have the contact for guys. And so that was a really difficult thing to do. Luckily we had a lot of great kids who bought into the things that we were selling.

And basically what we were selling was we think you can be great in everything that you’re trying to do, right? So we want you to strive for excellence on and off the court. And I really was big on trying to get our guys to come out of their comfort zones. You know, when you’re at a place like DePauw, I mean, it’s a world class top tier liberal arts college. Right? So you’re going to get exposed to so many different things if you want to, right? Like there’s readings and, and guest speakers and people coming in from all over the world on a weekly basis, but they’re not going to come to your dorm room and knock on the door and say, Hey, you know what, Bill Clinton is speaking in the gym tonight. Do you have an interest they’re not going to invite you personally to these things. You gotta be paying attention. And I was really big on that. I did not want our guys to see themselves as stereotypical athletes, right?

I wanted them to see themselves as guys who were trying to become Citizens of the world. Right. And the only I mean, it’s the only way you learn is by coming out of your comfort zone. So one of the things that I was a big acronym guy, right. And so we always had a bunch of acronyms that we’d put them on your shorts or you’d put it on the shirt or whatever.

And we wouldn’t necessarily tell other people what they stood for. So it was kind of secret shit. Right. So we wouldn’t. It was just kind of our thing we didn’t necessarily share it with other people. And so one of the things was and we’d usually have one for the season.

And then we just had some that carried over and stuff like that. And actually, a kid sent me a video one of our former players. Is the president of the student body there right now. And he had to give an address to the freshmen. So he was a freshman on my last team. And he went through these acronyms for these freshmen that were just coming into school.

They had the whole, the whole class. He was giving them the whole thing. So one of them was, was GCF. So it stood for it stood for good, clean fun. Right. So I tried to get our guys to say, okay, anybody can drink beer every night, right? Just because you’re in college, that doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do.

Right? I mean, I used to tell them like, I’m 65. I might have a beer tonight. You can do that for the rest of your life, but you’re never going to be in a place again, where you’re going to be exposed to all this stuff and it’s free and you can walk to it. Right? Right. And so GCF meant do something fun that you might not really recognize as fun, but if you do it, you might have some fun.

So whether that’s going to a play or going to a field hockey game or going to a reading or whatever, I would try to get them to just come out of their comfort zone, learn a little bit about something that they don’t know. And that’s not that easy to convince guys to do that kind of stuff.

So we had a school of music at DePauw and they’d have a couple of operas a year. And I’m like, well, let’s, why don’t we go to the opera? And they looked at me like I had two heads, right. And it’s like, well coach, don’t like the opera and I said you don’t get to say you don’t like the opera.

If you’ve never been to an opera, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work like that. Right. If you go and you don’t like it fine. Right. But you never go and you just kind of have this idea of what it is, but you’ve never really had the experience, that’s kind of the definition of ignorance.

And so we’d get them to do stuff like that. And I think one of the things, and you guys have probably had this experience, is that you’re getting through to kids and players, When they start repeating the stupid things that you say, right? And so because they think they’re making fun of you, but they don’t know that the diabolical aspect of it is you’re really getting in their heads a little bit, right?

And so they were always talking about the GCF. So they would always come to me and say, cause we tried to do a lot of that stuff as a team. We try to encourage them to do it as individuals. And so they always had this kind of screening process, the process as to, well, what counts for GCF and what doesn’t count for GCF, right?

And so we we’d beat it around a little bit and that sort of stuff. So we had another one, we had another one and this, the kid actually used it in his, in his talk the other day. And, and that’s TATGOD, And so a lot of times you know, you’re on a college campus, sometimes the kids look like ghosts, right?

They haven’t slept and everything’s so hard and there’s too much homework and everything’s really difficult and bad practice, bad tests, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so TATGOD stands for these are the good old days, right? And I would try to convince our guys that as difficult as things seem, sometimes you got to know this time that you’re living in your life right now is the time you’re going to be looking back on and talking about, right?

This is going to be a highlight of your existence. And it’s going to be for the rest of your life. So if you can keep that in perspective and recognize that you’re actually living in the good old days right now, you’re going to be money ahead.

And you’d be surprised how many guys I hear from 10 years later, 15 years later, who, who didn’t always get it at the time, but eventually they do get it. And you know, that’s pretty rewarding.

[01:04:56] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that long term impact that coaches can have on players is something that I think we’ve talked to so many guys about, that when you get an opportunity to have players reach back out to you and talk to you about things that are going on in their life 10, 15 years down the road from when you coached them, there really is nothing more important, more rewarding, lets you know that you had that long lasting impact.

And I think that’s a really important part of coaching. For you. When you look ahead now that you’ve retired and you’re trying to stay active in the game, what’s next for you? What do you see as being your biggest challenge moving forward here?

[01:05:42] Bill Fenlon: So I’m trying to learn how to be a broadcaster. So that’s been really fun.

So I’ve been working for this network ISC in Indiana, doing high school and small college games. And then I’m going to have the opportunity to do some games from Notre Dame in their preseason. So that is going to be pretty challenging for me. I’m also trying to figure out I’m also thinking about starting a little bit of what I would call a kind of an informal consulting business.

I’m still working on what form that’s going to take. I don’t want to do any focus groups and surveys and stuff like that. I just want to come over and spend some time with coaches, give back a little bit sit in on practices and meetings and stuff like that and give guys maybe another set of eyes.

I think that very often, especially high school and small college guys it’s really difficult for you get on that hamster wheel, right? You’re maybe understaffed, you’re teaching, you got all these other things going on. And you just kind of get on that hamster wheel and you don’t really see everything that’s going on.

And very often the differences are there they’re small, right? They’re details. And having another set of eyes that’s maybe not there every day and can give you a little bit of a different perspective. is something that I’m playing around with that idea. Still not sure exactly what that’s going to look like, but I think that would be a lot of fun and that would make me, that would make me happy, at least in terms of thinking that I’m, I’m giving back to the game a little bit.

The guy who’s coaching Notre Dame is a guy named Micah Shrewsbury, who was just at Penn, came from Penn State last year was his first year there. And I think he’s going to really get them going. And he was a GA for me back in the early 2000s and worked with me and for me, for two years.

So just seeing guys who you’ve maybe had a little bit of a hand in their careers and stuff, just take off and have unbelievable success, incredibly rewarding. So for no other reason than that, I’m looking forward to kind of getting a little closer to their program.

[01:08:18] Mike Klinzing: Well, that sounds like a really great second act. I mean, the opportunity to call Notre Dame games and then work those small college games as well, kind of back where you’ve been rooted for your entire career. Really great opportunity. Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share how people can connect with you, whether you want to share email, website, social media, whatever you feel comfortable with. And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:08:43] Bill Fenlon: Sure. My email is Bill Fenlon22@gmail.com. And I actually was going to talk to Mike about it. One of the things that I’ve also done is I’ve written a couple of of articles that people might find of interest.

One of them is about the situation. It comes up at the end of the game when you’re, when you’re when you’re up three, it’s kind of a big discussion point. Like, do you foul? Do you not foul? And I worked, I worked through all that with a math professor at DePauw and did all the probabilities and stuff like that.

And people love that thing. So I’m happy to send that to anybody who has an interest. And also happy to just have people bounce things off of me. If I can help, I’m happy to do it.

[01:09:37] Mike Klinzing: Bill, can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us, really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.  Thanks.