JIM BROWN – MEN’S BASKETBALL COLOR ANALYST & FORMER HEAD COACH AT WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY- EPISODE 839

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Email – jbrow10@aol.com

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Jim Brown served as an assistant, associate, and head coach for the Wright State men’s basketball team for 27 years.  He was an assistant coach under head coach John Ross, Wright State’s first coach, and continued in that role with head coaches Marcus Jackson and Ralph Underhill, becoming associate head coach in 1993. He then was appointed head coach for the 1996-97 season. During his time with the Raiders, the program moved from high school gyms, to the PE Building to the Nutter Center and from a Division II independent to a member of the Horizon League and Division I. 

After leaving Wright State, Brown was the head boys’ varsity basketball coach at Northmont High School in Clayton, Ohio for 16 years.

Jim currently works alongside Chris Collins, calling Wright State Men’s Basketball Games on Radio.

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Grab your notebook and pen as you listen to this episode with Jim Brown, former Wright State and Northmont High School Head Coach.

What We Discuss with Jim Brown

• Growing up with a father who coached high school basketball at two different Ohio High Schools
• Keeping score at Dayton Flyers’ games as a kid
• Meeting up recently with a guy who mentored him as a young player on the playgrounds
• “There’s so many kids today that are having bad experiences with young coaches because all they want to do is win.”
• “I don’t care if you win any games. What it’s about is developing talent and keeping these kids interested in this sport so that when they become sophomores and juniors in high school, they’re still playing basketball and they haven’t given it up because they’ve had a bad experience.”
• “Until your score of your game is either on Channel 7 at night or in the Daily News, it’s not important.”
• “If you’re going to get better at the game of basketball, you’ve got to have a passion for the practice.”
• Developing a passion for the game in young players
• “If you have a player in your program that can play at the next level, you have to challenge him and make sure he can do that.”
• Going to Vietnam after college and returning home to be an assistant at Wright State for his former high school coach
• Starting the basketball program from scratch at Wright State
• Working with a coach you previously played for
• The difficulty trying to recruit players to Wright State in the early years
• “Anybody can stand on the sidelines and rant and rave and put people in and out of a game, but how many people know how to teach a pick and roll?”
• “All the things that enter into being a good athlete, or being on a team, those values carry over into your everyday job.”
• The impact of NIL and the transfer portal
• His one year as the head coach at Wright State
• Recruiting stories with Vitaly Potopenko, Zydrunas, Ilgauskas, and Dirk Nowitzki
• Recruiting Mouse McFadden who ended up at Cleveland State
• Why he loves calling games on the radio

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THANKS, JIM BROWN

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TRANSCRIPT FOR JIM BROWN – MENS’ BASKETBALL COLOR ANALYST & FORMER HEAD COACH AT WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY- EPISODE 839

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co host Jason Sunkle, and we are pleased to welcome to the podcast, the former head coach, assistant coach, and associate head coach at Wright State University and former head coach at Northmont High School here in the state of Ohio, Jim Brown, Jim, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:22] Jim Brown: Well, thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:00:25] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. We are thrilled to be able to be able to have you on. We are thankful to our mutual friend, Tim Gallagher for connecting us. And Jim, want to 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.

[00:00:40] Jim Brown: Well, my father was a basketball coach. I have very little recollection of it, but my father was a basketball coach. He played college basketball at Ohio Northern University here in Ohio. And he was a coach at a real small school down in southeastern Ohio, not too far from Athens, called Corning, Corning High School.

And he actually, it was a class B school at the time, a small school. He actually had the player of the year in the state of Ohio, took his team to the state championship in Columbus and they got beat I think in the semifinals by Columbiana. And then he moved to a real small school just outside of Lancaster, Ohio called Rushville High School.

And I don’t know really what happened there because we moved to Dayton. He got out of coaching. I think when he went there, he was probably offered more money, thought it was a better opportunity, and he got there and it just wasn’t what he thought it was going to be, or he kind of soured on coaching.

I don’t know. Never really found out the exact reason, but anyway in 1950, we moved from Lancaster to Dayton, Ohio. And I guess my first, first love with basketball really started about. The seventh grade back in those days, you didn’t have AAU basketball, you didn’t have basketball camps. If you wanted to go play, you had to go to a blacktop at a park.

And there was a school near my house that I went to school and I could walk to and my seventh grade coach, he was my seventh grade coach and my eighth grade coach. He’s the kind of junior high coaches I wish there were more of because he really made me fall in love with basketball. It was so much fun.

I just really enjoyed him as a coach. Didn’t realize it at the time, of course but the impact he had on my life as a young kid. Because my dad was out of coaching at that time. He went into private business and it was really interesting. And then I became a University of Dayton basketball fan.

My dad showed me how to do a scorecard and we kept score of the Flyers. When I was in junior high, seventh and eighth grade, and that was I was about as big a UD flyer basketball fan as you could imagine at that time. And I really was, I’d lived and died with the Dayton Flyers. And so that’s where it all got started for me.

[00:03:13] Mike Klinzing: A little different today. Not many people are doing their scorecard anymore.

[00:03:16] Jim Brown: No, no, no. I mean, he would take a piece of paper and he would draw. I think he did it for me at at first. And then I started doing it and we kept score of the games on radio. Listen to the game on radio and keep score.

And yeah, there’s a lot of things that are different today when it comes to playing basketball. I mean, Yeah, my first experience of playing on a wood floor was when I was in the 7th grade. You got kids. Eight years old playing on wood floors now. I mean, that’s totally different.

[00:03:47] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. Nobody talked about playing on the blacktop. It’s kind of been a running theme on the podcast that you tell kids today, Hey, we used to play a lot of basketball outside. And they look at you like you’re crazy. They can’t have any, no concept that that’s what used to happen all the time. Especially when you think about guys who are really good players, who from a young age, I’ve been playing travel basketball, I’ve been playing AAU basketball.

Like those kids are playing in gyms with a coach. With parents on the sideline with a scoreboard, whereas the way you grew up, and certainly I know the way I grew up was you were just outside and you were playing on your driveway and that eventually you were playing at the park and you were playing against guys and it was windy and there was pebbles on the court and you were playing on cement and all these other things that kids today really don’t do and don’t have to, I guess, deal with those elements the way that you or I probably did growing up.

[00:04:37] Jim Brown: And it’s really interesting. I played at this park, as I said, I could walk to, it was called Grant School, and it was a blacktop park. And you actually only played at one end. You didn’t play full court. And the funny part about it, they were all older than me. I mean, I was in the seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th grade.

And every night, I was so fortunate because this became a very popular park to play basketball at. And every night there would be. 10, 15 guys that were older than me. I mean, they were out of college and, and there was this one guy that he was, it’s really a funny story. I have not seen this guy in 60 years.

He lives in Florida. He somehow. His son somehow got my telephone number and he called me from Florida and he and his son were coming up to Ohio and I had lunch with him last week and we had not seen each other in 60 years and I was telling him the story. I don’t know whether I was an eighth grader, ninth grader, freshman or sophomore, but we were playing down there one night and he says to me, he says, Jim, you’re never going to be a player unless you learn to chew tobacco.

And I said, what? He pulls out his red man pouch of tobacco and gives me a wad of it. I put it in my mouth and I immediately got sick, of course, and I told him that story the other day when we were having lunch and he was just laughing like crazy. He, I told him, I said you don’t realize this, but you had so much influence on me as a young kid because when I was a seventh and eighth grader, I was probably the best player on our team.

And then I went to Big Belmont High School, which it was a big high school at the time. There were like 4 elementary schools that fed into it. And of course I thought I was just everything because I was the best player on my eighth grade team and I get there and I struggled, I mean, I barely made the freshman team and didn’t play very much.

And his name was Buck Irwin and he really encouraged me. I mean, he was so supportive and I was telling him the other day when we were having lunch, I said if I hadn’t met you, I don’t know what my career would have been like in basketball because you were so Supportive of what you thought I could be.

And it really encouraged me. And it was just a really cool experience to visit with him again after all these years.

[00:07:03] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that’s absolutely amazing. I mean, it speaks to the relationships that you build. In pickup basketball, and it also speaks to the fact that those relationships for kids today just don’t exist.

I’ll give you a little story from, from me playing playground basketball. So when I used to go and I probably started going to the park, I grew up in Strongsville, Ohio. And so I started going to the park and playing basketball up there with. Adults and whatever, all, all the mix of ages of guys that used to play.

And, and I kind of got befriended by a guy who at the time he seemed obviously a lot older than me. I was probably 13 or 14 and he was probably, I don’t know, in his late twenties, but this guy kind of befriended me and he gave me a nickname. He started calling me Jerry West. And so then at this playground, I was always just known as West.

And I tell this. That’s the story to people all the time that anybody who knew me in that era will see me and, and I don’t see those guys just like you. You haven’t seen someone for 60 years. I probably run into guys very, very rarely, but they’ll say, Hey West, how you doing? And then people that know me and don’t know me from that era, they’re looking at me like, what are they even talking?

They have no idea what I’m talking about. But anyway, this one guy. He and I became friends and we’d sometimes just get there early before before people were playing and we’d be shooting around or we’d just be sitting on the bench and we’d be talking and whatever. And so this guy at one point, now he didn’t give me tobacco, but instead he gave me this bucket hat.

And this bucket hat became something that For whatever reason, the connection that I felt like I had with this guy, like I love this bucket hat. And so, I would wear it and it had like, it had like patches of, it looked like almost like patches from jeans. And so, that’s what this whole hat was blue and whatever.

And it wasn’t, I don’t think, the most attractive hat, but I wore this thing everywhere seriously in high school. Like I was wearing it all the time. And you just think back to those relationships that you had. And like you said, I had so many people that encouraged me that were. They weren’t my coaches.

They weren’t my parents. They were just guys that had known me since the time I was 13 or 14 years old that kind of encouraged me and then watched me as a high school player and kept track of what I was doing as a college player. I just think that those experiences that I had to me are always invaluable.

And I’ve said numerous times that I feel like what kids have missed out on today is something that, look, you just had a reunion with somebody that you hadn’t seen in 60 years that you felt like had an impact on your life. And I kind of feel sad for this generation of kids that they don’t get to have those experiences.

Now they get to have different experiences because I didn’t get, I didn’t get to play. 80 games of AAU and a nice air conditioned gym with, in a lot of cases, good coaching and some of the advantages that kids have today. But I always say I wouldn’t trade the way I grew up for what, for what we have today.

[00:09:59] Jim Brown: No, no, not at all. And it was a totally different time, but I think I’ve thought many, many times, I mean, I was a coach for 43 years, 27 in college and 16 in high school. And I’ve thought many times how fortunate I was to have a seventh and eighth grade coach that really made the game fun for me.

I mean, I enjoyed it. I mean, I’m sure he yelled at me from time to time, but he made it fun. And it wasn’t necessarily about winning. I mean, it was about, and I can’t believe he did this one time because he was a good coach, but. He had two tickets to Belmont high school. Now, remember I was in the seventh or eighth grade, I guess I was in the eighth grade and he told everybody he had two tickets to the high school game and he would give them to the player that scored the most points.

Now I can’t believe he did this and I may have this story wrong or not, but anyway, we played the game and I guess I shot the ball every time I touched it. And he calls time out. He says, Jim. If you want those tickets that bad, I’ll just give them to you. We need to make sure we get good shots. You know, there’s so many kids today that are having bad experiences with young coaches because all they want to do is win.

You know, when I was a high school coach, I would tell my seventh and eighth grade coaches, look guys, it’s not about winning. I don’t care if you win any games. What it’s about is developing talent and keeping these kids interested in this sport so that when they become sophomores and juniors in high school, they’re still playing basketball and they haven’t given it up because they’ve had a bad experience.

in the seventh or eighth grade. And, and I think, I think that it’s really difficult to do that as a coach, to put aside the importance of winning. I used to tell for, I don’t know, 30 years, 35 years, I taught a coaching class at Wright State University. And one of the things I told those students, Until your score of your game is either on Channel 7 at night or in the Daily News, it’s not important.

It’s not important. What’s important is that your players get better, they have fun doing what they’re doing, and they don’t give the game up. And you say that, but that’s a difficult thing for a young coach to understand and come to grips with because there’s so much emphasis put on winning. You have these fourth and fifth graders playing in a select league and they’re pressing full court the entire game.

It makes no sense whatsoever why that sort of stuff is going on today, but it is. And you just wonder from time to time, like how many kids give up playing basketball because they’ve had a bad experience from a coach that coached for the wrong reasons.

[00:12:50] Mike Klinzing: I think there is way more than we would like to think about when it comes to kids that have walked away from the game because of bad experiences.

And I mean, I know I’ve experienced it in terms of just talking with the number of people that I’ve talked to, parents of kids, and then just being around it as coaching my own kids. rec youth basketball and then in travel basketball with their community team and then coaching them at the AAU level and you see the teams that you play against that you couldn’t have given a better description of teams that have fourth or fifth grade and they’re pressing all over the floor or you have a girl’s fourth grade team that’s playing a two three zone and you just look at all these different things and you wonder like, what is it about these coaches that pushes them?

To win over the idea that you have to develop the kids. And I think you’ve said it tremendously well that the game has to be fun and you want to keep them playing. And I, one of the things that I’ve always said to parents is, is look. What you want to do with your kid is you want to give them the opportunity to experience as many different things as they can, because when they’re 10 or 11 and they haven’t hit puberty yet, you have no idea what they’re going to become as a person, as an athlete.

Are they going to be tall? Are they going to be short? Are they going to be fast? Are they going to be slow? Are they going to be strong? What’s their body going to look like? And it’s just, we drive so many kids out because of that culture of winning. And I think that. What you talked about in terms of teaching your class at Wright State, what we really need.

And again, I think that there’s USA basketball, I know has tried to do it, but it’s such a daunting task is to try to have more coach education and get people to understand, like, look, whether you’re a parent volunteer, or you’re actually coaching at the middle school level or whatever it may be that. It should be about development, but unfortunately, again, our society tends to value winning and a lot of times parents, especially in the AAU side of it, they’ll chase that winning, right?

With the, they, they don’t care about the quality of the, of the coach or if the players are being developed, they’re just looking at that bottom line. And it’s something that I think in the youth basketball space, we’re fighting that constantly, Jim. We’re just fighting against it all the time.

[00:15:06] Jim Brown: Yeah, when I went to Northmont High School, they had two freshmen teams.

And, no, I’m sorry, two 7th grade teams and two 8th grade teams. What they were doing was they were putting their 10 best players in their view on the one team and the next 10 best players on the other team. And I went there and I said, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to have a draft. Team A is going to pick the, what they feel is the best center.

And then the other team’s going to pick the best point guard. And boy, did I meet with some resistance. They said, yo, we’ll never win any games. And I said, well, look, this is the thing. If I put the 10 best players on one team, five of them aren’t going to play a whole lot, but if I put the 10 best players on two teams, the 10 best players are all going to play a lot and we’ll still win.

And they said, oh no, no, you’ll never win with that. Well, we did. We won a couple of championships doing it that way. But my whole point was. I wanted guys to have it because in the 7th and 8th grade, as you just said, you don’t know, I always would talk about when I was teaching that class at Wright State and trying to get these young coaches because their first job was probably going to be coaching a 5th grade team or 6th grade team or 7th grade team. That was going to be their first job. And I tried to convince them that you have no idea how a kid’s going to develop, whether he’s going to I always tell my kids in high school if you’re going to get better at the game of basketball, you’ve got to have a passion for the practice.

And you can go to CVS and get a flu shot, but you can’t go there and get a basketball patient shot. You either have it or you don’t. And so. These kids have to develop that passion and, and if they don’t have it, they’re going to go someplace else.

But you as a coach, you can help with that. I mean, by making it fun and, and having an enjoyable time. And, and I told my seventh and eighth grade coaches, look, everybody on your team is going to have to start at least two games. I don’t care how long you’re playing, but he’s got to start two games. I want that kid at the end of the year to be able to tell his buddies, I started a couple of games.

And I didn’t go over and check them. I just, that was what I tried to encourage them to do. And when I first went to Northmont, they hadn’t had a winning season in a long time. We went 16 straight winning seasons. So something we were doing was right. And I feel very strongly about youth basketball and the changes that should be made to make it better. I mean You can probably guess I’m not a real fan of AAU basketball for 4th, 5th and 6th graders. I’m in favor of recreational basketball where they play neighborhood. But when you’re a 4th grader, and you’re going to 2 and a half hours to play in a tournament, I just.

That doesn’t I don’t think that’s a good way. And then the problem today, Mike, is these parents have, they’ve bought into this. They think that doing that’s going to guarantee him a college scholarship someplace. It’s crazy, but that’s the mindset. This actually happened to me.

We moved to Beaver Creek. We lived in Dayton and we moved to Beaver Creek, which is a suburb of Dayton. And when we moved there, my youngest son was tall for his age and he, he wanted to play for this select program in Beaver Creek called the Beaver Creek Stars. And he was a third grader. And he found out that as a third grader, he could try out for the fourth grade team.

That was the first team they had was the fourth grade. And he was a third grader, but he could try out. So he tries out and he makes the team. Well, I’m coaching at Wright State and they asked me to be the speaker at their banquet at the end of the year. So I did, and I’m driving in the home of the car with my wife and she turns to me.

She says Anthony’s not going to do this next year. I said, what are you talking about? She’s no, he hated it, Jim. I says, Oh, come on. She’s, well you weren’t home a lot. You didn’t, he hated it. He didn’t like running suicides. He didn’t like getting yelled at. And I didn’t say anything. Well, the next season came around and he didn’t want to play.

And the coach calls me on the phone says, Hey, Jim, Anthony, hasn’t been at a practice. And I said, well Anthony’s not going to play. And it didn’t hurt his career at all. I mean, he played you know, my wife’s Catholic. He played on a CYO team and he went to the high school.

He started every single game of his high school career. But it told me right away that he didn’t have a good experience. And I think the fact that dad was a coach kept him interested in the game. But I thought many times what would’ve happened to Anthony if his dad hadn’t been a coach and he had that experience as a third grader. What have he given up basketball? Those are the things that as a coach, you try to prevent from happening.

[00:20:09] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. And I think to go along with coach education, there’s also, as you said, parent education where…

[00:20:16] Jim Brown: Gosh, well good luck with that.

[00:20:17] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, exactly. But as you said, parents have sort of been indoctrinated into the idea that you have to play this in fourth grade or you have to do this in fifth grade, and that if you don’t. That somehow your kid is falling behind. And I remember it’s funny because my son is going to be a senior this year.

And I have a daughter who she stopped playing basketball as a ninth grader. She’s going to be a sophomore in college. And I have another daughter who’s going to be in eighth grade this year. And so before I had my kids. I remember I would have conversations with parents about the speaking to what you talked about, where you’d like to see kids playing rec basketball and playing in their neighborhoods.

And obviously that’s the way you grew up. And that’s the way I grew up. And I remember talking to people and saying to them, like, I just don’t know how many kids, and this is before I had my own kids. I just don’t know how many kids there are that are out there. that want to play basketball or any sport for that matter, that they’re eight years old and they want to go practice three times a week for two hours and then go and play whatever X number of games on the weekend.

Like, Don’t get me wrong. There are kids who are eight years old who want to do that, but they are very rare. There are kids who are like that, but there aren’t very many of them. Most kids would rather do a variety of different things and just kind of focus on being a kid. And I think once my kids got into it, what you find out as a parent is that you kind of are forced into that system because the alternative is nothing.

There’s nothing out there. And so what I found that I had to do was I had to coach those teams to make sure that I was able to control the environment that my kids were in and I could make it fun and I could do the things that you’re describing to make sure that, Hey, I want every kid on my team to be able to come back the next year and want to play again and not drive them away.

The coach drove away your son and it’s just, it’s such a vicious cycle and parents just don’t, they don’t understand what the process looks like and what it needs to look like.

[00:22:24] Jim Brown: Yeah. They don’t have the experience of you or myself that have been through it and knows. I was going to say this when I was teaching that class at Wright State.

And I was trying to bring across the point that you have no idea. What’s going to turn out with a kid, when you’re coaching a seventh or eighth grade team, and I always would bring out the fact, one of the greatest teams in the history of professional basketball is the Chicago Bulls, and they had three players on their team.

Michael Jordan was cut as a freshman. That’s well documented. Scottie Pippen went to Central Arkansas as a basketball manager. He didn’t even go as a walk on or a scholarship player. And then Dennis Rodman look at his background. And those are two of them were top 50 players of all time. And you know, those all happened after the seventh grade I mean, Jordan was cut as a freshman and Pippen went to college as a basketball manager.

That, if you hear that story and you think is you have an idea of what a seventh grader is going to be like as a high school senior or a college friend. I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. So. Like I said, it’s a very difficult thing for a young coach, 22, 23 years old with his first job to have that kind of philosophy coaching a seventh or eighth grade team, or even a fourth or a fifth grade team for that matter.

It’s very difficult. I understand that and I appreciate it, but still if you can somehow get it across to those young coaches that that’s the proper approach. As it doesn’t matter how many games your fifth grade team wins is, are those fifth graders still playing basketball when they’re in high school?

[00:24:09] Mike Klinzing: Part of that’s a trickle down effect too, right? Because if I’m a junior high coach or a middle school coach, then part of my philosophy should be coming from my high school varsity coach on the same token. When you talk about AAU, right? That if I’m a four and there, look, there are a lot of AAU programs that do things right.

There are unfortunately a lot of AAU programs that do things wrong. If you have a good AAU program, you can have a good experience playing 4th grade or 5th grade AAU. If you have… A coach who makes it fun and makes it about developing the players and you don’t get in the car and travel four hours or out of state or do all these things that these teams do and these coaches do and these parents do with the idea that what I laugh about Jim and at some point, man, I think I might have to write a book, but like I said, my son is going to be a senior.

And so the last two years, he’s played on a pretty good AU team. And so going into his Junior year, our team was pretty good. And we’ve got a number of players who are going to play college basketball probably at some level, and our team was 37 and 3 and nobody was watching us. There was no colleges watching us at all going into our junior year.

And we have, again, guys that are going to play college basketball, but nobody. Was watching us going into our junior year. And yet you see all these people that are traveling to these showcases and tournaments that are being advertised that, Hey, there’s coaches here and you’re going to be ranked and all these things, and you just wish you could tell people like, Hey, relax.

If your kid loves the game, as you said, you can’t get a shot for basketball passion. Like either you have it or you don’t. And it’s funny because growing up, like I was a kid myself who, I mean, I loved it from the time I was little and couldn’t get enough. And my kids were all different than that. And my son, I, I, when we started the podcast in 2018, and Jason can probably attest to this, I used to say all the time that my kids are not wired.

Like I was, I was just, you couldn’t give me enough. And so I used to say to my son, like, he, he likes the game. He likes going to practice. He works hard when he’s there, but he doesn’t put that extra time in. And now all of a sudden, after he was in ninth grade, all of a sudden that light. Came on and he completely shifted and started working at it and started working at it and working at it.

And a kid who would never pick up a ball on his own. Now he’s charting everything he does and he’s put in all this time and he’s going to end up being a college basketball player at some point. And again, if you could go back and listen to our episodes of the podcast in 2018, 2019, you’d hear me saying he just doesn’t have that same passion for the game that I had.

But at some point. It turned on, but he hadn’t been turned off the game.

[00:27:05] Jim Brown: See, that’s right there. That is the key point is because for me. It happened after my sophomore year when I was a sophomore and I played very, very little, I came to the realization that, look, if I want to be good, I’m going to have to put in four or five hours a day and get better.

That’s the only way. Basketball is a skill game. I mean, you have to practice and all sports are skill games, but basketball, Because it’s a 10 foot basket with a big ball and they get these fourth and fifth graders, 10 year olds to start. And it’s impossible to dribble a ball very well at that age.

And you just never know. You know, as a parent, expose your kids to those things. And if they’re going to do it, that passion will come. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a, my fear is it comes too early. Like in your son’s case, it didn’t come until he was in high school. Well, that’s great because he isn’t burned out.

He’s ready to explode his talents. And I think that’s the best scenario of all when a kid develops that passion later on because. There’s so many things kids want to do today. And it is what it is, but it’s good to hear that that’s what happened to your son.

[00:28:23] Mike Klinzing: Yeah.  And it’s hard too. I mean, to be honest with you, Jim, I mean, when I think about my journey as a parent, especially being wired the way I was, it’s hard to say, okay, I’m going to the gym to do some workouts with some kids or I’m going to camp and whatever. And Hey, I got the keys to this gym.

You want to go and shoot. And to have your kids say to you, nah, I don’t really want to go.

[00:28:49] Jim Brown: Like exactly, exactly.

[00:28:51] Mike Klinzing: It’s really difficult to not be the guy who forces them. And look, I know the right answer. The right answer is you don’t force them. I know that that’s the right way to go.

There were many times where it was hard to not take them. And there were some times where I’m like, guess what? You’re going, even if you don’t want to go. And I kind of know the landscape and ultimately what it came down to for me is that as I looked around and obviously we’ve all read stories of the parent who forced their kid to do this or that.

And then when they get to be adults. There’s no relationship between the child and the parent because sports got in the way of it. And so I made a decision that as difficult as it was for me, I was just going to make sure that ultimately the game didn’t get in the way of when my kids are 26 years old, I want to be able to have that relationship with them.

But even for me, who knows those pitfalls, there was still many times when it was very hard not to give a little swift kick or be like, Hey, we’re going to go to the gym, whether you want to go or not. So I can feel for parents who don’t have the same experience that, man, it’s hard to navigate. As you said, they just don’t know any better.

[00:30:11] Jim Brown: No, they don’t. I came home one day from coaching practice and my son was in the driveway. He was working on shots and I said, Anthony, let me see if you can shoot a left handed layup. He was probably about 10 years old and he said, I can’t do that. It’s too hard. And all I said was, well, I’ll tell you what, Andy, there’s a kid on the other side of town that’s learning how to shoot a left handed layup and you’re going to get to high school and he’s going to kick your butt.

And I walked in the house. You know, like you, I was a little pissed off. And about 15 minutes later, he comes in. He says, dad, come outside. And I went out and he shot a left handed layup. Now it was cruel. It was crooked. It wasn’t, but I didn’t yell at him. All I did was make a comment and he took that in and went with it and learned how to shoot a left handed layup.

And I was proud of myself because that’s all I said I didn’t get one little comment and. Sometimes you do that as a coach. You know, those little, little things to motivate somebody, sometimes being negative is not the answer. So as part of coaching is how do you motivate everybody?

Cause some guys are motivated in different ways and you got to figure out what rings this bell and gets them going.

[00:31:30] Mike Klinzing: What was your favorite memory of being a high school basketball player?

[00:31:34] Jim Brown: Oh, well I had a great high school basketball coach. I mean, if you play high school basketball and you play for a coach that prepares you for your profession, which I had no intention of being a basketball coach, I wanted to be a biology teacher, but I played for this coach who was way ahead of his time, Mike. I mean, when we were in high school and I played with Donny May and Bill Hoskett. Donny May went to the University of Dayton, was a great player there. And Bill Hoskett went to Ohio State and was a great player. They both played in the NBA for a short period of time.

They were sophomores when I was a senior. They won the state championship when they were seniors in Ohio. But my coach. We would play multiple defenses. I mean, we would start the game in a man to man. And when we scored six points and we would start to change, we’d be in a zone on a made basket and a man to man on a missed basket.

And I learned how to play a two, three zone. I learned how to play a one, three, one zone. I learned how to play a one, two, two zone. All in high school and playing for this guy. And so I always felt like a high school coach. Your job is to win games, of course, but if you have a player in your program that can play at the next level, you have to challenge him and make sure he can do that.

I was so fortunate to have the high school coach that I had because he did all of those things and he was way ahead of his time. So I had so many great memories in high school. My only… was my parents had me too soon because those guys won the state championship when I was out of school two years.

And then when I went to the university of Dayton, they went to the final four a year after I graduated. So, I mean, I’ve told my mom and dad, you had me way too soon. I should have waited a couple more years. I had a better experience, but no, it was my high school. I mean, the last two years, I only played for Coach Ross my junior and senior year.

Actually I, yeah, my junior and senior year, no, just my senior year. I’m sorry. Just my senior year. I played for a different coach as a junior and then he was replaced by Coach Ross and he prepared me for the coaching profession, no question about that.

[00:34:01] Mike Klinzing: When did you know that you wanted to get into coaching?  When did that get on your radar?

[00:34:05] Jim Brown: This is an unreal story. I went to University of Dayton and I guess when I was a senior and I wanted to be a biology teacher. And when I was a senior at UD back then the theory was this. You wanted to be a coach. You had the minor in physical education.

And I was way behind in doing that because I hadn’t taken the number of physical education courses that you have to take to get a minor in it. So my senior year I was taking, I took like 20 hours of physical education classes just so I could get a teaching certificate in the coach in physical education.

So I graduate from the university of Dayton and I took ROTC in college. So I had an army commitment. I graduated. I became a second Lieutenant. Eventually I got sent to Vietnam and I was in Vietnam and Wright State was starting a basketball program for the very first time. They had never had a basketball program at Wright State.

And I got this letter from my high school coach, John Ross telling me that he was picked as the first coach at Wright State and he wanted me to be, he says, I know you’re getting home sometime in February, I want you to be my assistant coach. And I thought, oh my God, what a change in career this is going to be.

And so I wrote him back. I was in a bad place in Vietnam. I was right on the Cambodian border, but I made it back and then I got back on February 10th of 1970. And a week later I was recruiting players for Wright State University and the rest is history. So then I became a coach.

[00:35:49] Mike Klinzing: So you really had no plans to go into coaching and then all of a sudden, boom, here you are coaching at the college level.

What was It like starting a program from scratch. Cause there aren’t many people that get an opportunity to do that.

[00:36:02] Jim Brown: No, it was, it was very, very difficult. Now I was living the dream, Mike. I mean, I really was, I was a college basketball coach, albeit part time because the first, the first couple of years there, I still taught and I was teaching in the Dayton Public School System and going out there part time and Coach Ross, John Ross, was even part time. As you can imagine, you’re starting a program from scratch. You don’t have a whole lot of money. You didn’t have enough money to pay a head basketball coach his salary.

So John was actually working. He was supervising student teachers in the morning and then coaching in the afternoon. I was visiting high schools throughout the Southern half of Ohio for the admissions office. And the, well, the first two years I was still teaching in the Dayton public school system.

I was teaching biology and going out there part time and each year they kind of upped the program. You know, when we first started, we had no place to practice on campus. We had no gym on campus. We had to practice at a local high school, but we couldn’t do that until nine o’clock at night because they had they had their freshman team, their JV team and their varsity team.

And so we would go down there at nine o’clock at night. We would rent a van, fill it up with sandwiches. Cause when we got back to the. College, there was no place for the guys to eat, so. We would bus down there or take a van, go down there, practice, come back. And the van would smell like bologna and salami and ham sandwiches.

It was hard. I mean and it was, but like I said, I was living the dream because I was coaching college basketball. Now for John Ross, who had won a state championship and this and that. It was very, very difficult. I mean, he had been very, very successful as a high school coach.

And when you go there and you’re starting from scratch and you’re playing schools like Otterbein and Wilmington and Muskegon, and you’re not doing well. I think the first year we won eight games and then the second year we might’ve won nine games, but they wouldn’t turn it around. I mean, the third game, the third season, we won 17 games and started to win, but it was really hard because we didn’t have any place on campus. They finally built in 73, which would have been our third or fourth year of basketball. They built a place on campus for us to play and it seated about 2,500. But it was hard. I mean, it was a great experience for me, but here’s the other thing I was coaching with my high school coach, and so it took me a while.

To come to grips with, look this is a guy I played for. Now I’m coaching with him. And I can remember we had a meeting one day where there was something that happened and, and John had to admonish something that happened. I don’t know what it was. So we walk out of the meeting and I turned to him.

I said, that was great. What you said, coach. And he said, well, I wish you would have spoken up and it was a kind of a coming to Jesus meeting for me because I realized, look I’m not playing for him anymore. I’m coaching with him and I have some responsibilities here and I need to speak up at the appropriate time.

So in those first three or four years were very difficult in terms of building the program, but I think in hindsight, looking back on it, we did it the right way. We really did it the right way. I mean, we eventually got some scholarship money and when I first went to Wright State, it’s a state school and we only had so much money.

We didn’t have such a thing as a full scholarship. We might’ve had $30,000. And we had to split that among, among 12 or 13 guys. So we didn’t have a full scholarship. And so I was recruiting in Youngstown and Cleveland and not having any luck whatsoever because you had to recruit in state because Wright State had this out of state tuition thing, which doubled the tuition.

So if you recruited a kid in Ohio, it was maybe $2,000. If you recruited a player outside of Ohio, it was like $4,000. So when you had a certain amount of money, you just didn’t go out of the state. And it wasn’t until, I guess, the fifth or sixth year that they finally told us. Look, you have scholarships, don’t worry about whether it’s in state And that really turned things around for us because then we were able to go to Louisville is a lot closer than Youngstown from Dayton, Ohio.

So I started recruiting closer to home and had some success. But those first five, John coached there for five years and then he retired. And those were hard years on him. I know they were. Not so much for me because like I said, I was a young coach and I was living the dream. I mean, I really was.

It was for me, it was big time and for John, probably not quite the same.

[00:41:07] Mike Klinzing: What did you love about coaching right away? Because obviously it wasn’t something that had been on your radar. So you get in there and you guys are building this program from scratch. You’re a young guy. And again, you get to do something that maybe you didn’t know.

that you were going to love, but it sounds like you knew you loved it right away. What was it about coaching that you took to right away?

[00:41:29] Jim Brown: I think it was the recruiting, getting to know players. I don’t think I was the greatest recruiter. I mean, at first, I’ll be honest, it was very difficult at first because we were in Dayton, Ohio.

We were the new kid on the block and the papers didn’t even know we existed. I mean, we had no publicity. Whatsoever. I mean, like I said, I was about as big a University of Dayton fan as you can imagine, and when I started coaching at Wright State, I hated UD. I mean, I hated them. I wanted them to lose every game because we got no credibility whatsoever in the Dayton community with, with the news media.

And then there were some guys that were on our side, but most of them weren’t. And it was very difficult. And I think the recruiting part. It was so much fun. It was frustrating because you just were not well known. You didn’t have the reputation. And I mean, I was taking a kid around from Dunbar high school one day.

That’s a local school here in Dayton. And I was taking him around and he says, gosh, coach Brown. I didn’t know it was anything like this. My mom told me there was only one building out here. And I mean, those are the kinds of things that you dealt with back then. But I was young, I was enthusiastic. I loved the game of basketball.

I mean, I just loved the game of basketball. The recruiting part of getting to know kids and, and it’s sort of recruiting sometimes can be like winning the game because you spend so much time talking to a kid, developing a relationship, and then he says he’s coming, it’s really I don’t know, it’s a buzz or whatever you want to call it, I mean, it’s a challenge.

Because back in that, those days, I mean, we didn’t have full scholarships. We weren’t the biggest school in town. I mean, we didn’t get the kind of publicity. And so it was really difficult to get a really good player. And there was a school here in town called Alter High School and they’d been extremely successful down through the years in basketball.

I mean, a bunch of John Paxson went there, Jim Paxson went there. They both played in the NBA. I mean, they’ve had multiple players. Go to Alter High School that went on to the University of Dayton. And I don’t know exactly what year it was. It was in the late seventies, we recruited a player from Alter by the name of Bob Schaefer.

He was offered by Dayton. He was offered by Miami and for whatever reason, he came to Wright State. And I felt like it turned us around in terms of our acceptability in the Dayton area, because we got this kid from Alter High School. He was their best player and he chose us over some of these other schools.

And he chose us over because he felt like he was going to be able to play. And, and he became our all-time leading scorer for quite a while. And it’s always fun as a coach to win a big game. And I always I’d listen to these coaches as a young coach and I’d look, I’d go to clinics and they would talk about the thing they enjoyed the most was practice.

And a game? Yeah. I mean, you’ve probably heard that yourself. You’ve heard coaches say, I enjoyed the practice part of it more than the game. And when I was a young coach, I didn’t understand that. And I don’t know when it was. That I realized that is, that is what it is, is being able to teach these kids and breaking down how you make a crossover dribble or how you shoot a left handed spin layup or whatever.

I mean practice became, I could understand, and I don’t know when that. Went off when that light bulb went off in my coaching career when I realized that the practice was a lot more fun than a game. That I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know when that was that happened, but it happened to me. I mean, I realized that practice can be a lot more fun, a lot more challenging because a lot of coaches, a lot of people that aspire to be coaches, They see what the coach does on the sideline.

I would go out to they have these career days where they’ll invite you’ll go to a junior high or elementary school, and they’ll bring in these people from different careers, accountants and secretaries, and you would talk about your profession. And so I would go to those and I’d walk into the classroom and I’d say, okay, how many of you people want to be a teacher?

And there might be, no, no, let me phrase that. I would walk in. How many of you in here want to be a coach? Oh, gosh, they’d all raise their hand. And I’d say, well, then how many of you want to be a teacher? Well, there’ll only be two or three hands go up. And it really opened the door for me because I would tell him, well coaching is teaching.

It’s just like being an English teacher or math teacher. You’re teaching the game of basketball. And if you don’t know how to do that. Then you’re going to have trouble and when I was teaching that class at Wright State, I would always bring this up because I was, how many of you had a math teacher that you knew was brilliant?

He was a brilliant mind, but you didn’t understand anything he was saying. And oh boy, would you see the lies light up, you know? I mean, yeah, they all identified with that. Well, I would tell them it’s the same way in coaching basketball. I mean anybody can stand on the sidelines and rant and rave and put people in and out of a game, but how many people know how to teach a pick and roll?

How many know how to neutralize the ball screen? That’s what coaching is. It’s teaching the game of basketball. You’ve got to be able to do that if you’re going to be successful. And so I don’t know if I answered your question or not, but I mean, there’s so many aspects of coaching that are so rewarding.

I mean, it’s an unbelievably tough profession because of all the outside things that go in and it’s even more, it’s impossible today. I am so glad I’m not coaching today with this transfer portal and the NIL. I don’t know how these guys do it. I really don’t. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, I could not handle that

[00:47:56] Mike Klinzing: I think anybody that we’ve talked to on the podcast, trying to figure out how to navigate that from a standpoint of how does it affect your program? But then also, how do you manage that to help your players? Not obviously the transfer portable when it comes to NIL.

How do you try to make that work? In the best possible way for your players, which then obviously benefits your program. And then the transfer portal. I mean, we could circle back to the beginning of our conversation tonight about youth basketball. And you think about just, I mean, it’s just permeated every level of the game where.

Players in 5th, 6th, 7th grade, you’re jumping from one AAU team to another. And then you see so many kids that are jumping from one high school to another because they’re chasing this or that or whatever. And then you look at the number of kids that are in the portal. And I always think about, Jim, from my perspective, because Since I played at Kent, I always think about it being a situation where I try to always view these things through the eyes of like a mid-major program and how do they handle this kind of stuff, just because that’s what my firsthand experience was.

And so from a, from a transfer portal, I always think that, okay, so it used to be, if you’re going to be good at a mid-major, what do you have to do? You have to find a kid who’s under the radar who maybe hasn’t quite developed yet. Then. Over the course of the four years that they’re there with you, you develop them.

So their time by the time they’re a junior or senior, they’re really, really good. Well, now, if you do that at a mid-major and a kid has a good freshman year, a good sophomore year, there’s a real good chance that that kid’s probably going to leave and go to a bigger school because. Those bigger schools look and say, well, this kid’s already proved himself as a college basketball player.

Why do I want to take a high school kid? And so you have that part of it. But then on the other hand, you also have guys that maybe go to a big 10 school and don’t get to play as much as they thought. And now those guys are transferring down to you know, down a level. So there’s just, there’s so many different aspects of, and I think the biggest thing, the biggest frustration that I hear from most.

And I don’t know if your conversations have been the same but the biggest, the biggest complaint I think that most of them have is it’s just, it’s really hard to develop a continuity and to understand from one season to the next, like who’s going to be on your roster. It’s like the season ends and you’re like, you’re like, who’s going to, who’s going to be back next year?

And you’re trying to figure all that out. And who’s going to be in the portal. And man, it’s just, you should try to. To try to have a team that just turns over. It’s one thing if you’re John Calipari at Kentucky and you’re turning your team over every year with one and done guys, we’re going on to play in the NBA.

It’s another thing when you’re a Wright state or you’re a Kent state and you’re turning your roster over that much, it has to be tough on those guys.

[00:50:38] Jim Brown: Yeah. And then you add the NIL, which I call that now it’s legal. I don’t even say now it’s legal. Yeah, that, like I said, I’m so glad I’m not involved in that.

I mean, I don’t know how they do it. At first I thought it was killing the mid-major schools, but now you talk to some of these coaches at Big Ten schools, it’s happening to them. I mean there’s no loyalty that when you when you spend all the time recruiting a young man and then you get him to come and then he’s going to leave the first time something first time he had, like I’ve heard coach Izzo talk about this first time he gets that. In fact, you know that he’s got a reason to leave. He talked about Adrian Payne oh, the guy that plays for Golden State that played at Michigan State.

He can’t think of his name now, but anyway, he was at Michigan State and Izzo talked about, gosh, if that transfer portal was in existence today, he wouldn’t have lasted a half a year with me. I was yelling at him and he would have left and that’s one of the things about athletics, it’s so, I mean, so great is you’re challenged and you have to overcome these challenges and all the things that enter into being a good athlete, no matter what it is, being on a team those values carry over into your everyday job.

And so many of those things are disappearing because of the transfer portal and we’re just going through a really bad time in college athletics right now. It’ll work its way out. I hope, but right now it’s not good.

[00:52:22] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think it’s going to eventually settle down. I mean, personally.  I like the theoretical intent of both the Transfer Portal and NIL, again, theoretically. I think trying to execute it is a whole other thing, but just when you look back on the history of college basketball and you think about the fact that You know, a coach can recruit a player to a school and then that coach can leave that job and so that, and then you look at, okay, so shouldn’t players be able to have the same right?

I think that they probably should, and yet what that’s done is created this just wild, wild West. So I think the intent of the rule is a good one. I think the way it’s played out isn’t necessarily the best for the players or for college basketball itself. And then NIL. I think the same way. I think the fact that again, it doesn’t necessarily affect players quite as much at Wright State or Kent State because you’re not getting these big, giant, huge lucrative NIL deals.

But if you’re a player at Ohio State and you have an opportunity to make a significant amount of money, I have no. Problem with being able to do that, but it is a matter of now as a coaching staff, it’s a whole nother thing that you have to figure out how to navigate it. And then I guess I always look at it.

If I was a coach and you’re like, okay, this kid has. Whatever, $10,000 in NIL deal and this kid has only seven, but the 7, 000 kid is starting and the 10, 000 kid isn’t. You just think about how much I’m sure in your experience as a coach that you have to navigate the personalities of your team and you’re trying to build cohesion and that’s hard enough when you don’t start throwing money into it and have all that stuff.  I can’t imagine what that’s like.

[00:54:15] Jim Brown: I think a perfect example, and I have no inside knowledge. I’m just speaking as an observer of college basketball, but you look at North Carolina University last year, they made it to the final four the previous year, had everybody back and didn’t even make the tournament.

And like I said, I have no inside knowledge, but this is just pure speculation on my part. There had to be some serious chemistry issues on that team because of the NIL in the locker room. It wasn’t the same. I could be totally wrong, but from an outside observer I don’t know how you navigate that.

I don’t know how you determine what this kid gets and that kid. Cause you know, they all talk, they all are going to know what the player’s getting. And it just, it’s something that if they would have put restrictions on this, when it became legal I would have liked to have seen them done something like this, and this is probably way too complicated, but you can take the NIL, but it goes into a trust fund and you have to graduate from that university to receive it.

And if you leave early. Or you don’t graduate, you don’t get it. But that would have never happened, but that to me would have solved a couple of problems. It would have encouraged kids to graduate. It would have encouraged kids to stay at the same school. And you still satisfied the business of kids getting money for their likenesses and their names and so on and so on. But that probably would have never lasted, some lawyer would have got involved and shut them down.

[00:55:54] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. We probably could have used it. We probably could have used a phase in instead of just going right to the wild, wild west.

I think that probably would have been a good idea, but to your point. It’s once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s completely out of the bag and over, it’s over. Yeah, I think it’s going to eventually settle. There’s going to be some equilibrium where I think you’re going to find out that companies are going to start to realize where they should put their money and where they shouldn’t put their money and things will kind of start to settle down and colleges will get a better handle.

I think we’re close to the point now where as a division one program, you almost have to have like a full time NIL person in your athletic department just to deal with it and try to figure it out. And I’m sure the bigger programs probably you’re going to have a person actually that’s on their basketball staff or their football staff that that’s all they’re doing is dealing with NIL for basketball or football.  I’m sure that we’re headed there if we’re not there already.

[00:56:53] Jim Brown: Yeah. Yeah. I just read this yesterday. They were over. 1,200 kids in basketball that put their name in the transfer portal. And there’s like 6 or 700 that haven’t found the school yet. And so I don’t know how you do this. I don’t know how you, do you call your coach and say, I want to come back?

Well, he’s already signed somebody else. I mean, there’s so many issues with this transfer portal. It’s like the kids that put their name in the draft and then don’t get drafted and you never hear about them. You just never hear about those kids. And then they’ve made that a little better. They allow these kids to go to NBA camps now and take their name out.

So it’s a little easier than it was. But this transfer portal thing’s got to be addressed because there’s an awful lot of kids. that are putting their name in the portal. Now, there’s a lot of kids that put their name in there that aren’t playing where they’re at right now. They just feel like they go someplace else and get a better opportunity.

And they find out that there aren’t any opportunities and their careers are over. I agree with you. I think it’ll work its way out, but we’re nowhere near that right now.

[00:58:08] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s not, I think sometimes players think that it’s a magic wand and a lot of them are getting bad advice from the people around them.

Yeah, Hey man, you should be playing here. You should be getting more time. I mean, I think about just my own experiences when I went to Kent and as a freshman, I maybe played. Five minutes a game. And I think I had a pretty realistic understanding of coming in kind of where I fit. And I realized like, I got to work if I want to get on the floor.

And by the time I was a sophomore, I got on the floor and I was out there all the time and then got to play, but you could certainly see, had I grown up in a different era. That after my freshman year, I said, right, I might’ve said, oh man this isn’t working out. Let me try and go somewhere else.

And I was already, I mean, as a recruit, I was at best a borderline division one recruit and ended up having a really good career, but. I stuck it out. And I think that perseverance piece, I mean, if I could teach any kid a lesson from my playing career, it would be, Hey, you got to figure out a way to persevere through some tough times and figure out what you need to do to get yourself on the floor.

And look, just because you go and you transfer to a different program, you’re still the same player that you were at the previous program. And so you got to figure something out. And again, that’s not to say some kids, again, you do make a choice to go to a school and for whatever reason, it doesn’t work out.

And I certainly think that that’s where the portal is a positive, but in so many cases, just have kids that jump in there and they don’t get the opportunity that they’re looking for. And now, as you said, boom, all of a sudden you’re in no man’s land and you don’t have a career anymore. And that’s what you hate to see.

Because again, You want, right, I mean, we all love the game and you want to see people have a good experience with it. Players, coaches, everybody. I mean, cause we all love the game of basketball and it feels like in a lot of ways, sometimes kids are losing that opportunity as a result of this instead of gaining an opportunity.

[01:00:09] Jim Brown: Sure are.

[01:00:10] Mike Klinzing: All right. Tell me about your one year as the head coach. What was that like?

[01:00:14] Jim Brown: Well, it was terrible. I have to back up. I was there for 26 years, 18 of those years with, with coach Ralph Underhill. And he was a phenomenal guy. I never felt like I was working for him. I was working with him. He was just a great guy to coach with.

And I cherished those 18 years we were together. And yeah, I don’t know if you know exactly what happened, but he was accused of shoplifting, which went to trial and it was all the charges were thrown out. And he actually sued and won some money, but it cost him his job. We had recruited a player by Vitaly Potapenko, which is a whole nother story how we did that.

He was from Kiev in the Soviet Union and we recruited him to Wright State. And a great trivia question is who was the player drafted right before Kobe Bryant in the 1993 draft. Well, it was Vitaly Potapenko. He was the 12th player picked. He was a lottery pick. He went to Cleveland. And so we had him back.

I mean, he was coming back for a senior year. So we scheduled Kentucky. We scheduled Louisville. We scheduled Miami with Sczerbiak. I mean, Wally Sczerbiak. I mean, our schedule was without question, the toughest schedule Wright State’s ever played. And then Ralph gets fired and I become the head coach and Vitaly goes to the NBA because he didn’t like how that all happened.

And I ended up playing that schedule with three freshmen, starting a junior and a senior, and got absolutely no support from the administrator. I didn’t have a very good relationship, I should say, with the athletic director at the time. And so you know, if you’re at a school for 26 years and the head coach leaves, you would think that the assistant coach that’s been there that long would be somebody you would strongly consider.

But my relationship, yeah, you would think, but my relationship with that athletic director Wasn’t the best. And so I knew I wasn’t going to get the job. So it was a frustrating year. It really was. I mean, we won seven games but we had like 12 games where we were in till the like last eight or nine minutes and just couldn’t finish the deal because we were playing such a young team and such a tough schedule.

So you know, I look back on it. It kind of soured me on coaching, to be honest about it. And when that all happened, they, my contract, they had to pay me another year. So that’s the year that Northmont High School came after me to be their coach.

And I hesitated like crazy to do it and finally did it. And, and it was good for me because I’d never taught there. I just coached basketball, but I always felt like in my mind that I could be a successful head coach. And so when I went there and I was the head coach it reaffirmed my thinking because I was very successful there, but it was coaching at Wright State, we had some success recruiting foreign players and we had taken our team to Europe back in the early nineties we went over, we were over there 21 days.

We. We’re in Holland, seven days, Germany, seven days, ended up in Paris, France. And I met a man over there by the name of Vladimir Hager, and I developed a relationship with him. And, and he, he was he was back then, this was in the, the late 1900s. 1990, 94, 95, right in there, there was nobody in the United States recruiting foreign players nobody.

And the only schools we competed against were Valparaiso and George Washington University in Washington, DC. Nobody else was recruiting foreign players. In fact the other night when I was watching the basketball hall of fame Dirk Nowitzki was, and I recruited Dirk Nowitzki. I mean, I called him on the phone, talked with him.

This is a great story. I called him on the phone. He was 17 years old. I, this Vladimir Hager had told him, told me about him. He had seen him play in a European tournament and he sent me a fax. And he says, he gave me his phone number and his address and everything. So I call him and he was very, very nice.

He spoke English and he says, well, coach Brown. I love Germany. I don’t want to leave Germany. I’m going to stay here. And so I waited about three months. I called him again. Same story. Very nice. Very pleasant to talk to. And so you fast forward about four years and I’m sitting in my living room watching the NBA draft.

And I don’t know what number he was, but it says the Milwaukee Bucks draft Dirk Nowitzki. And I’m like, holy cow, that’s the guy I was talking to. And I called Underhill right away.  He’s not going to believe this. You remember that player that I was recruiting from Germany? He just got drafted in the first round of the NBA.

So, I mean. And then when we recruited Vitaly, we had him in our school for a year. I got a call from a Russian coach. I couldn’t tell you who he was, but he was telling me about this player that wanted to come to the United States and play for one year, and he says, I know you have Vitaly Potapenko and he’s from Russia, but this player, his name is Zydrunaus Ilgauskas, and he’s seven foot two, and he wants to come and play.

He wants to come to Wright State. And of course I knew nothing about him. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know this guy that I was talking to on the phone. I mean, you know how that is, you don’t know whether he’s telling you the truth or not. I did some checking and found out that it was legit.

And so we’re in the process of finalizing his admission to Wright State and he breaks his foot. It was like in August and he broke his foot. And I don’t know if you remember, but when he was drafted by Cleveland, he and Vitaly were drafted right after each other. And Vitaly was 12 and Zydrunas was 14.

When he came to the United States, he had serious micro fracture surgery on his foot. And they didn’t know whether he was going to be able to play. Well, he played in the NBA for what18, 19 years?

[01:06:38] Mike Klinzing: Long time. Long time. Well, and those two guys became friends because it’s funny because when that was in the era, so we’re talking like what the mid to late nineties.

So at that point I was 26, 27, 28 years old and I remember going out to bars in the Cleveland area and those two guys were always together like you’d walk and obviously they stand out Zydrunas is 7’2” and Potopenko was 6 foot 10. And so you see these two big guys standing by standing by the bar when they were playing for the Cavs together.

So, yeah, I mean, I clearly remember the 2 of them being friends and being on the Cavs together at that point.

[01:07:17] Jim Brown: Well, Vitaly, the guy gave me his telephone number and everything. So the first time I called Vitaly, his mom answers the phone and I hang up. She speaks Russian and I hung up and I thought, okay, I waited a few days.

And of course there’s a big time difference between Dayton, Ohio and Kiev and the Soviet Union. So I waited, if you called again, she answers the phone again, I hang up again. Well, you have to, this is where I’m real proud of myself because a lot of coaches probably would have said, the heck with this, I’m not going to, cause we didn’t, I didn’t know how good he was.

I mean, I was going by this guy’s word and seen him playing a tournament. So I called a third time and hung up again. And so I’m thinking there’s gotta be somebody on our campus that’s going to speak Russian. So. Nobody, I couldn’t find anybody on Wright State’s campus that spoke Russian. So I called back to the University of Dayton and this woman came out to my office.

Sat down, we called the numbers, the mother answers the phone. This lady could speak English, I mean, speak Russian and Vitaly was there. And that’s how it all got started. But the interesting thing is he was probably the best player in all of Kiev at that time. And the coach of his team had his passport.

So Vitaly couldn’t, he didn’t have a passport. The coach had the passport. We’re talking Russia, you know. So. I was so fortunate. We were so fortunate at Wright State because I was speaking downtown at one of these Rotary Club things. And I was talking about Wright State basketball and I talked about the players that we had had and a couple from Europe.

And at the end of my speech I said, are there any questions? This one guy says, well, yeah. He says. Are you recruiting any foreign players right now? And I said, well, yeah, kind of. We have this one player from Kiev, but we’re having a lot of trouble. He doesn’t have his passport.

His coach got it. I don’t know. And it doesn’t sound like we’re going to be able to work things out. So that was it. Well, after this, this guy comes up to me, he’s a lawyer and he says, Hey, Jim, he said tell me more about this kid in Russia. And I told him, he said, well, I might be able to help you out. And to make a long story short, a lawyer in his office was Russian.

He traveled back and forth to Russia about twice a month. And he was willing to help us out. He had never been to a Wright State basketball game, never gave money to the university, so he wasn’t considered a booster. And he went over there, got a new passport for Vitaly, translated all of his documents and everything.

It’s an amazing story. I mean, it’s just an amazing story. And he’s an assistant coach with the Memphis Grizzlies now. He’s done really well for himself, but it’s just amazing how things can happen sometimes in something like that can really happen. Now, today you have these colleges that are recruiting overseas like crazy.

I mean, just about every College team has got somebody from Europe on their team.

[01:10:28] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. All you got to do is look at the NBA draft or look at any college teams roster and the amount of foreign players and the way the international game has exploded. I mean, it really is, it’s kind of incredible when you think back to…

[01:10:42] Jim Brown: If you go back to the, it’s really incredible because that was 19.  We recruited the tally in like 94. And as I said, the only competition we had was Valparaiso or Indiana and George Washington. Nobody else, nobody else was recruiting foreign players. And I all owe all of that success to Vladimir Hager. He was from Holland and he went to a lot of he coached a team over there and he would go to these tournaments and back then we didn’t have cell phones, so everything was done by fax and all he wanted me to do was send him NBA Street and Smith books I sent those things and he would send me faxes with names and numbers and we ended up recruiting three or four kids. I got a couple of high school kids to come over here helped him out that way.

He wanted to get a couple of kids over here and we got them over here. So yeah, it was well worth it. And it was a lot of, well, it wasn’t easy. I mean, it was very difficult. It was very difficult recruiting foreign players. I mean, no question about you had to have a lot of patience, but it’s a lot easier now.

I mean, the NCAA we had one kid and this was when this was first starting and the NCAA was finding out that these schools, these kids were coming over here and they were playing professional basketball over there. You know, they were getting paid in Europe. Right. I can remember this one kid he had to fill out this form.

The NCAA was getting involved in it and he said, well, I have to fill this out. And I said, yeah, and I’m telling you right now, Steno, if you answer that one question, yes, you’re probably going to be ineligible. I’m not telling you how to answer it. And so anyway, he answered it, no, and he was okay. But I mean, it was not easy to recruit foreign players, but we had a lot of success. We really did. We’ve got about five of them. I think during my time there.

[01:12:40] Mike Klinzing: That’s funny. I mean, hearing you tell those stories, I don’t know. Jason’s going to have to fact check me on this. I don’t know if I ever told this story on the podcast, but my dad was a professor at Cleveland state.

And so one day he came home from work and this is probably when I was, oh man, I don’t know, I must’ve been, I think I must’ve been in high school and. He comes back, comes home and he says to me, Mike, you got to come down to the gym. You’re not going to believe this. And I’m like, what do you what are you talking about?

I have no idea. And he wouldn’t tell me. And so I go down to Cleveland State with my dad and the old Woodling gym where they used to play, it was like, there was like an overhang. So the basket, and then there was like, yeah, there was an overhang. So you, if you walked in from the lobby, you would walk out under this, under this overhang.

So I’m standing on the overhang. And my dad’s like, just wait. He goes you’ll see in a second. And I’m standing there and all of a sudden this guy walks out from underneath this overhang and the guy’s like seven foot seven and weighs about 170 pounds and it was Manute.

And so Manute Bol comes out and he’s got like, I mean, we all know how skinny Manute was by the time he got on the public’s radar. Well, when he was there at Cleveland State, I mean, he had literally just come over and he is literally like his leg. It was like his leg was like a stick. And then his knee was this big ball.

And then the rest of his leg was another stick. And so his knees just looked like this big ball that were attached to two bones. And the only thing that he could say at that point was ball. So he would just kind of walk around and he would just say ball, ball. And I just remember me and my dad having this conversation like, all right, it’s going to be really interesting to see how coach Mackey.

Gets Manute Bol into school. And the only word that he can say in English is ball, how’s this going to work? And of course he was there for a couple of months and then they never did get him in and eligible. And he ended up going to, I think, what Bridgeport up in Connecticut division two school, and then obviously went on to the NBA.

[01:15:16] Jason Sunkle: I understand the origin story of Mike’s obsession with Bol Bol.

[01:15:23] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that’s why I’m such a fan of Bol Bol. So yeah, but Manute, I mean, my dad, again, I give him all the credit cause he didn’t tell me what I was about to see and I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on Manute.

I mean, that picture is cemented in my brain of just how skinny and tall when it was, it was, it was crazy back there. So yeah, recruiting foreign players is quite an adventure.

[01:15:16] Jim Brown: Do you remember when Mouse McFadden played at Cleveland State?

[01:15:20] Mike Klinzing:  Absolutely. So I used to play with Mouse. I used to play with Mouse all the time.

[01:15:25] Jim Brown: This is a funny story. I was recruiting in New York City at the time and, and there was this guy helping me out. He was helping me with, cause I’d never been to New York City in my life and he was helping me find players and I had some success. I recruited a couple of players out of New York City that year, but he told me, he says, there’s this one player, he says.

I don’t know where he’s at Jim. He says, I can’t find him. Nobody knows where he’s at. His name’s Kenny McFadden and he’s here in New York city at some school, but nobody knows where he’s at. And I’ve always, he’d be a great player for you guys and I can help you out. And you know, two years later, he’s playing at Cleveland State.

[01:16:02] Mike Klinzing: Mackey found out where he was that’s for sure. Yeah, exactly. Mouse was man, he, that guy, he could play, man. He was quite a player back in the day. I spent a lot of time down at Woodling gym. When I was young as a high school player, just trying to get into games. And then eventually as I got to be a high school player, I was able to kind of sneak my way into some open gyms.

I always say this, I still see, I don’t know if you, do you remember Clinton Smith? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Clinton is still around up here in the Cleveland area. And so I still run into him and he’s doing some stuff with coaching youth basketball. And so I’ll run into Clinton every once in a while.

I always say I really love Clinton cause he was one of those guys that back in the day, skinny little high school kid trying to get into a game on a college campus with, with dudes wasn’t always the easiest and Clinton kind of looked out for me and would say, Hey I’ll take Mike on my team.

And so I kind of always have a soft spot for Clinton and but that era of Cleveland State basketball was a lot of fun. I mean, it was a lot of fun.

[01:17:02] Jim Brown: Cleveland state was the first division one school that Wright State. I mean, Ray Derringer and John Ross had a relationship and we went up there and played in public hall, old public hall,

[01:17:14] Mike Klinzing: Public hall, we used to go to games and literally there would be times when you’d go to public hall and there’d be like 30 people in public hall and my sister and I Because it was shaped like a horseshoe, they had all that space behind the court so it was just, it was just basically open space.

And my sister and I used to take like the little plastic balls that the cheerleaders would throw out and her and I, like the game would be going on and her and I would be over in that open area, just throwing the ball to each other and running around as little kids. And I remember sitting in the stands and watching Frank Edwards and Lee Reed and Mike Sweeney and Darren Tillis.

And all those guys from that era playing at public hall, great, great memories of Cleveland state basketball for me as a kid.

[01:18:01] Jim Brown: Ray Derringer was so nice to, I mean, we played them several times back when we first got started, we were division two and I know we went up there and played in public hall, two or three times. We’ve played Cleveland State a ton of times. Of course, they’re in the league with us now, but I mean back in the day, I mean, Ray Derringer agreed to play us when he had no business playing us. I mean, he had no reason cause we. I don’t know that, I don’t know, I’d have to go back and look whether we ever beat him up there, but I mean, I know he was nice enough to play us back when we were playing a division one school back when you’re just starting your program.

I mean, my goodness, that was, you got coaches to do that. That was something else.

[01:18:47] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no question about that. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of crazy. All right. We have about three minutes if I’m going to make my goal. So just tell me a little bit about the radio gig real quick, how you got the radio gig and what you love about it.

And then after you do that, we’ll jump in and wrap things up.

[01:19:04] Jim Brown: Okay. Well, when I retired, I was at the high school there for 16 years. And when I retired this friend of mine who had done games at Wright state, he was doing some high school games. On the weekend. And he said, Hey, Jim, would you be my partner?

And I said, well, sure, I’ll do that. And so I did it. Well, then Wright State found out I was doing that and they approached me. They were at that time, they couldn’t get anybody to go on the road with them consistently. So they were having different people do games and they approached me and said, well, would you do this full time?

And I said, yeah, I’ll do it full time. And so I did. And Chris Collins is the play by play guy. And he is phenomenal. I mean, he is so good. And I didn’t even know him. I had no… I had heard him on radio. He was did a morning show in the morning. I heard him on radio, but I didn’t know him at all.

We hit it off right away and we have a great relationship and I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. And then the great part about it, and you’ll appreciate this, win or lose. It doesn’t bother me. I can go have a beer and I’m fine. My blood is green. I mean, I got crazy for the Raiders, but doing the games on radio has been so much fun.

And the thing I enjoy the most. I think about it is after when the Raiders win we have a post game show. We interview Coach Nagy, but then we also get to interview a player. And then the coach has a show once a week and we interview players on that. And getting to know the players it’s kept me involved in the game.

It’s a commitment. I mean, I’m 79 years old and my wife and I are, we’re celebrating 56 years of marriage this weekend and she’s not real crazy about me being gone for three or four days. You know, she says, you’ve done that, Jim come on, but she supports it and allows me to do it.  And it’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy it.

[01:21:06] Mike Klinzing: That’s awesome. I mean, as you said, to be able to keep you involved in the game and I can completely relate to your ability to walk away from a win or a loss. I always equated to as a coach, when I was coaching my. 3rd, 4th, 5th grade team. Again, this goes back to our beginning of our conversation, right?

Like, I know it’s about development, but yet when my team would lose, I would still think about it. What can we do differently to try to win these games and this and that? And then when I’m a parent, I’m almost completely opposite. Like the game’s over and 30 seconds after it’s over, I’m good with whatever the result was, as long as my kids played hard and were coachable and all the things that you want them to be.

So it is a completely different perspective when you’re coaching a team versus when you are a, and I don’t want to say completely a casual observer, but when you are not in the inner circle of that team, it is a completely different feeling without question. It is completely different.

[01:22:02] Jim Brown:. So the toughest part about coaching is if you’re in a college or even a high school and you get beat. You feel like you let all the fans down. That was the part that was the toughest for me. I mean, I can handle the loss, but, and I noticed this big time when we went from playing in the P. E. building where there were 2,200 people there to the Nutter Center where there were 10,000 people there.

It was, oh gosh, when you lost all these, you let them down and you felt this tremendous Oh, it was just a terrible feeling and not so much as you got beat, but all these fans that support you are crushed and that’s the tough part, but you know, I don’t deal with that as a radio guy.

[01:22:44] Mike Klinzing: Exactly. Hey, Jim really enjoyed this.

[01:22:46] Jim Brown:  It’s been a lot of fun. Well, thank you.

[01:22:49] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, this has been a blast and we can’t thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to jump on and join us. Truly appreciative. It’s been a really fun conversation. Just a public shout out to Tim Gallagher again for connecting you and I.

[01:23:03] Jim Brown: He really is a good guy. And you talk about a guy that’s got basketball in his veins…

[01:23:10] Mike Klinzing: He does, there’s no question. So, Jim, thanks again for all your time tonight. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks!