JOE CRISPIN – ROWAN UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 641

Website – https://www.rowanathletics.com/sports/mens-basketball?path=mbball  https://www.crispinbasketball.com/

Email – crispin@rowan.edu

Twitter – @RowanMBB @CrispinBball

Joe Crispin, a former college standout and professional player, completed his sixth year as head men’s basketball coach at Rowan University in 2021-2022 and now owns a 90-48 record. It was his 8th overall year at the school as he previously served as an assistant coach with both the men’s and women’s basketball programs for two seasons.

Prior to joining Rowan’s coaching staff, Crispin played professionally in the United States and Europe, highlighted by a stint in the NBA. The 2001 graduate of Penn State was an undrafted free agent and played in a total of 22 games in 2001-02, first for the Los Angeles Lakers, under coach Phil Jackson, and then with the Phoenix Suns under coach Scott Skiles.  
 
Joe also played in both the ABA and the USBL before his career then took him to Europe as he played in leagues in Ukraine, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Poland and Greece.

Crispin enjoyed a successful career as a four-year starter at Penn State from 1997 to 2001, where he remains the school’s third leading all-time scorer with 1,986 points, is fifth all-time in assists (485) and ranks fourth in three-point field goals made (885). A two-time All-Big 10 Conference selection, which included first-team honors his senior year, Crispin captained the 2001 Nittany Lions as they went 21-12 and reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.
 
As an All-State player at Pitman High School, Joe scored 2,654 points.  He is the owner and director of Crispin Basketball, which has been conducting camps, clinics and leagues for players in grades K-12 since 2008. Crispin, who earned his Penn State degree in telecommunications, has also trained players from the elementary to collegiate levels.

He added the title of “author” to his resumé, with the 2020 publishing of his book, Offense Wins: A Player’s 12 Foundational Principles for Great Basketball Offense.

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Grab your notebook before you listen to this episode with Joe Crispin, Head Men’s Basketball Coach at Rowan University.

What We Discuss with Joe Crispin

• Growing up in a family of coaches and the influence they had on him
• Playing multiple sports is natural cross training
• The emotional and mental benefits of playing multiple sports
• How the monetary incentive in youth sports pushes kids and parents to do too much
• “There’s so many things kids are missing out on because I think in general, the adults are too involved and we’re not as good at stuff as we think.”
• The freedom to take risks
• “My whole career, summer was that time where you always wanted to do new things and add to your game.”
• “Kids need you to sit down, shut up, let them play and let them try new things.”
• Why we need to let kids organize themselves way more than we do
• “The lessons we learned on the playground, the lessons we learned in that adult free environment, we’re way more powerful than people think.”
• “Crispin Basketball exists to help players of all ages and abilities play the game better and enjoy the game more.”
• “Did they get better? Yes. But if they don’t walk away and think it was fun, who cares? What are we doing here?”
• “When we grew up, the motivation to win was to keep playing. Now the motivation to win is to be seen.”
• “I have to step back and go, wait a second. What do I want for my kids, period?”
• “Why was I a great shooter? Well, it’s because I grew up playing in a ton of environments where I could miss hundreds and thousands of shots.”
• “All players want two things, they want time on the court and touches on the ball.”
• Becoming an anti-fragile shooter
• “I want you to be in great shape and I want you to love basketball.”
• D1 Summer workouts
• “In 6th grade, you don’t know who’s going to be good and who’s not.”
• College and pro basketball are work, you have to find the “want to””
• “I don’t want my college players to grind. I want them to have fun.”
• “I know what it’s like to lose the love for the game to lose the joy you find in the game. I had to fight to find it and to play with it, especially the second half of my career.”
• His craziest European Basketball story
• His experiences playing for Phil Jackson and Darryl Dawkins
• “I tell my players, anything you did, I did. I sat at the end of the bench, I got cut. I was the star and I was everybody in between.”
• Thinking the game like a coach in the second half of his playing career
• I’m a player at heart, right? I’m a baller. That’s what I say. I tell my team, I want us to be a group full of ballers. That’s who I was. I love to compete. I love to play. I love to take risks. I love to tell the coach to just sit down and shut up and let me play. That’s how I played when I was at my best.”

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THANKS, JOE CRISPIN

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TRANSCRIPT FOR JOE CRISPIN – ROWAN UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 641

[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 all

Jason Sunkle: Do I get to talk at all?

Mike Klinzing: Yeah. Hey, you’re already in man. Nine seconds. It’s nine seconds. You already jumped on us.

Jason Sunkle:  I’m alive.

Mike Klinzing:  Jason is here. He hasn’t been on an interview episode in a while.

So welcome back, Jason.  We are pleased to welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod tonight, Joe Crispin, the head men’s basketball coach at Rowan University, Joe. Welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:25] Joe Crispin: Thank you. Pleasure to be ere.

[00:00:27] Mike Klinzing: Excited to have you on, want to dive into all the great things that you’ve been able to do in your basketball career.

We’re gonna touch on some youth sports parenting stuff as well. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell us a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.

[00:00:42] Joe Crispin: Well, my grandfather was a coach. My father was a coach. My uncle was a coach. I probably had no chance, but to get into basketball.

The earliest memories. I have a younger brother that’s 18 months younger than me. We were the ball boys for three different teams growing up. We hung out at practice because we didn’t have anything else we could do back then. And basketball was the primary thing. I love sports in general, played a lot of baseball as a kid, played football, played soccer, but basketball was always tops at the dinner table at my grandparents.

And I mean, we, back in that day too, we even traveled to junior college trips. I mean, we have a lot of stories and basketball when they say it’s in the blood, I guess that’s, I can be about as close as it gets.

[00:01:30] Mike Klinzing: All right. So when you think about your experience as a multi-sport athlete, and now you think about yourself as a coach, what’s your feelings or just, how do you look at being a multi-sport athlete, especially when you’re thinking about recruiting and the types of players you have, what’s your experience with how multi-sport athletes compared to, especially in the system today where kids are just playing basketball year round nonstop since they’re seven, eight years old?

[00:01:56] Joe Crispin: Well, I mean, the first one’s physical in the sense that I just think it’s the natural cross training, right? I mean, my son plays soccer, he’s playing baseball right now. And his basketball is his primary sport. He’s 16, but the physical component of things comes first, right? Like people always say, Hey, do you guys have a speed trainer?

I say, yeah, it’s called soccer. And naturally there’s more to it than that, but Hey, do you have a yeah, you think my son could get more physical? I, yeah. Call, sign him up for football. Right. So there’s a physical component that I think I learned a lot from. And then I also really.

It’s been a lot of time telling parents about just the mental component of things. Like the ability to just have a feel for the game of basketball is something I value. And it’s not something you can just kind of grab your hands on and just control that process. Soccer plays a big part in that I was a quarterback growing up.

So taking there there’s that emotional element and that mental element, I took charge in a huddle when you’re 11 years old and in baseball, I love playing baseball, but when you make an error, it’s your fault. There’s no one to blame. When you strike out, it’s on you when you’re the pitcher and you failed, you failed.

There’s nothing else. Everyone’s solid. You’re on that stage. So when we talk about multiple sports athletes, like I look at kids you know, one of my best leaders right now at Rowan, our primary captain next year is Connor Dickerson. And he was a great tennis player growing up. He’s an amazing mover.

He is the most efficient mover you’ll ever see, and it’s all tennis footwork. So I won’t say that like the kid has to be naturally, if he’s a great player, he’s a great player. I don’t care how it got there, but I do value it for my own kids. And I certainly look back on my own experience and realize, like, I was really fortunate to do a lot of things growing up.

[00:03:50] Mike Klinzing: I think when I look back on my experience to Joe, that I see that when I was playing in the neighborhood and I played everything, baseball, football, I didn’t play a whole lot of soccer, but just running around the neighborhood and riding bikes and climbing trees and doing all those things. I always feel like that was really my athletic training.

And now you have speed strength and agility and all these different guys that have. These businesses. And part of me always goes, man, my speed strength, agility person was a tree and a bike and my neighbors and that kind of thing. And I really feel like that made me into a better athlete, a more well-rounded athlete.

And I think that’s one of the challenges that we have today in youth sports is how do we make sure that we’re not just overtaxing kids and that they’re doing the same thing, that repetitive injury worry. And then also, as you said, you talked about the mental side of it, where if a kid’s been playing basketball year round since they were eight, or whether it’s soccer or whatever sport it is that they’re playing baseball.

If they’re doing that year round from the time they’re seven or eight years old, I I’ve always maintained that. I don’t think there are very many kids. There are some one out of a hundred, one of a thousand. I don’t know what the number is, but there are some kids who that is the right place for them.

They love their sport there. They would do it nonstop no matter what, but I maintain that there’s many more kids that that’s not the. Situation for them. And so it’s just a, such a challenge. The way the system is set up today, because I think kids and more importantly, probably parents feel a lot of pressure to have their kids going year round, or going to trainers or doing these different things because they feel like their kid’s going to fall behind.

So you, as a parent, you as a coach, how do you look at that piece of the youth sports environment where you think about how you put kids into what it is that they’re going to do, whether it’s whether it’s basketball year round, or just how you put it together, what’s your thought process there?

[00:05:48] Joe Crispin: Well, I always tell people I have I do a lot at the youth sports level with club teams and camps and all these different things that I was doing before I started coaching at Rowan. And fortunately it’s very well organized cause my wife’s our administrator, but I spent a lot of time telling parents.

I’m not telling them, but encouraging parents, not to do my stuff all the time. Because I want to encourage them that, that they’re not getting behind. It’s not that big a deal. Like if you take two seasons off it’s especially you don’t need to play this spring, if you’re playing soccer and you don’t feel like playing, don’t worry about it.

He’s not going to be behind just because he didn’t do that. I think the problem is there’s an encouragement there. Not an encouragement, but a pressure there because of money. You know, because there’s money involved and because there’s people involved who literally just want to make more money or feel like they need to feel space, there’s this pressure that comes with needing to fill space that we come up with a lot of things that are unnecessary and to go back to those playground examples you know, I tell people all the time I was given an incredible basketball education. I mean, it was a gift. It was not something that I sought after. But I grew up in the homes of coaches and I grew up in gyms, have good teachers, too. My mom was a teacher. My dad was a teacher. My grandfather was a teacher. My uncle was a teacher. Right. And then I grew up with incredible playground experiences pickup ball experiences against older players.

When you think of the examples, I always tell people in baseball you know, we spend all this time with like hitting trainers. And I said, listen, I heard, learned how to hit a curve ball by playing tons of wiffle ball. And I learned how to hit the ball to right field because when we played pickup baseball, they didn’t have enough players to cover right field.

And instead of closing it, we kept it open. Well, there’s no better teachers in that I argue with people about baseball. I say, listen, the recent kids can’t throw strikes at nine and 10 is because they don’t throw enough on the playground with no catcher. Like we used to the things that we think are great teachers aren’t, they’re not the adult directed environment that we’ve created.  It helps later on and it helps the strongest.

It helps the best, but it doesn’t help the crowd become as good as they could be. And me growing up, I had all these diverse playing experiences. I played pickup with my dad on Friday afternoons, all through middle school. You know, I would go to parks and play with 28 year old guys and not kids my age.

And I would learn things from them. And I would watch high school practices in junior college practices. And then of course I got to high school. I had a head coach who was ahead of his time, but I was given at basketball. And then eventually I became a pro. And instead of spending 12 years in the NBA, like I wanted to, I traveled the world.

This was something that I was given, not something that I necessarily wanted, but I start with the youth experience. And I had just, I was, it was a gift. I mean the ability to shoot any of these things. I tell people all the time I found out that I could be really fast because one of my friends was chasing me for a touchdown and he was the fastest kid in our town and I out ran them.

And I can still picture that to this day. There was not an adult there around, there was no one around. So I could just, there’s so many things wrong with our current youth climate. I will be this weekend with my fifth grade son playing an environment and losing games because I’m letting them shoot threes and any number of things.

But there’s so many things kids are missing out on because I think in general, the adults are too involved and we’re not as good at stuff as we think.

[00:09:47] Mike Klinzing: All right. Let me ask you this. I think one of the biggest things that is missing is that creativity piece as an athlete. And again, you can talk about basketball.

You can talk about any other sport, but a kid today compared to how you grew up or how I grew up with. I never had a parent watching me play on the driveway, play on the playground, play at the park. When I played play football in the backyard, whatever it was, I didn’t have parents supervision in those cases.

And so often today kids, they never play. I mean, never play without an adult watching them. And obviously having an adult watching you as constraining because that adult afterwards might say to you, Hey, why were you doing this? Or you should be doing that. And to be honest, going back, I would, I mean, I wouldn’t have liked that as a kid that after I got done playing one-on-one to a hundred against my friends, If my dad were to come out and said, well, Hey, you could have done this.

And maybe you would have held them to 97 instead of giving them a hundred or whatever it was. And I just think that creativity piece is one of the big thing that’s missing.

[00:10:58] Joe Crispin: Well, and it’s the ability, it’s the freedom and the room to take risks. So actually one of the first things I did when I moved back here to New Jersey, a friend of mine when we had our sons were six years old and I had just been in the states and when I talk about youth sports, it’s very, I have a unique perspective because when I left high school in 1997, till I retired more or less, 2013, I might as well have been on a spaceship.

I had no clue what was going on in youth sports. I had no clue what AAU basketball was. Focused on my own career. I helped out with like a camp in the summer and that was it. And when I came back and I started like seeing the environment that the kids were growing up in and all the constraints that were on them for their play and the playgrounds being empty, I was like, this is bizarre.

And then when I started to see the AAU culture and the, the club culture with this, these high level tournament’s every weekend, I was just like this. Weird, right. It was, it was eight. I might as well buy 16, 17 years. I might as well have been on a spaceship, but the two things, I often tell people when we started it, we started a three on three league and I still run it as a summer league because I believe summer for me was experimentation time.

Summer was playground time. Summer was trying new things time, summer, and that was it. My whole career summer was that time where you always wanted to do new things and add to your game. But what I always tell people is if you never get the chance to do it in a game context, why would you work on it?

And so we started a three-on-three league for our we call it full court, but it’s a short full court for our six year old sons. And we continue that to this day. It’s one of our most popular things. First through fourth grade. And then we added four on four and five on five with a shot clock. In the last couple of years, but what I essentially, I joke about this, but it’s kind of true.

Every week. I essentially write an email to all our parents essentially telling them to sit down, shut up and let their kid play. I don’t use that language, but I I’m in some way, shape or form reminding them that this is what your kid needs. They need you to sit down, shut up, let them play and let them try new things.

And if you can’t do it just don’t come. Right. And if you don’t want to come, who cares, just drop him off, let him play. And the story I always tell is I say, oh, cause I can be as guilty of going against my own philosophy with my own son sometimes as anybody else. I actually run a camp called just play in August every year.

That is literally just call your own fouls. And I just try to give kids as much. Game opportunity and fun stuff to do. And self-organization even leadership. Like you you’d be amazed how many kids I get and I say, all right, you guys down there formed two teams and they go, what are the teams? And I said, no, I don’t do that.

You make the teams. And if they’re stupid, then I’ll tell you, and then you’ll have to change them. Right. Or you’ll learn that the game stinks when you make stupid teams. That’s what the playground taught us. How to take ownership, how to create new games. How do I mean, how many people say, oh I want my kid to be a better finisher around the rim or better ball handler.

I said get four kids in the playground and play 21. Right. Shoot pressure free throws. There you go. There’s all these things. These games taught us. And actually I run this, just play camp in my soul speech to the kids. I’ll never forget this. My son was probably in fifth grade at the time. My whole speech is like your parents aren’t here.

This is a, this is environment where you could play, try new things, create some new games. If you have an idea, tell me. And I give them a bunch of games for two days, and then I start letting them run with it. But and I always tell the parents, like, it’ll take the kids an extra two and a half minutes to organize themselves, but they learn more in that two and a half minutes than you would ever imagine.

Right. And they, the game they create might not look as meaningful to you, but it’s, they love it. And they’re learning more than you think. Well, sure enough. One day at just play camp. My son he’s a risk taker, he’s a big risk taker. And he’s had a lot of freedom and a green light, even though I give him a lot of feedback he’ll shoot the deep ones and everything else, but I’ll never forget he did something goofy or crazy.

And I said, Elijah, what are you doing? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He turned around. He goes, Hey, I thought this was the place where no parents were around. And I said, all right, nevermind. You’re right about that. He goes, what happened to that speech dad? But I really like the playgrounds had taught us so much, right.

There’s that book, everything I ever needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten. I think that’s true of the playground. The lessons we learned on the playground, the lessons we learned in that adult free environment, we’re way more powerful than people think. And they’re not just about skill. Right.

You know, the weekend tournament, these kids are going to go this weekend and in order to win a game, they should dump it inside to the most physically mature player in sixth grade. That’s how you win the weekend in sixth grade, but four or five years later, it’s the exact opposite. And all of a sudden these kids who weren’t allowed to shoot to win the weekend need to shoot and they can’t.

And then they wonder why I won’t recruit them. And I see it all the time. Right? So we tell our parents, you need to lose now to win later in more ways than one.

[00:16:29] Mike Klinzing: It’s amazing what you just described, how often you see that, where you just have, like, I love the, and I’m sure you’ve seen this a million times, but I love the coach who a player gets a rebound and it’s a bigger player on their team.

And that player takes one dribble and the coach is going crazy on the sideline screaming don’t dribble. Don’t drill. Pass it, pass it, get it. You’re just. What are we doing here? Like this kid is in fifth grade and they’re five, six. They might, that

[00:16:59] Joe Crispin: might, they might top out at, yeah, they’re sad. And their dad’s 5’9”.

That’s the worst part,

[00:17:04] Mike Klinzing: Like we’re top or topping them off at, at, at five, six and fifth grade and tell them they can never dribble the ball. And those kinds of things to me are just always, it’s always incredible to me, Joe, the biggest challenge. And I think you’ve kind of hit on it to some degree is being able to educate parents about what you just described, where what happens when you’re nine is not a direct line to what happens when you’re 16 or 17.

And if you think, and if you think it is, you’re a hundred percent wrong and I always have this conversation with people where else. You could want all this stuff for your kid and you can drag them to all these things and you can coach them in the car on the way home and do this and that, and force them to go here and work with this trainer and do that.

But ultimately I know Jason knows that if they don’t love what it is that they’re doing, whether it’s basketball or the violin or art, or it doesn’t matter what it is, if they don’t love it enough to put in a lot of time, they’re never going to be very good at it. And I just think that the biggest challenge that we face facing youth basketball, you mentioned one of it is that a lot of it’s driven by money and people having to fill their programming, which I understand I get that.

But I think the biggest one is we have to be able to educate parents about what good basketball looks like at age 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, all the way up through, and why doing things the way that they’ve been done for the last 15 or 20 years is not the most beneficial for a kid’s overall development as an athlete.

And as a person, let’s say.

[00:18:40] Joe Crispin: Oh, there’s two. And there’s two things I always say to parents, like our tagline for our youth organization is we exist to help players of all ages and abilities, play the game better and enjoy the game more. And I, I tell people, I say and this, this will hit on the, the adult education piece because that is something that I’ve really tried to specialize in and I’m actually want to specialize in more.

But I tell people like where most people stop is play the game better. And that’s it. And I’m honest with people. I was a very, very driven individual.  I was a little bit crazy. I mean, I practiced basketball. I was literally, I was crazy. I was not willing to lose at anything and I was very driven and I would work hard and work hard and work hard and work hard at a pretty young age. And it was all on my own. And I always tell people, one of the things, my dad, one of the greatest gifts my dad gave me as he didn’t care. He, and in the best possible way, he didn’t care. And I knew he didn’t care.

He cared. He took me to the gym. He gave me feedback. He taught me if I wanted to be better, he was willing to do whatever we traveled to. Tournament’s, that’s what I wanted to do. But I knew that if I gave it all up that day, it wasn’t about him and he didn’t care. That was fine. Right. And you know, the one big piece it’s like, it’s a parent driven culture, not the kid driving the ship.

And that is super, super dangerous. I would have burned out. I burned out at 24. I was literally, I didn’t want to keep playing basketball at 24, but I hadn’t finished my degree yet. I had a daughter and a wife and a house, and I had no choice, but to learn how to love basketball again. So I always tell people, like, I know what it is to burn out.

Now. I had played on like 10 teams in three years. So I understand why I burned out, but that’s what we’re doing. The same thing to kids that was that I had to endure just to play professional basketball. So we do the same thing. And then we wonder why they don’t love hoops. And what I tell parents and people is if you come to our youth practice that we just had tonight for fifth and sixth graders, did they get better?

Yes. But if they don’t walk away and think it was fun, who cares? What are we doing here? Right. What are we doing? Because in, in four years and I used my son as his example, cause he’s 16 like yours, and now I have a different speech with him. Now it’s, You want to be a scholarship level basketball player.

You are, you have to become a five, six days a week. I, and literally put in work, but developmentally he can understand that. And he embraces that and his brain, literally his brain development is ready for that. But an 11 year old, isn’t, I don’t have the same speech with my twelve-year-old. Right. So this environment that we’ve created, and my argument is it’s literally not making better basketball players.

It’s these kids are better. Many of these kids are better fundamentally they’re better from a skill perspective. And they’re worse in some, in what I think are the most important things. Right. And you know, the emotional level, the confidence level, the creativity level, the ability to handle failure, the ability to play with people you don’t like and persist in it, because why would you, you never gained that skill cause you never had to win on a playground.

And, and, and just to keep playing right this weekend. My, my youth teams are gonna play three games, guaranteed. That’s, that’s different than going to a playground. And this is what I always say to parents. I said, when we grew up, the motivation to win was to keep playing. Now the motivation to win is to be seen or the motivation or the, or we’re going to win it, win or lose we’re going to play anyway.

Right? So there’s all these components that after literally after my first couple of years at Rowan really coaching, I was like, this is weird. The things that I assumed about myself and my teammates you can’t assume anymore, so you have to, but if you put kids in a situation where they have to develop those things, they will, just like we did.

But what I think is we’ve, we’ve created a fragile, a system that creates more fragile basketball players. In more ways, not just emotionally, not just mentally, but even. Fundamentally and system-wise, we’ve created a lot of fragility and like you said, it does start with the parents and that’s one of the reasons why parent education is something probably four years ago, five years ago, I realized, wow, I’ve got to spend more time sharing and communicating with our parents so that they can encourage their kids better.

[00:23:29] Mike Klinzing: And I think you don’t really know that right? Until you go through a Jo, because if you don’t have your own kids, then you don’t really, I don’t think, understand the mentality, the relationship that parent to child and how difficult sometimes that can be to navigate. And I’ve told my story with my son on the podcast a bunch of times, but my son was always a kid that growing up, he liked basketball and he got way more opportunities to be exposed to basketball just because of me as his dad and the things that I was doing.

He wasn’t a kid who was going to pick up the ball and go out on the driveway and work on his game and do ball handling drills in the basement. And do some of the things that I know you did that I did when I was a kid, because I was driven. I wanted to be successful. I wanted to be that type of player.

So for me as a dad to have a kid who wasn’t that way in a lot of ways, for me, that was difficult that I had to really, really dial back in terms of how much I pushed him. I would give him opportunities that say, Hey, I’m going to do this training. You want to come with us? And sometimes he’d say yes, sometimes he’d say, no.

He always loved going to practice. He always loved being on the team. He always had fun, but he wasn’t a kid who was going to grind and probably about a year and a half ago, the light bulb for him came on and he suddenly started. Develop that and decide that he wanted to work at it. But as you said, he came to that on his own.

But as a parent, it’s sometimes really, really difficult to just kind of let it be your kid’s journey. And I know all the pitfalls, I mean, I’m aware of what I should and shouldn’t be doing in it. As you said, I’ve made mistakes. There’s been times where I’ve said, Hey, we’re going to this. I don’t care if you don’t want to go, but you have to, I think, make sure that you realize that it’s about your kid and that doesn’t matter again, if it’s basketball or whatever it is that they’re doing, that ultimately that journey has to be theirs and not yours.

And I think that before you become a parent, you don’t necessarily understand exactly how that dynamic plays out. And you just have to make sure that you allow it to be driven by the kid and not driven by the parent. I think if you do that more often than not, you’re going to end up in the right place.

[00:25:46] Joe Crispin: Yeah. I also think, I completely agree and it’s, like I said, my dad gave me that gift that it was mine. It wasn’t his at all. But the other thing is like I always tell people I’ve spent more and  I’ve had to correct myself plenty, or my wife will when I’m too hard on my kids.

But I’ve spent most of my life where all this youth sports stuff ends. And what I’ve found is that if I’m at a place where there’s five courts and there’s 10 teams playing and there’s other teams waiting, I often ask myself how many parents or how many coaches here spend most of their time where this all is.

The reality is most of them don’t, most of them are only just caught up in the thick of things. They can’t see the big picture and that’s true one from a basketball perspective, but it’s also true from a life perspective of like, even on a Saturday I’m as competitive as any person I’ve ever met.

So I’ll lose track and I want to win too much sometimes. But I have to step back and go, wait a second. What do I want for my kids, period? Right. Not just basketball wise. I want them to be Christian people. If it’s my son, I want him to be a great husband and a great father and a great community member and great at whatever it is he does.

If it’s my daughter, I want her to be a great wife and a great mother and a great community member and a great family person. We lose when we get into those gyms or we get on those or you know, feed. We lose all sorts of perspective and you know, myself included. Right. But when you keep that in mind and also like, when you keep in mind, like, who is your kid?

Like, you have to know like a coach, right. As a dad, you want to pro I don’t, I don’t pigeon hole my players. I always tell them, like what position you play is based on who you are, how you play a position is all based on you. Right. It’s not what I want. Right. I don’t pigeon hole you and make you fit into my box.

Right. I want to know who you are, what you do well, and sure. You might be in a similar situation as the guy, you back up, or you start in front of, but the way you do that depends on you. Well, that’s the same thing with our kids. I mean, my oldest daughter has gone to Messiah for musical. And I might be able to pay her to play basketball right now because she could use a few extra dollars, but I couldn’t pay her.

Like I would just, literally, it was like the only reason we made her do stuff was just for exercise, right? Like not, I don’t care that she has a basketball. She is passionate about singing and musical theater and she’s great at it. And I love it. And my son, on the other hand, I literally, my oldest son, I thought there was something wrong with him because he was obsessed with balls.

It was his first word. He literally ate, he just lives to play. Right. He came with me to practice at three and four years old and he is just a basketball and whatever I can play, I want to play. My daughter has been playing, I had to make her play just for exercise again, my second daughter and something clicked just like your son a year and a half ago.

And now all of a sudden she is all in. So I know her so well. If I had tried to force her to do. She would resent me. She’d be worse individual and she wouldn’t love basketball. So what’s the end of this. And it’s like the big grand goal is we want a bigger vision for our kids and their whole lives.

But I always tell that the people we work with, like, I want them to want to share the love of basketball with their kids or with the kids they coach someday or whatever. That’s what this is about. And our environment makes that very, very difficult. Right? It makes it very difficult to all this, hang all this, all this anxiety, you can just walk into these environments and feel the anxiety, it’s almost tangible.

Right. And that certainly is not how we grew up and I don’t think it helps develop and cultivate this amazing love for the game.

[00:30:04] Mike Klinzing: Do you think that goes to what I see a lot of times is that players and probably even more so parents they’re so focused on. What’s next and what’s going to happen down the road that they forget to enjoy the moment where they are.

So if I’m playing fifth grade, AAU basketball, I’m worried about what team am I going to be on in sixth grade? Or am I going to be a starter on the middle school team? And then when I get to middle school, I’m worried about, can I make the varsity when I’m a freshmen? And then when I’m on the varsity, I’m worried about where am I going to go to college?

And instead of having a great middle school experience or a experience or high school experience, I’m just so focused on what’s next that I forget to enjoy it. And you see that so often, as you said, you feel that anxiety, when you go to whether it’s a high school game or AAU tournament, and you sit with parents and the level of just nervousness.

Yeah. Anger and rage when things don’t go the way that they should and party just looks and says, look, if you’re not going to enjoy watching your own kid play sports, then what are, what are we doing here? Why are you, why would you want to come and just make yourself so angry? I teach phys ed during the day and I’ll have that conversation with my kids.

Sometimes that they’ll get upset cause they lose and they’re pouting for 10 or 15 minutes. I’ll just say to them, look, you come into my gym to play and get some exercise and have fun with your friends. And you shouldn’t be leaving here angry, whether you win or you lose, but you see it’s often because I just think people are focused on what’s next.

Do you see that in your experience?

[00:31:50] Joe Crispin: Oh yeah. It’s, it’s a total fixation on the now. It’s the now and it’s not even just what’s next. It’s like what’s immediately next. So we, we. And again, some of it is like people don’t have the experience. Like, so my, my son was a freshman this year. Great example because I, again, I can be just as guilty, like if he’s a freshman and he had to do a lot for his team and some days it wasn’t pretty at all.

Right. And they had a very young varsity team and it was always refreshing to my son and to myself. Cause I would laugh when we were around my dad. And my dad is, was always like, this means nothing. No, one’s going to remember this, who cares. This is varsity basketball because I asked your dad. And I finally said that to my son.

I said, Elijah, like, you’re actually playing varsity basketball. And, and literally I think I remember two games from my freshman year too. I can’t remember. I have to go back to video tape to remember these things and I will often tell them this on the weekend. I can remember one game. Maybe one like cloudy game.

I played in middle school, AAU and then one game of high level a, you were like a lot of college coaches were there in Vegas. I can’t remember anything else. I literally don’t remember. I don’t remember if I had 41 in a game. I don’t remember it. Right. It’s so not that important. It is part of the process. I think it’s hard because a lot of people don’t know how the process works.

And I think the, what underlines, a lot of it is a lot of people want to control the process. Right. And I think I do too. I want to control it like anybody else, if your kid wants something bad enough, you want to help it, get it right. You want to grab your hold of it and say, I’m going to get it for you, but that’s not how this works.

It’s this is there’s no formula, right? There’s no formula. There’s no. Well, you better start now and then you better get good by this time. There’s so many examples. Even overseas, I played against so many guys who were division two players or low division one players I’d never heard of who were making good money and having a thriving career.

And you start asking yourself, what happened to all these people, where’d they go? And they peak too early. I mean these kids who were dominant and then all of a sudden they’re not that good anymore. We just get so lost in the moment that we forget, like one, we can’t control this thing for our kids or for our players.

And two, we don’t know where it ends. Right. We, we literally are losing our brains here because we’re forgetting the big picture of like what’s in, what’s actually important now. Right. And I think the best example, frankly, is shooting. You know, there’s more kids technically that can shoot the basketball today that are good shooters, especially if you have no defense on you, but with all the training we have with all the stuff we have, like, why don’t kids shoot the ball better?

And I mean like big time, shotmakers like, why was I a great shooter? Well, it’s because I grew up playing in a ton of environments where I could miss the hundreds and thousands of shots. Absolutely. Now we played in an environment where if you miss, you might get taken out or you’re not encouraged to shoot.

So, and then, and then this is what I tell people. I said, like these kids get to their junior year of high school and they go, well, these kids can’t shoot. And it’s like, we have, because for the last five to six years, you’ve been telling them not to, well, they didn’t work on it yet. Why would they work on something that you’re telling them not to do it.

It doesn’t make any sense. So shooting is one of those things. Like you have to have a high risk tolerance to shoot because people are going to think you’re crazy. How do you develop that risk tolerance? Just a little bit at a time, a safe situation at a time, a lonely gym or a little rec game with your grandparents there.

That’s where you develop that, not in this high pressure environment where you think somebody is watching, even though nobody is so I really believe it’s simple example when we started our three on three league again, my oldest son has always what I go back to cause I’ve seen this the most, but my younger son could be the same example.

I’ll use my seven-year-old. For example, he is the biggest gunner I think, in the family. But because we play in this environment of three on three, and everyone’s just shooting and getting rebounds and it’s a mess. Kids just play it. Right. Some of them are traveling six, seven years old. They’re well, what else would they do if they want to do a spin dribble, they’re going to travel a little bit.

You know, we teach them along the way the dude might play for 45 minutes and he might shoot 70 times. Well, what does that do to his brain one? He, he identifies as someone who should shoot. Well, that’s the makings of a shooter too. He’s getting tons of practice in a game chaotic environment. Right? How many do we expect them to make in that environment?

One of 10, maybe, right? Well, that’s how you create a shooter. It’s not by just putting them on a gun shooting guns. Great for my college players, but. And that’s not how that’s not how you become a shooter. Right? There’s all these other things that have to happen. And when you shut the faucet off just to win the weekend, and then you want to turn it back on five years later, sorry, man, it’s too late

[00:37:30] Mike Klinzing: And it’s not fun.  Look, why do you pick up a ball in the first place? Right? Why does anybody pick a block when it comes to shooting? Right? That you sh you play basketball because you want to shoot. You want to see the ball go in the basket. I love at a place where we’d sometimes do some training. They would sometimes have soccer.

Football would come in after basketball. And I’m amazed by the number of times that soccer players would come in and they’d have their soccer ball and they’d be shooting baskets with the soccer ball. I’ve never seen anybody go to. You know, go to soccer or go to basketball and then start start kicking the kick in the basket,

[00:38:02] Joe Crispin: The Europeans do that.

I’ve never seen it here. Yeah. The, sometimes they do that. We play plenty of that. But here, the thing is, it’s funny because when you talk about the youth sports stuff people say, well where did you get all these ideas? I said, I just asked my son what he wanted. That’s when people say, what did you do?

Market research. Yeah. I asked kids what they wanted. And then I figured out a way to make that benefit them and then educate parents on why it worked and what I always say about our three on three leagues example, but anything that we try to run at the youth level. And again, my college players are just big kids.

That’s who they are. They’re big kids. They’re 21 years old. They are the same as they were at 12. This, they want the same thing in college that they wanted at age 10. They want a time on the court. And they want touches on the ball. That’s it, that’s what they want. They want time on the court and touches on the ball.

So if you find a way, and then of course there’s more to it, they want meaningful touches. They want the ability to take risks, right? They want the ability to try new things. But you should do more things that revolve around those two things. More time on the court, more touches with the ball, meaningful touches as they get older and older, all the other stuff is cool, but they don’t care about your play.

They don’t care about the latest thing you got from YouTube. They want time on the court. They want touches on the ball, they want to shoot when they’re open, if you give them those things they’re going to be interested in basketball. Basketball’s a fun sport, but the moment you start worrying too much about like measurable things of you got to get better at this specific thing.

And we’re going to put it. I always say it’s just dangerous when people are like, we’re going to put in work. And I’m like, dude, I spent 12 years of my life. I spent probably 15 to 16 years of my life working at basketball. I’m actually more, probably 20 cause I was crazy. I put in work and I always tell people when I wanted to do, oftentimes after my pro seasons, I wanted to play in a softball league.

That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to play in a baseball league just for fun, just to play, just to play. And you’d be amazed how many pros realize, like they need pickup in the summers where they can just play just to play. And when when your entire youth development model doesn’t include that, you’re literally failing kids. You’re failing them miserably. If it doesn’t include playing just for the sake of playing, you’re failing your own kids. And if you’re not finding those, and sometimes as a parent, you have to actually create those opportunities or find them right for kids. Like, Hey if I was going to force my son, my kids to do anything, my daughter, if I’m going to force her to do anything this summer, it’s, you better call your two teammates and get them over here and just go have fun on in our backyard court.

Right? I’m not going to tell you what to do, but they better be over here and play some one-on-one for fun play dunk ball for fun for all we care, right. That has we do that at camp for when I have the baskets the right way I do. I lower the rims and we…

[00:41:25] Mike Klinzing: that’s the best time we had. We had a court in my neighborhood that was.

Full court, but it was probably only the length of like a regulation half court. One of the baskets was 10 feet and the other basket was like eight, maybe eight and a half. And it was a steel rim steel backboard on a steel pole. So, I mean, you could literally do chin-ups on that thing and it would never break.

That was probably as much fun as I ever had planned basketball was going on. Do they like a

[00:41:52] Jason Sunkle: Strongsville thing? Like what development did you grow up in?

[00:41:54] Mike Klinzing: No, no, no, this was, this was off of, this was a guy who I had a friend who lived at the corner of west a hundred 30th and Whitney right over in your neighborhood chasten and oh, yeah, yeah,

[00:42:07] Jason Sunkle: yeah, yeah.

[00:42:08] Mike Klinzing: The court’s not even there anymore. Well, he was friends with a guy that lived down the street on a hundred and 30th, and this guy had this court in his backyard. And I don’t even know. I don’t even know what the connection was between my friend. I can’t remember now what the connection was between my friend and this guy who was an older guy, but he had this court in his backyard and we would go over there and play wasn’t ready on three foot four in the Huntington park.

No, no, this wasn’t even, it was just that it was on, it was on 130th. It was like a guy’s backyard on 103. If we go over there and play, we play 33, which I think is what you were referring to Joe. Earlier as 21, we used to call it here. We call it 33. Those types of things are just stuff that it’s just, it doesn’t, it doesn’t exist.

It does not exist anymore.

[00:42:51] Joe Crispin: No. And the thing is, you, you literally have to create it. It’s so important. I think the kids’ development that I created a camp for it, I created a summer league for it. I do think it’s that important. it’s not even just important from a emotional mental standpoint.

I really think it’s important from a skill perspective. So from a shooting perspective, for example I did have access to gyms when I was a kid. I was a spoiled kid in some respects. Like my dad had the keys to gyms, my grandfather I could get in, but I couldn’t always go to the gym. Right.

Like my dad, my parents had stuff to do. I spent a ton of time outside playing basketball and. You know, I had at my school, we had four different baskets. None of them were the same height and only one of them was level. And one had a one where we would play full court. One had a branch that came down.

So you had to like shoot line, drive shots from different angles. And I used to always say to my son, like you’re too sterile as a shooter. And you know, and he’s not, I’ve, I’ve done a lot of different things to make him creative he’s but I’d say like, if you want to get good, go to school and go make shots there, because if you miss the balls bouncing over the fence, some places, and then other places, the rims lean in, in a one way.

Right? So it’s it was an incredible shooting education playing at that point. Right. And then someplace you go play pickup. I had the triple rooms and you had to, and I was a shooter. I had to learn how to make the shot on the triple rims. And people say, Hey, we got the latest shooting gun. It’s great. I had my kids use it.

I have my players use it. However, I liked Kendall school for that purpose too. We talk about fragility, which is just an antifragile system. A favorite term of mine is like, that’s what I want my kids to be emotionally, mentally basketball wise. I want to, I want them to be able to Chuck them in any court, anywhere in the world and have them be able to play basketball with those people, whoever they are.

The way you create those kinds of players is not the way we think, right? It’s not with your uniform on the back since age of second grade or first grade. Right. Which is what we’re creating now. Like, and then we wonder why I’m unimpressed with them when they get to high school.

[00:45:21] Mike Klinzing: All right. Let me, let me ask you this related to college basketball and thinking about your experience at Penn state versus what a kid who plays division one basketball has to do today during the summertime.

I don’t know what it was like for you in the summer at Penn state, what you guys did or didn’t do. When I was at Kansas, I was there from 88 to 92. I was when I played. So I’m a little bit older than you. And when we got done with our season you talked about wanting to go play in a softball league.

When you were done with your professional career. When I was done with my college season, I wanted to just go play pickup basketball. Cause I wanted to play for fun and not have somebody watching me. And I look at what division one players, coaches do now in the summertime. And the fact that those kids are on campus, whatever 48 weeks out of the year.

And they’re going through skill development, workouts and all the kind of things that they do with their coaching stuff. And I think about my experience and I know that I needed the opportunity to get away, just go play and be creative and do some of the things that I had always done growing up as a kid, as a high school player.

To me, that was so important. So just, what’s your thoughts as a college coach, obviously at the division three level, you don’t have that kind of access to your players, but I’m just curious to get your perspective on what you think is the best system is the division one system, the best system that we have it now is the division three system.

The best system would, it would a hybrid version of sort of a combination of middle ground between those two. How do you see that as a college coach?

[00:46:49] Joe Crispin: Well, I’ll put it plainly. Like if, if, if ever I’m a D one coach, I’m not doing it. And I might use a hybrid system that cause some kids like our rule was like, if you needed a summer cool, Of course you could work out with the coaches or whatever.

But no, we were very similar at Penn State. I didn’t graduate on time solely because I loved coming home and playing. In the summers I played in Philly, I had a great workout group of college players and professional players. I learned a ton from other people. I tinkered and I tinkered and I lived in the gym all summer.

I worked like two camps and worked like crazy at the game of basketball. And I loved it. And you know, my joke is always that if I had stayed up in the summers, the coaches would have never let me stay again. Cause I would have driven them crazy and I would have hated them. I would have hated them. I hated having a coach in my face telling me what to do all the time.

And I honestly, I really think a lot of players do hate it. They do it because they have to, not because they like it. And I do think, from talking to a lot of division one coach friends of mine, they don’t like it either. I don’t think any, I don’t think anybody likes it.

[00:47:58] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I’ve gotten that sense too.

From the coaches that we’ve talked to, it feels like it’s more of an obligation. Like this is what’s out there and we have to do it because if we. People are going to look at us like, well, you could be doing it. Why aren’t you doing it? And yet I think everyone feels to some degree that it’s too much. And I, like I said, I would not, I would not have wanted to have that to listen to the same coaching staff that you just listened to for eight months.

[00:48:33] Joe Crispin: Naturally these kids, most of them, there’s some kids who need to be on campus. Right. We understand that that’s, that that’s a different story, but on the whole, most of these kids are playing basketball, right? Like they’re playing basketball wherever they go. And you know, my philosophy at T3, I can’t work with them anyway, but I just tell them like, go, go, when you come in September, the two things I want is I want you to be in great shape and I want you to love basketball.

That’s it. That’s what I want. I want you to love basketball. So if you need to go on vacation for me to love basketball in September, then go on vacation for a month. I don’t care. As long as you could still be in shape. I really believe that I really do, because I’ve seen kids and I’ve heard this from division one coaches that they’re tired of their kids and the kids are tired of them by the end of September.

Yeah, absolutely. And you’ve got to go all the way through March. I don’t, I’m not seeing the skill development piece be that great. Right? It’s one thing, if a kid says, Hey coach, can you work with. Yeah. If you as long as it’s, when they say guidelines, shore, that’s a great thing. Right.

But it’s another thing where it’s like, you better be here, then you better be here. You better be here. And I think at the D one, there’s two things motivate and one is a justification of salary. And two is, it’s trying to make sure you keep your own kids because of the transfers. That’s what’s motivating it, right?

It’s the same thing at the youth sports level. We talk about like, what’s really the driving force here. It’s not what we believe for kids and their development. It’s not what we believe was best for those division one players. It’s often what I have to do in order to keep my players and keep my job.

We understand those things, but that’s the same thing at the youth level is like, well, why do I want to wait in the weekend is like, so I can put it on Instagram and what, like, to what end get a better player. But so to out recruit your sixth grade team, like, what are you trying to do here? Right. That literally is what happened.

Like I shouldn’t fill this spot. Like why do you need to fill his spot for what? And not to mention that kid might be your best player in four years. Right. We’ve seen that before where we’ve had kids who were, we only had one team. I usually try to keep as many kids as possible. You know, we have kids playing varsity basketball.

They couldn’t make our sixth grade team. Like you don’t know who’s going to be good and who’s not,

[00:51:03] Mike Klinzing: That’s a hundred percent. Right. And I think, when I’m sitting at these AAU tournaments. And I see, especially the kids at the younger age, now that my son’s a little older, I have in my sixth grade daughter too.

So I see it there a little bit, but you’ll go and you’ll watch these parents and they’re just, they just, they’re going crazy on the sideline. And you just want to walk up to him, put your arm around them and just say, Hey, just relax. In six, seven years, it’s all going to work itself out. And either your kid is going to be a really good basketball player because they love it and they work at it and they’re going to stick with it.

Or two years from now, your kid may not be playing basketball and maybe they’re going to be in the choir, or maybe they’re going to be a great mathematician or whatever it is. And you’re not going to care anymore about whether or not that referee called a block or a charge and a third grade at you basketball game.

And it just, it’s just, you wish you could, you talked about it earlier. You wish you could give them that perspective of seeing the whole picture. That look it’s new. Whether we win this game on this weekend in a week, it’s not going to matter. And just keep that in mind, keep that in perspective and think about why it is that you want your kid to play basketball or play a participate in youth sports.

What’s the ultimate goal, right? You want to be able to have them have a great experience and you want to be able to use sports to help them to have a better life. Because even a guy like you, right? You played professional basketball. You basically lived the dream that all those people, all those kids, all those parents are looking at it going.

We’d love to be able to have our kid play professional basketball kids. How many kids grow up dreaming of playing in the NBA, playing professional basketball. Everybody does. And you had an opportunity to do it. And yet at some point you stopped playing and you still have the rest of your life to live.

And hopefully the lessons that you learned as a basketball. Help you to be a better person so that you can have a better life moving forward. You talked about it with your own kids. You want your son to be a good husband. You want it to be a good father. You want to be a good community member, same thing for your daughter.

And I think we so often lose sight of why are we doing the things that we’re doing? And it’s easy to do. Like you said, it’s easy to do, but if we could give one piece of advice to parents out there, it’s just, Hey, relax. Things are going to work out the way they’re supposed to work out and just make it about your kid and not about you.

[00:53:30] Joe Crispin: Yeah. And the other thing I often say to parents, and of course, like it’s hard. It’s not hard for me to say because I mean it, but I’m like, I don’t wish professional basketball on my son at all. It’s very difficult. It’s not. An easy life at any, like, it’s just, I don’t think, I think what people think professional basketball is and what it actually is, are two really separate things.

And I mean that having seen the highest level of the NBA, I mean, it’s not, it’s like you, of course, if you’re all into money and the glitz and the glamour, like, okay, great. You could get a big Instagram following. Like that’s not what I was into. And I just remember you know, my rookie year was in the NBA and, and I just remember thinking like, wow, I college basketball was really hard work.

Right. And, and the only thing that really changed was I didn’t have to go to school and I got a paycheck for what I was doing. For me, like the demands were very similar, but it wasn’t the. It really wasn’t the same and it is work. It is a job. You when you’re young, you want it to be, I get to play and you don’t want it to be, I have to play.

Right. You know, my son will sometimes ask me, do I have to do this? And I always say, I don’t even understand that question. Like have to what, like have to, in order to what, like half to, in order to get good at basketball. I maybe not like you could probably take 10. I don’t have to, to play good this weekend.

Maybe you want to get some shots. I don’t know what have to means, but when you become a pro you’re, it’d be basketball becomes a have to the thing that you did for its own sake. You no longer can, you have to fight to do for its own sake. Right? Play is supposed to be life-giving and freeing. That’s why, if I play in the employee softball league, like I still care about winning and that too.

Cause I’m a little nuts as a competitor, but it bothers me too much that before COVID we actually lost that, but the, I can still remember it. But what I tell people is like, as a pro, I can’t tell you how many times, like my body was broken. I was tired. I was white. I didn’t want to play basketball, but there were 5,000 people there who paid to watch me.

And I had to learn how to find that and how to give them the gifts I had that night. That’s I don’t wish that on anybody. I am so thankful. I did it. I am. If somebody wants to do it, I want to help them do it, but it’s not everything that people think it is. Right. And that’s why it’s hard when it’s like, you think you want like, even division one basketball.

I mean, there’s plenty of kids who are finding they don’t want to be a division one player. Not because they don’t want to play in the games, but because they don’t want to do all the even though even the word grind, right? Like you see these AAU programs talking about, we grind. I’m like, dude, your guys are in fifth grade.

If they’re grinding now that’s grinding them out. Like they’re going to be ground out in five years. It’s like, I don’t want my college players to grind. I want them to have fun. I want them to think yes, we need to get better. Yes. We need to work on some tedious things, but on the whole. Basketball should be fun and basketball should be a joy.

And it’s a very, very easy, and I just speak from personal experience. I tell people like, I know what it’s like to lose the love for the game to lose the joy you find in the game. I had to fight to find it and to play with it, especially the second half of my career. So you don’t want to do that to kids.

And I mean, kids that are literally kids, but then also big kids that are high school, varsity players and college basketball players. I don’t want to do that to my college players. I want, I’d rather lose a couple of games and have a little bit more fun doing what we’re doing then grind all the time.

I’m not into all that.

[00:57:43] Mike Klinzing: What was your favorite country?

[00:57:45] Joe Crispin: Probably my favorite country I had, I really had a lot of positive experiences. I did. I loved living in Italy, but probably my most enjoyable country to play in was Spain. I played on a team thought, they say over there that is now an ACB team, but we were fighting to get to ACB.

So we were a loaded team. We had 10, 11,000 every night. They love their basketball. It was just an awesome environment to play in. Right. But probably my favorite city though, was in Brindisi, Italy. We won the championship there to go to series. I had a couple of my most positive experiences where second division teams who were good enough to be first division teams because we won.

And Brindisi was a place that I wanted to go back to and didn’t get a chance to, but just people who love hoops and they came and they loved what you did, and they appreciated the way I played. And I was fortunate enough to have a lot of positive experiences. Even though my first one was a bit of a circus in Greece, that’s why I was slow to go back to Europe.

[00:58:46] Mike Klinzing: All right. So that being said, standard question for anybody who played overseas, what’s your craziest story that, that you can tell on a PG rated podcast?

[00:58:56] Joe Crispin: It’s actually from Greece. So I have a couple from Greece, but the craziest one is us winning a best of three playoff series in four games. During this series, it also involved a borderline a fight between the riot police and fans.

In which the fans actually won. But within this, that’s a whole nother story. And within this series we played Olympiakos. I believe it was. And we were, I played for like, we were, I, I don’t know if Olympiakos was your league that year, but us in Panathinaikos with a year league teams. And there was a controversial call at the end of game one.

They actually, they messed up the call. They should have reset the shot clock. But they didn’t. We ended up winning game one. And at the end, after game one, I came to practice the next day and they said there’s, everyone’s quiet. And they’re like, we might need to, we might need to replay the game. I said, what do we talk about?

Replay the game? Like you don’t read the games done. They were up one zero, and they go, they said, not here. Cause Olympiacos is a very well politically connected. There’s a judgment. There’s a ruling. Whether or not we need to replay this game or not. And I said, well, why? And they say, cause they didn’t reset the shot clock.

I’m like, we’re going to win anyway. Like what he just, so what, it was a two point game, whatever. So that like later that day they’re like, all right, nevermind. We don’t need to replay the game. And I said, okay, good. So we, we get actually losing game to win a great game in game three, come back to practice the next day we didn’t win.

We got her. I was like, are you kidding me? And this is how I remember it. Maybe it happened after game two and we had to win two in a row. So that might’ve happened after game two, but either way, it was after we had lost or something happened, we won and we had to replay a game that we had already happened and already been ruled on to be a win too.

So we played four games. We won a best of three series three to one in order to go play that I guess, in the championship. And sure enough game one against Panathinaikos was an empty gym. Somebody had hit the ref with a quarter or something like that. So it was a circus. And then they owed me half of my money by the time I left.

And I never wanted to go back to Europe because I thought everything was a circus. So that con that, that costs me a lot of money. That, that trip. Did you get your money eventually or no, I actually did get almost all of it from that team. And I count that as an answer to prayer. And my agent in Greece was an awesome guy.

He worked hard for me and got it done.

[01:01:27] Mike Klinzing: I’ve heard lots of stories about guys that were waiting for paychecks for a long time. Let’s put it that way.

[01:01:34] Joe Crispin: Oh yeah, I got used to it. I was actually pretty fortunate. I was very fortunate actually. I had some really good positive situations, but I had a couple of those Greece was the worst.

And then one year in Sicily, I used to say. Eventually Domani needs to mean today. Don’t mind. I don’t mind everything down in Sicily is don’t mind tomorrow, tomorrow. And it’s actually one of the great team meetings. I always tell my players, like I always felt like it was my calling in life. It still is that if nobody else is willing to say it, I am.

But I, one of my favorite stories was, and I was in Sicily. I had gotten a couple three or four technicals probably because they used to just hand check the crap out of me. Cause I played most of the game and was our leading score. So I got a couple technicals and we had this team meeting and, and the GM said Joe, like in your contract, you can get fined for technical.

It’s like, we’re going to have to start finding you because these technicals hurt the team. And I said, you know what? I, I agree. I said, I should not get these technicals. And I apologize to the team. And I said I agree you, you should do that. You should find me for the technicals. And I’ll also find you according to the contract, $50 a day for every day, you’re late.

So according to my rough calculation, right now, you owe me $5,000 this minute. And naturally all my teammates were afraid to say stuff like that. And they couldn’t believe like it was dead silence. And and I said that the GM was like, afterwards, he said, you can’t say that you’re the leader of the team.

I said, well, I guess you don’t understand how leadership works because it’s because I say that that I’m a leader on this team, right. That’s right. I said like, guys, like you’re two months late and you’re talking to me about whatever, a couple of hundred bucks for a technical, like, you’re right. Like, I’ll give, I’ll go find another job before I’m worried about you.

[01:03:23] Mike Klinzing: That’s good stuff. That is good stuff. There’s always, man. There’s always good stories without question.

[01:03:32] Joe Crispin: Cause I often forget stories until like something that happens within the team brings things up. And I’ll just be like, yeah, there’s one time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I forget, like my players are just like looking at me with these wide eyes.

Like that really happened. I always, I say like I learned more from about spacing and movement off the ball from Rob, but worry in about a 15 second conversation that I had my first 22 years of life. Right. Like that’s how I learned these things was just in the moment. I did the thing, I didn’t, I didn’t have a guide.

Right. I didn’t have trainers. I didn’t have, like, it was just you just pick stuff up to survive. That’s what people, people often ask about professional basketball. And when my players want to be professional basketball players, I solicit. You think it’s about the ball? It’s about learning how to survive.

It’s about learning how to do well, where you are in order to get to the next place, or maybe find a home in the place you are like, it’s not what you think it is. It’s not just, oh, Hey, look at my crossover dribble and my ability to score. It’s like, nah, like what do you do when they’re three weeks late for payment and the presidents whatever.

And you, and you got to, and what do you do when you got to make this team win? But you still also got to average 18 in the midst of it and got to figure out there’s so many things like that’s where you learn all these lessons. And yeah, there’s a lot of stories that come up that’s for sure.

[01:05:05] Mike Klinzing: I’m sure there are.  All right. You had a chance to play a little bit briefly and have some experience with Phil Jackson. Also with Darryl Dawkins, little chocolate thunder. Give me a quick just impressions of those two

[01:05:20] Joe Crispin: guys. Well, one is, I learned more I was only with the Lakers a couple months, two and a half months or so.

And I remember I learned more about offense in those two and a half months, then I had probably learned anywhere else. And naturally what I believe I wrote a book called offense wins that I wrote before I ever coached actually. And you know, one of my first principles it’s from a player’s perspective, but one of my first principles kind of revolved around what I learned with the Lakers and the triangle offense.

And of course I don’t run the triangle offense, but you know, it was, I remember when particular one timeout early in the season where you needed a bucket and in the NBA, the coaches are really good at. It’s also because it’s the NBA and the defense is really good and the offense is really good, but I remember him drawing up an option within the triangle and I turned to Lindsay Hunter and I, and I said, jeez, that’s going to work.

And he goes, well, yeah, that’s why he’s Phil Jackson. And sure enough went out, boom, there’s a bucket. Right. And you know, I’m 22 at the time, I think. And I just, like, I’d never seen that before. Right? Like I just assume coaches called plays and they never work right in college. There’s reasons why it doesn’t work.

Right. Sometimes the coach doesn’t know other times it’s because the defense is not as predictable as it is in the NBA. But you know, I had to learn that triangle offense well enough to make the team so as complex as it can seem, or as it can be from a teaching standpoint, the way they taught that offense and implemented things was it was really.

Yeah, it was, was world-class right. That’s why they were so good at it. Is that a rookie like me could pick up on what was important. They didn’t, they didn’t just overwhelm me. You know, we started at square one and went from there. So he was a great teacher, but he was also, he’s just a different dude.

I mean, I remember Shaq through what we’re doing meditation and somebody fell asleep and that was like, there’s so many funny things that happen in a team context. And Shaq and Kobe were starting to just be a little goofy back and forth. And Shaq was like a big kid, even at that time as he still is.

And you know, but Phil, like, he just managed those things in his own odd way. And it was, it was apparent to me even in just a couple months. But he, I did, I learned a lot in just a short period of time as a rookie. I wish I was there longer. Right. And then who else was it that you asked me about?

I forget Darryl Dawkins. So Darryl, I was actually supposed to go to Italy that year and lost my, I have, I lost my passport in Mexico. It might’ve gotten stolen. There might be, there might be another joke. Crispin walking around with my passport to this day, I was supposed to go to Italy. It got stolen.

And like the Italian team, I did have the passport. I got a brand new passport within a day, but the Italian team was like, nervous about it. So I’m driving back with my my wife and newborn daughter. And we’re like, okay, at least off the books. And I ended up in the U S BL playing for Darrell with a loaded team.

We were actually a pretty good team. We won the championship and Darryl was just a character. But one of the things he did in that league, which he always kind of had to do in the minor leagues is like we had like super, I think it was me, Kareem Reed. And Tim, when. Often on the court at the same time.

So you’re talking about like 2 5’9” guards and then me a six footer. And I think we’d often have Willie Chandler who was a great division three player at Misericordia is now the head coach there on the court at the same time with like one dude who’s six, seven, and you know, nobody did that.

Right. And I had played in the ABA, but we still had like high level, big, big guys who made it back to the NBA on the minor league teams. I played in on the CBA and ABA. But in that USB FL we ran people off the court, literally Gord, it was a modern day game. We were playing that, that game in the USB L for two months for Darryl docket.

So as, as, as even though he was a big guy, that’s the game we played and he used to wear his. You know, his colorful suits and he had his personality. But a good dude. He had known my grandfather years, years before. Cause his brother used to work out all the time. They used to work out my grandfather’s gym, but he, he was ahead of his time in many respects.

That’s how they, and some of it was by necessity, right. It was the USB cell. And it was actually pretty well funded that year. But yeah, he was a character and our team was full characters. That’s for sure.

[01:09:54] Mike Klinzing: The basketball world is so small. It’s amazing. Just when you think about the connections and people and people you’ve come in contact with and who knows who and just how it all flows together.

As you were wrapping up your pro professional career and you started to see that it was going to come to an end, was coaching always on your radar as, Hey, when my playing career is done, I think I’m going to get into coaching. Or was it more a case of when, when you got done playing. You kind of looked around and eventually kind of fell into coaching, which one better describes kind of your situation?

[01:10:28] Joe Crispin: Well, I was way too slow to realize coaching. I don’t know why, like I majored in telecommunications. My joke now is like, my brother’s now working with ESPN and as a commentator. And so he’s doing all the talking and I, that was why I did telecommunications. I heard it was pretty easy, frankly. And then I also was like, oh, I guess I could do TV when I’m done.

And you know, I’m like, I was an idiot, right. I always wanted to be in charge. I was always questioning my coaches. I was very difficult to coach. If I thought something was stupid, I was going to tell you and tell you why. I always thought I knew more than I actually did. And I was always like interested in thinking through things and writing things down and watching film.

I actually spent four or five, probably four or five years, like thinking I was going to be a pastor. Like I studied a bunch of theology. I’m still into that, of course. But it was kind of a change, a shift of perspective for me, it midway through my career. Number one, that like, I got a vision for like how coaching could fit into the big picture and just how basketball fit into the big picture, just spiritually.

Just what my vision was like, why I was doing this? Like, why was I playing sports? Like why was I spending all this time and emotional energy beating up my body to entertain people with basketball. A lot of the things I was studying helped me in that regard, actually Frank Reich, who was the head coach of the Colts suggested five or six books to me.

I’d emailed him back in the day and they were super, super helpful. And during that time, about five, six years into my career, it was like an obvious epiphany. Oh, I’m going to coach. I want to be a coach. And you know, I remember my wife saying like, eh, that was probably pretty obvious to me, like why wasn’t it obvious? Right. And literally from that point forward, I viewed the rest of my career. I was in Spain at the time and I just viewed the rest of my career was like, I’m going to play as long as I can, or until it’s obvious, I want to start to coach, like until I viewed the rest of my career as like, I’m going this is the best education a lot of people like you can get a different coaching education You know, in a variety of different ways, but I viewed my playing career as just the most incredible education I played for so many different coaches in different countries, in different philosophies and different styles, right?

Like one year I’m scoring 150 and a week later, I’m in Greece playing for a guy to tell that told me to slow down and call it play every time. Right. So I just, anything I was telling my players, anything you did, I did. I sat at the end of the bench, I got cut. I was the star and I was everybody in between.

Right. And so I can relate to my players so much better because of that. You know, I got a story for everything, but the second part of my career was very purposeful preparation for coaching I’m reading books, I’m studying what I’m doing. I’m there were things I was doing on the court that if you would ask me to explain what I was doing, I was like, I don’t know.

Like, why did you make that? Like, w and again, I, I joke about this with people, but it really was true for me. I didn’t have a guide. Right. There’s things that my son could explain to you now that I couldn’t explain to you at 25, I didn’t know. I didn’t have anybody explain into the film and ball screen reads, and why you should do this instead of this.

And I was just doing it. Right. And I was just trying to win games. I didn’t know what it was or what it was called, or I didn’t care. But the second half of my career, it became very purposeful. And I could, I really started to see of like, oh, this is why, this is how this connects. This is why this works.

This is how I can take advantage of it. I became a better player because of it, because I really started to understand. How I could best contribute to a team with the, with the actual basketball strengths I had cause I was a Steph Curry guy before there was Steph Curry. So I wasn’t cool. I was nuts.

That’s my joke. And it’s true. People thought I was just crazy because I was pulling up in transition and I was a ball screen oriented guy shooting off the dribble. People didn’t think it was cool back then. They thought it was crazy. But I started to understand later in my career, and then at the end of my last two seasons ended with injuries nothing major.

I had to have sports. I had a knee MCL in the playoffs of my second to last year. And then I had a sports hernia I played with throughout my last year and I pulled my calf muscle in a playoff game and I was playing great in and I never would have thought in my wildest dreams, it would have been my last game.

Never. I was ready to come back in eight weeks and I was, I thought I was gonna play till I was 35 or 36. But I was living up at Penn State and state college at the time. And it really became apparent to me that I had a clear vision of coaching that if I just kept saying no to jobs, I had great job offers in hindsight.

I’m like, what the heck was I thinking? And I just kept saying no. And finally I said to my agent, Dave, I said, I said, Dave, if I go back, I’m going to be there for four or five years. Cause I’m going to get it done. Like I’m motivated to play, but I want to coach, and I don’t want to start coaching when I’m 40 years old or 39 years old.

I want to be rolling when I’m then. And, and I didn’t even, I didn’t even tell people I retired. I just kept saying no. And I just kind of faded off in the sunset and started researching and connecting again and moved back here. And fortunately got connected with Rowan. And they kind of made up an assistant coaching job for me.

So that’s how it all got started.

[01:16:16] Mike Klinzing: What’d you like about coaching right from the get-go?

[01:16:20] Joe Crispin: Well, I mean, I, frankly, I didn’t like coaching more than playing from the get-go. I love playing basketball. I still love playing basketball. I liked playing better than coaching, and I think one of the reasons I think I’m fun to play for is I never want that to change.

I’m a player at heart, right? Like I am a, I’m a baller. That’s what I say. I tell my team, I want us to be a group full of ballers. Like that’s who I was. I love to compete. I love to play. I love to take risks. I love to tell the coach to just sit down and shut up and let me play. Like, that’s how I played when I was at my best.

And that’s what I want to give to my players. But I think the biggest thing that I loved early on. Was just the ability to give kids. And I still love this to give kids at little taste of the experience that I always wanted. Right. So I just say, I just try to coach by the golden rule, like give my players what I always wanted.

Right. Give them what I always wanted. And, and then give my opponents what I didn’t want. That’s all we’re trying to do. So to give kids just that the situations and the freedom and the knowledge to apply in a simple way, that led to a more a more enjoyable basketball experience.

I was able to do that right away as an assistant coach. Cause I was an assistant for the men’s and women’s team. And I had a lot of freedom right away. I didn’t know necessarily how to teach this stuff. So I was making a lot of stuff up and in some regards, maybe I still am, but I was able to connect with those kids on the girls and the boys side in a way that was super positive my first couple of years, as an assistant coach,

[01:18:05] Mike Klinzing: I think that’s an interesting perspective. Cause I tell people that all the time that when I have dreams and I haven’t coached nearly as much in a while. I mean, I’m doing camps and some of the similar things that you’re doing with youth basketball and a YouTube, I stopped coaching in high school probably now it’s been who, I don’t know, 13 or 14 years, but even when I was coaching and I put my head down on the pillow, I still, when I dreamed, I still dreamed about being a basketball player as opposed to being a coach.

And I think that that’s something. You just it’s, it’s kind of I think it’s just intuitive. It’s just something that I don’t think it’s ever going to go. It’s never going to go away. And I could certainly relate to that perspective without question. So we are going to right now, we are going to leave it here with the idea that you are going to come back on with us at some point.

And we’re actually going to talk about your coaching career at Rowan and talk about your program and get an opportunity to dive in to that. Cause we spent a lot of time talking about youth sports and talking about your experiences as a player, which has been fantastic and super interesting. What I want to do before we get out is give you a chance to share how people can reach out to you.

Find out more about your program, whether you want to share social media, email website, and then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:19:26] Joe Crispin: Yeah, no, I’m happy to, one of the things that I’m just passionate about in general, and like, I view my mission as a college basketball coach. And then just things I do in the youth, basketball is just, I want to spread basketball, happiness.

Like that’s the way we put it in our program is like, we want to spread basketball, happiness. I don’t think there’s enough joy and happiness in the game. I think there’s a lot of work. I think there’s a lot of good stuff. But that’s what I’m passionate about. So any way I can do that I try to do that you know, Pretty accessible online.

My, my Rowan emails, often the easiest crispin@rowan.edu for my college stuff. But our youth organizations called CrispinBasketball.com. And my wife handles all the administration and communications. So we’re very, very well organized. I just kind of handle it. I just handle the vision and I just show up how it is when you show up and people are like, Hey, is this supposed to be, I’m like less than like, just email my wife. Like if you’re here, you’re part of this group. We’re good. But yeah, any way that I could serve the basketball community. Certainly I’ve come to learn.

I’ve had a lot of unique experiences and certainly a different perspective on a lot of things. And that’s true at Rowan and all the way down to my kindergartners.

[01:20:45] Mike Klinzing: Well, Joe cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule. Shout out to Josh Merkel for connecting us. Really appreciate

[01:20:53] Joe Crispin: Really appreciate that, man.

[01:20:56] Mike Klinzing: He was great. He was great with us and again, it’s always, that’s one of the most, I think satisfying parts of this is just the connections that you make through one connection and then you connect it to another. And like I said earlier, the basketball world is, is so small and getting an opportunity to hear your story and dive in.

And like I said, I think what we need to do is have you back on again, and we can dive more into what you’ve done to be able to build your program at Rowan and get into more of the coaching philosophy side of it and that kind of thing. But thank you for your time tonight. Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening.

And we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.