RICK BOYAGES – FORMER COLLEGE BASKETBALL COACH & ADMINISTRATOR – EPISODE 1042

Website – https://denison.edu/people/rick-boyages

Email – boyagesr@denison.edu

Twitter/X – @coachboyages

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Rick Boyages has worked inside the college sports industry as a basketball coach, special assistant, conference administrator, and consultant for 39 years. Most recently, he spent 12 years as vice president for men’s basketball at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago. His role included oversight of event management, game operations, conduct policies, and officiating. During his tenure, Rick served as sport liaison to 31 head coaches, 30 athletic directors, and dozens of network television executives, arena directors, and NCAA stakeholders. As executive director of the Collegiate Officiating Consortium, LLC, he simultaneously directed men’s basketball officiating operations for 65 Division I institutions in 22 states.

Boyages also spent time as associate commissioner for the Mid-American Conference and special assistant to the athletic director at Ohio State University. His 19 years as a college basketball coach included stops at Ohio State, Boston College, William & Mary, and Bates College. He was an integral part of Big East and Big Ten championship seasons with Ohio State and Boston College, and coached in five NCAA Tournaments, two Elite Eight’s, and a Final Four with the Buckeyes in 1999.

As a consultant, Rick has advised clients in areas including sports tech, higher education, and professional/international basketball.

On this episode Mike & Rick his extensive journey through coaching, administration, and officiating. He discusses the evolution of the NCAA landscape, highlighting the complexities introduced by NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) legislation and the transfer portal, which have significantly altered the dynamics of college sports. Boyages reflects on his experiences at the Big Ten Conference, where he oversaw officiating and implemented a successful training program for referees, emphasizing the importance of mentorship and development in the officiating community. He also recounts the influence of his father, a youth basketball coach, on his coaching philosophy, prioritizing empathy and fundamental skills over rigid structures. As he embarks on a new chapter teaching leadership at Denison University, Boyages aims to inspire and connect with the next generation of athletes and coaches, sharing lessons learned from decades in the game.

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Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Rick Boyages, former college basketball coach and administrator.

What We Discuss with Rick Boyages

• The significant influence Rick’s father had on his coaching philosophy
• The commercialization of youth sports
• Networking through summer camps as a young coach
• Why the evolution of college basketball has shifted significantly with the introduction of NIL agreements
• Coaches today face unprecedented challenges with the transfer portal and recruiting dynamics
• The role of officiating and the pressure officials face in high-stakes games
• Why the NCAA’s structure has become too bureaucratic and inflexible to adapt quickly to changes
• The importance of foundational coaching principles over complex plays
• Empathy and simplicity in coaching philosophy
• His relationship with Jim O’Brien and their experiences together at Boston College and Ohio State
• Building a successful coaching staff is crucial for team success
• Good coaches have a strong feel for their team’s needs
• How coaching experiences and networking opportunities play a crucial role in career development
• Increased training and scrutiny for officials
• The evolution of basketball towards ball screens and spacing
• Why practice design should focus on skill progression and game situations
• The influence of international basketball
• Why young officials need to learn how to communicate effectively with coaches
• Reflecting on a 40-year career, Rick values the opportunity to give back

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THANKS, RICK BOYAGES

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TRANSCRIPT FOR RICK BOYAGES – FORMER COLLEGE BASKETBALL COACH & ADMINISTRATOR – EPISODE 1042

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight, but I am pleased to be joined by Rick Boyages, former college basketball coach, former college administrator, and someone who has played a lot of roles in his athletic life. Rick, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:21] Rick Boyages: Thanks Mike.

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

[00:00:36] Rick Boyages: Well, it was really my dad. My dad actually was a first generation son of Greek immigrants that came overseas and kind of settled in the Boston area. He went on to play at Everett high school outside of Boston and actually made it to Dartmouth. And the interesting thing about the story is in the early fifties He was the captain of Dartmouth and his coach was a guy named Doggie Julian.

And Doggie’s famous for being known as the head coach of the Holy Cross Crusadism, winning the national championship with Bob Cousy and Tom Heinsohn. So my dad was lucky to he played baseball too, but he’s lucky to play for a great college coach. Doggie actually left Holy Cross and went to Dartmouth.

But after he got out of the service and he worked in the aircraft engine group at General Electric for many years, but He he started the youth basketball program in my hometown, which was Wakefield, Massachusetts, and it was By the time I was a kid Probably no eight or nine years old. They’d already been a generation of kids in the town that had gone through the program so By the time I probably was winding out of it  guys that had played in the league initially had their own kids now that were taking part in the, in the league.

So he, he did it for over three decades and it was at a time where there weren’t a lot of elementary and middle school basketball teams affiliated with  that type of secondary education. So he, he just treated as intramural really. They’d have a draft down in my basement. I remember being a little kid and there’d be coaches down there drinking beer.

They’d have a chalkboard out and they’d be put the names of all the kids up and they’d have a draft. And the rule was every kid had to play the same amount except for maybe the last five minutes of the game. Is he really, his philosophy was that when kids are 10, 11 years old, you don’t know who’s going to be five, eight, who’s going to be six, eight and he just wanted to have a good experience with, with basketball and have fun and get a chance to play.

And then there’d be travel teams and things for, for kids that want to do a little bit more had a chance to maybe do something more special. So It was for 8th graders, Mike, and I was playing in the 6th grade division when I was probably in 1st or 2nd grade I had a political connection.

There you go. That always helps. Yeah, I’d hang around the gym, and if kids in the 7th grade games, if anyone was sick, Here it didn’t show up. I’d jump into games. I’d play sixth or seventh, eighth grade, always play with older guys for four or five years until I actually got into sixth grade. So that, those are my experiences and they were fun and, and wholesome.

And it was a good balance and it wasn’t an overemphasis in eSports like today, or today we got private equity buying AU teams it’s gotten full circle. So yeah. And over the years, he, he, his program fed a lot of good players into the high school system. Some kids would go on to play other sports or have other interests, but those that did have fun and stayed with it created a, a really a winning program at the high school level.

So that’s, that’s really kind of how I fell in love with the game and got involved. And I had an older brother that was four years older. So I was always competing against him and his buddies. So yeah, those are some of my earliest recollections of playing, playing basketball.

[00:03:57] Mike Klinzing: When you think of your dad and you think of who he was as a coach and how he went about his business.

What do you think are one or two things that stuck with you that influenced you that sort of became a part of you when you became a coach?

[00:04:13] Rick Boyages: I was, he was always empathetic. I think he he really got to know the kids as people and their family situations the socioeconomic background, that type of thing.

The other thing, he kept it simple and he just taught you good principles and fundamental concepts. We wouldn’t run any plays really, but we would do stuff like run and jump,  I’d be with a back foot mate, he’d teach us how to kind of spin a guy or turn a guy and a weak side guy would come over and steal the ball give and go, moving without the ball.

I don’t remember us running a lot of different things, just playing and then defensively, he’d be like, first thing you got to do, force your guy to his weak hand,  or box out or basic, basic stuff, but we really had fun and I think I think that’s always a big part of it.

And then  he was exposed to good coaches and then he actually was a captain in the Marines during the Korean war. And he played a lot of like semi pro ball through the military. And there were a lot of guys that, that he was an officer’s candidate school, but there were others that enlisted in, in that era in the, in the fifties.

A lot of those guys played, played ball on base or traveled to other competitions through the military. He he, he had a lot of great experiences that way that he he’d like to share.

[00:05:33] Mike Klinzing: You get into high school and you start taking the game maybe a little bit more seriously. What are you remember about your development as a player?

Obviously it looked a lot different than player development looks like today, but just tell me a little bit about your experience, both in season as a high school player and in the off season, what you did to try to get better.

[00:05:55] Rick Boyages: Well, during the season, I just remember it was a really good structured high school program.

It was typically based on seniority, unless you got a break somehow.  the older kids would have a shot before you. I got really fortunate. I think as a freshman, I played freshman basketball in a half a JV and sat on the bench. With the varsity you could only play so many quarters of a week.

It was one of those kind of deals. And then as a sophomore, I was behind just some older juniors and seniors. And it was actually a disciplinary situation where four of the guards got in trouble. I forget what they did and I, and I got a shot to crack in as a starter and I never lost my position so.

I was a little bit of fate that, that kind of was involved with that. But as a point guard, I just remember my coaches, I had a really great, like a Hall of Fame high school coach outside Boston. And he basically taught me how to call offenses and defenses and kind of quarterback on the court. So he had a philosophy where we played one defense after makes, one after misses, another after turnovers.

And so I, I was kind of calling offenses and defenses and things. And I had a lot of control on the court to, to quarterback the team that way. And I had played so much from such a young age that that was kind of a fun part of my development. The other thing we did back in those days is we went to overnight camps in the summer.

And we my coach was in with a group of high school coaches, very successful, small college coaches. And then some of the Boston Celtics back in that day. So, so we would go to camps with Sam Jones, John Avlicek. We would bus up to Maine and stay at an overnight camp at a small D3 school. We’d take a five hour bus ride.

We’d play other towns around our community other suburban all star teams and things. We had summer leagues in town as well. So it’s probably a whole different, you remember Mike, like a whole different scenario than what eventually evolved from, from what would be kind of AAU club ball and how it is today.

And I think, like I said, I’ve already used the word whole time. It was just healthier. Most of us played two or three sports. We were encouraged to play multiple sports. And I think that was always great for our development. When I was a small college coach, I used to teach sports sociology and I remember one of the textbooks was it was kind of a case study on great, on superstar athletes.

 the Wayne Gretzky’s, Larry Bird’s whole host of athletes and they all played multiple sports growing up and they all talked about they avoided burnout that way. They used different muscle groups and they also learned fundamentals in different sports that they could apply to, basketball, once they decided to specialize or ice hockey or whatever their niche was, once they got to be about 15 years old and they felt like this is either the sport I love the most or the one that physically my gifts match up best as far as advancing from this point.

[00:08:55] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s totally a different scenario than what we have today, obviously. I mean, kids. To play two sports now for most kids is really, really difficult. And then you talk about in the era when you and I grew up, we’re talking about there were a lot of three sport athletes and now it’s just with the, with the year round sort of requirements almost to be able to just the price of admission is you almost have to play year round just to be able to be a part of it.

And so it’s, it’s definitely a different era when it comes to that. And I like the word wholesome. I just think that when I look back and reminisce on my experiences in the game growing up as a kid, I just feel like I played a lot of times just up at the park at the playground with older guys, just with people in my neighborhood.

I may grow up just like you playing in the community league where again, you’re just playing with other kids that live within the confines of your city. And  now we’re driving kids around hours at a time to find, to find games. And it’s, There’s, there’s some positive to it, but there’s also, I think, a lot of just challenges that we spend a lot of time and money as parents for something that we probably got just as much if not more out of the experience that you and I had back in the day.

[00:10:09] Rick Boyages: Yeah, I mean, the other thing with me was my mom passed away of breast cancer when I was 14. So for a couple of years going through treatments and things, I mean, and then a couple years subsequently, I spent a lot of time just out in the driveway by myself trying to figure out other things and How to cope with all that, that was going on.

But sports was a great outlet for me. When I wasn’t just out there playing by myself or working on drills that I’d been shown at camps I had a buddy in town, a bunch of us played, but I had one friend in particular, our best friend that, I mean, we played one on one until it got dark and the neighbors told us you guys going to go to bed at some point it’s 10 30 and it’s weekday and you guys are out there in summer.

 still pounding away and making noise or, or having pickup games, like you said. We did so much of the kind of sandlot they, they use that term with baseball, but in those days we just got our own games together a lot of times too I

[00:11:08] Mike Klinzing: had a, I had a buddy. I used to play one on one to a hundred.

We would ride our bikes. Probably we lived whatever a mile and a half, two miles away. And so one day we’d ride to his house. One day we’d ride to my house. We’d Play one on one to a hundred. And now I tell my own kids that, or kids that I’ve coached or kids at camp, they look at me, like, I got like six heads.

They’re like, what do you play one on one to a hundred? What do you, what are you talking about? So yeah, it’s a different, it’s a different world, Rick, for sure.

[00:11:32] Rick Boyages: Now that was my exact experience. The funniest was that the one camp up in Maine, I mean, we had 400 kids at summer camp, and then we were probably 12, 13 years old and we would, In our age group, whatever, we would have a one on one tournament through our teams, and then the best one would advance on like a tournament during the week of camp.

And we had played, my buddy Peter and I had played for years and years, and we ended up in the finals of the camp.

[00:11:57] Mike Klinzing: Oh, that’s awesome.

[00:12:00] Rick Boyages: Crazy, but but yeah, it was just, just great experiences. Great fun recollecting those times.

[00:12:07] Mike Klinzing: When did playing college basketball get on your radar? Was that something that you dreamed about from the time you were a kid?

Or was it more as you got closer to that time that it started to become, started to become important to you?

[00:12:19] Rick Boyages: Yeah, I was my situation was interesting from the standpoint of I wasn’t big I was five, eight and a half, barely five I don’t know, a fair end of five, nine, but I had great speed and quickness, but I was small.

So the question was then what level can you play at? I was a an all Boston area kid.  I got selected by the Boston Globe as kind of one of the better players in the, in the area. I wanted good academic situation too. So I applied to some schools first time around and I really didn’t like my, my opportunities that I had.

And so I took a postgraduate year at a boarding school New England prep school, which it really, even to this day is kind of still a, a great recruiting ground for college basketball players. And it was kind of a way to have a fifth year repeat your senior year. And go back, go or get some better study habits.

I’m asked to do all my homework and study hall and a couple of free periods and then just live to play sport. So at Northville Mount Hermon, which was a really good private school, we had 90 post graduates. It was one of the largest boarding schools in the, in the country. And it was really like a college freshmen team.

So I played basketball, capped in the team there and I also played tennis actually there. But that was a great kind of redo of my senior year. And then I was kind of between the Ivy League and the small Ivy League. And I just came to the realization that I just wanted to play. One of the things that happened with me because of the story I told you about my childhood was I never, I always started, I never once in my entire life came off the bench ever really and I figured I had four years to play four years of eligibility.

So why wouldn’t I want to just max out?  I. A lot of, a lot of my friends and people I played against would throw around the D1 term. But to be honest, I, I even tell people this day, there’s probably three, four or five divisions within division one so what does it really mean?

 what I mean? And so, and I, and I was recruited by some Ivy league, but a lot of the small Ivy league in New England. So I ended up in that league. I, I was a starting point guard at Bowdoin College in Maine for four years, played every minute of every game. And I used to kid people, I would say, from our all scholastic team in the Boston Globe, who were the two players that played every minute of every game in their college career in that era?

And it was me and Division III. And Patrick Ewing Jewish. I always say you only get four years to play, you might as well max out,  absolutely. Well, I, the other thing I would tell kids is go one level below where you aspire to play and you’ll probably just you’d be able to walk in and compete immediately and have great success and now it’s interesting because you see  a story like Duncan Robinson, who was in the same league at Williams College decades later.

But actually found a way to go from T3 up to the big 10 even. And with NIL now, they’re not recruiting freshmen anymore, a lot of these people. So they, they go and prove themselves in the D2 ranks or the low D1 ranks and move up from there. So even the recruiting’s changed dramatically with NIL and the transfer portal.

[00:15:38] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, there’s no doubt that that’s had a huge impact on the college basketball landscape, just in terms of. The tenor of conversations that I’ve had on the podcast with different coaches over the six years we’ve been doing this thing. Obviously, you can go back to when we started and NIL and the portal didn’t exist.

And now you think about the impact that those two things have had. I mean, it really is incredible. I sometimes I, I think about the job that college coaches have to do today and just the way that they go about doing it and how different it is, certainly from the time when you or I were in college as players, and certainly for a lot of the time while you were coaching.

different in terms of thinking about building a team and say, Hey, we got a really good freshman class and this group, we can wait for them to mature. And by the time they’re juniors and seniors, wow, we’re really going to have something. And Now it’s almost a year to year, I’ve got to create a whole new team with bringing in players out of the portal, but also having players that go into the portal for whatever reason.

And so it’s a, it’s certainly become a very challenging profession. When you think back to your time in college, what were you thinking about As a career, when you went to school, were you thinking coaching already at that point, or was that something that didn’t really get to you until, Hey, looking around, like my, my playing career is over now.

I want to figure out how to stay involved in the game. What was your thought process as you went into school?

[00:17:02] Rick Boyages: No, I really did want to coach. I mean, it was really my goal. And then what I did was all throughout my prep school and college years, I worked camps all summer long, seven, eight weeks of camp.

And  Mike, back in those days There were a lot of overnight camps. So I could work a week at camp on Cape Cod or in New Hampshire or somewhere. And then  I’d have room and board. I’d get my meals there. I’d make a few hundred bucks and I would go on to the next one. And then you would basically develop a network of contacts by doing that.

And then after two or three years of doing that, I actually developed a ball handling routine and became like a a lecturer.  back in those days, every camp after lunch would have a 45 minute to an hour lecture where we kids would digest their lunch and sit there and learn something.

And then they would drill on whatever that topic was and then go do some other drills and play some games in the afternoon. And at night, the morning was all fundamental drill stations. And I even remember when I was a kid, I saw, I mean, I can remember this day seeing lectures by Sam Jones, like I mentioned, Havelcheck.

Jojo White  Hall of Famers. I remember Calvin Murphy. I was at a camp Brian Winters, Paul Silas all kinds of guys. Hubie, and then on the coaching side it was far back like when Hubie was coaching Roley Massimino, Patino when he was very young. I was probably a counselor then.

I was actually, Rick would see me at so many camps, he had this one on one with Dickie would do. He would do his, his clinic was one on one basketball like mine, and a couple years later was ball handling. Other guys were,  before Dave Hopler what’s his name? I can’t, oh, George Lehman was the shooting expert.

So it was, there’s new people doing it over each decade. But when I developed a ball handling routine I’d juggle balls, spin them on my finger, I’ll do crazy tricks, all kinds of things. And cause I, I couldn’t get near the rim. I was small so I had all these other dog and pony show that I’d roll out, but once I started doing that, then I got booked sometimes two or three camps in a day.

So instead of working seven or eight camps over the course of the entire summer, I was doing 40 to 60 camp appearances all over New England. So by that time I knew everybody. And then my first job was right out of school was a D3 assistance job at Babson college. And just outside Boston. And then I did that for just a couple of years and I was very lucky.

I, I interviewed for a D3 head job at Bates College in Maine and somehow got the job at like age 24. And then you and I talked about this in a previous conversation when you’re a D3 head coach, you do the laundry, drive the van you wash  when you’re not washing uniforms, sweep the floor, you do the recruiting, the scouting, the film work.

It’s a great laboratory for being a young coach. And so I did that and I did that for four years and still maintained my network all throughout New England, still did lectures in the summer and things. And then I actually started to coach internationally because at D3 at that time they didn’t have huge budgets and they really didn’t want you out recruiting a ton and there wasn’t an AAU circuit so you had to rely on waiting for high school basketball or maybe some summer league stuff here or there.

So I coached in Africa, Czechoslovakia before the political changes and when the wall came down in 87 I coached a lot in Greece. I’ve still got some good contacts there. So I did all that and that led me to Boston College after four years at Division III. So so yeah, but I knew I wanted to be a coach and I kind of got involved in the game in the summers while I was attending college.

And then I remember they hired me at Bates College and the president, actually it came from the College of Worcester, a guy named Don Harwood. And he said, Rick, you want to hire you, but you got to make me one promise. I said, what? He goes, you got to get your master’s, like, Well, most of the faculty have their PhDs and I’m going to hire you at 24 years old, but just assure me that you’ll get your master’s degree.

So I started that summer and knocked that out in a couple of years. But I, I was really, really fortunate that the toughest decision I had to make was to give up one of those great D3 jobs where you could stay for 25 years, maybe become the athletic director. You could raise a family, your kids be running around the campus at all the events, using all the facilities.

 I, I coached, for instance, against, I played and coached against Dave Hickson at Amherst and called him less than a year ago to congratulate him on being the first D3 coach into the Naismith Hall of Fame. But I go back with a core of guys Dick Whitmore at Colby. I mean, there were a whole bunch of them that they were just as good a coach as anybody in Division One.

They just, they chose that lifestyle. And so I don’t have any regrets about it because I was able to move up within Division One and experience. Final fours in NCAA tournaments and do just about everything you want to do, but I, I think I would have been maybe just as happy if I was still the at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and living the, the D3 dream life.

It’s, it’s interesting. A lot of guys that opt for that have a lot of respect for that.

[00:22:22] Mike Klinzing: What was the transition like from that first assistant job at Babson to becoming a head coach? Obviously at that point, as you said, you’re very young, you’ve got a couple of years under your belt, but still comparatively to the amount of experience that most coaches have when they get their first head coaching job.

At the collegiate level, you were relatively inexperienced. What was that transition like for you?

[00:22:46] Rick Boyages:  when I think back, I really don’t see it as anything problematic. I was just so excited and enthusiastic about having the opportunity and and I think we were able to win I was able to move the needle a little bit on the program.

The very first game I ever coached Mike was against my alma mater. It was Bates Bowdoin. And then in Maine, in Division III, There’s Bates, Bowden, and Colby. They’re all great small Ivy League schools. And so I think it was a home game. I think we won in a local newspaper. Beat writer was like, do you feel bad?

 beating your Alma mater in your first game. And I was like, I feel bad. I’m like, I’m undefeated.

[00:23:28] Mike Klinzing: That’s like, yeah, that’s like, that’s like beating your brother in a backyard basketball game. Do you feel bad for your brother? Absolutely not. There’s no way.

[00:23:35] Rick Boyages: Well, it was this little gym that held about 800 and we would jam 1200, 1400 kids in there.

It was insanity. I mean, there was, it was a blast. We had a lot of fun. And then because I was traveling internationally, like I took my team to Prague,  one winter actually during a Christmas break. So you’re able to do a lot of different things. I also coached tennis and golf and I, I taught that class I mentioned earlier, taught an academic class.

So I did some other things. But it was a great, just great training ground and I think that’s really what led me to get offered a position with Boston College, which was my next stop. And I was from Boston and I was, I actually asked the president, it was, I was only in it four years at D3, Mike, and I asked him for a sabbatical because at the time Jimmy O’Brien was the head coach at Boston college and they’d come off only two one win seasons in the big, in the big East.

And the rumor was he was going to be let go. It was a lot of pressure on him. And days before the Big East tournament, his, his, tragically, his wife passed away from complications with Hodgkin’s disease. And so I think the AD was in a position where he’s like how am I going to do that?

Yeah. Daughters, whatever. So I think the trade off was they, they, they told him he could stay on a year, see how it goes, but he had to make some changes with his staff. And a lot of people turned him down because they thought he was a dead man walking. So I said, I said to myself, I got to play this like two ways.

One, I want to take the job, but if he doesn’t make it or I don’t make it, I want to be able to come back. Like this is a good job, a good G to do that. And unbelievably the president said, yes, he said, okay, I’ll make a deal with you again. Maybe because I got my master’s, Mike, and I, and I came through on the first promise.

But he said, just help me find a coach to replace yourself. Someone you trust, someone that would be good for us. Cause I had my best team in my fourth year. I was going into my fourth year, I think it was, or fifth. And we probably, it was going to be the best team in the history of the school. So I helped him find a high school coach that I really respected.

And then we won seven games in the big East that year. And we had a great group of sophomores. We had two NBA players, Billy Curley. From Boston and Howard Isley and our, we had two other players that would play professionally as well. Two other guards that played international basketball for a long time, very successful.

So Jim got a two year extension and so I, I resigned my D3 job in May and I mean, I was so lucky that I had a president like that that was even willing to consider such a thing. But I think again, if that hadn’t worked out, I probably would have stayed in D3 it was. It was a taste of the big East.

And at that time, the big East was everything you can only imagine, I mean,  Allen Iverson and Alonzo morning. And  it was a little bit after Derek Coleman, but unbelievable coaches kind of sucker, Patino Thompson, Bayheim, Massimino. It was, it was it was an unbelievable experience and we were good.

We, we went to the end, we made it to the NIT that year. The next year we went to the elite eight. We were stone’s throw from the final four and we lost a heartbreaking game. We had to play Florida in Miami. I think we had about six fans there in the elite eight game. And we led most of the game and lost in the last couple of minutes.

And I was, it’s crazy how things work. I’m saying to myself, that was my one shot at the final four that was it. And crazy two years later after we have another good year and, and go to the second round of the NCAA tournament Jim gets the offer to go to Ohio state and brings the whole staff with him.

And our first year was abominable. We won eight games. We were horrendous. But we, we laid a foundation of  discipline and expectations and developed a culture there. And, and we were lucky. We inherited a couple of good players and then we brought along from Boston College and somehow we went from eight wins to 27 in the Final Four in, in 99.

And I’m looking at it and I’m saying to myself I thought that game in Miami with Boston College would have been my last gasp. And here we are two years later coming off of an eight win season and make it all the way to the final four. So that was, that was a crazy year. And it was just one of these years, coaches talk about it on occasion where everything lines up perfectly.

And you get on a roll, you get on this train and it just keeps rolling. And we just had great kids and we fell into a style of play. And just I think we early on, we were like six and two or six and three. We lost at Toledo. We didn’t really know what we wanted. We expected, we hoped we’d be 500 that year and get to the NIT maybe.

That was our goal. And we end up just getting on this tier and  we end up we’re unbeknownst to us at the time, but  Michael Redd becomes an NBA player. Schooney’s an All American, probably the best point guard and as good as any point guard Ohio State’s ever had. And he NCAA tournaments, two with Boston College and two with Ohio State in his four years.

And then we had other great players. Kenny Johnson led the country in shot blocking. We had great role players. So that was a, that was a great run too. So I, like I said, I, I had a chance to do just about everything. And then I was head coach at William Mary. I left Ohio State and did that for a few years before going back to Ohio State a second time.

But but yeah, it was, I feel blessed with just all the opportunities I had, the, the confidence people had in me as athletic directors or school presidents and and just all the friends you meet Mike, over the, over the decades. I mean, the basketball fraternity that you, you get involved with, it’s, it’s been amazing.

[00:29:32] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. There’s nothing more special than that. And it’s just amazing again, how close knit the basketball community really is. That’s something that, I mean, I think I knew that before I started the podcast, Rick, but in all honesty, just, the connections that I’ve been able to make through this thing and then the number of people that know somebody that knows somebody that I know somebody.

And it’s just, it’s kind of incredible when you really start drawing the connections. Between people, how close knit the basketball community is, and kind of going along those lines. Talk a little bit about your relationship with coach O’Brien and what going from, okay, you get the job at BC and you guys are there and had that success and then take that, as you said, the entire staff to Ohio State.

So just talk a little bit about the, both the personal and the professional relationship that you had with coach O’Brien.

[00:30:20] Rick Boyages: Well, it was interesting in that our staff, we organized ourselves probably a little bit differently. I, I was one of the three full time assistants, but I was kind of the X and O guy.

So my role was game plans, practice plans, video breakdown strategic stuff. The other two guys weighed in on that, but they, they were on the road a lot recruiting. And at that time, Mike, only two of the three assistant coaches could recruit. One couldn’t. And I don’t know if you remember years back, there was they tried to restrict the earnings of one coach.

Yep. There was a limited earnings guy. Yep. Yeah. Cost cutting measure that was actually an antitrust violation. So for two years at Boston college, I think I made 16, 000 a year and I was the associate head coach. So what happened at case was it was interesting. What it took about three or four years.

That mean, but we finally got paid. We won the case. Which was a landmark antitrust win against the NCAA. And what was interesting about it was, what really swung things were the associate head coaches that didn’t recruit. So what happened when we got out in front of the jury, the case was out in Kansas City, and the jury was trying to understand how associate head coaches were being placed in this What was supposedly an entry level coaching position, the third assistant position.

And it was myself, Pete Gaudet at Duke, Jimmy Rossborough at Arizona, Norm Law at Pitt Bernie Fine at Syracuse. And the, the lawyers kept asking guy, these guys and myself about, well, what happens if the coach passed away or had a car accident or a bad flu? Who coaches the team? Well, we would probably for that, for that segment.

And they were like, wait a second. I thought this was a cost cutting measure for entry level coaches and that kind of swung the case real, real fairly quickly. But going back to Jimmy, I mean, the thing I tell people about Jim that they don’t even know, I always ask him, I said, do  who his two college coaches were at Boston College?

He was a standout four year player at Boston College. And they always go nah, who? And I tell them his first two years, Bob Cousy, and his second two years, Chuck Daly. And then he went to coach at UConn and he was kind of adopted by that, by the UConn guys that were prior to Calhoun it was before that era.

And D Ro was a legendary UConn coach. And Don Perno like they, he was just a genius basketball guy, a former point guard. Unbelievable basketball IQ. And again, like kept it pretty simple and had a real good feel for the players.  it was a really what people refer to player, player coaches Jimmy, Jimmy was that type.

And then the other thing I tell people about Jim, they didn’t realize he played in the ABA and he was with the Kentucky Colonels. And then, but when he was with the San Diego Conquistadors, he would tell me that the head coach was Will Chamberlain. Wilt, they were in San Diego, but Wilt still lived in Los Angeles and would like never be around for practice and fly in for games.

And it wouldn’t surprise me like Jimmy was coaching the team a lot of times so he had, he had unbelievable playing experience and knowledge. He played for great college coaches played in with amazing players in the a, BAI still I collected basketball cards when I was a kid. And I have a lot of ABA basketball cards and it’s amazing to see.

Go look back and see the guys and how that league merged a few teams into the NBA that Julie Serving and Marvin Barnes and all kinds of guys that you’d,  you’d laugh now looking at the their, their baseball playing cards. But Jim was an amazing X and O coach kept it simple, great relationship with players.

And so much of the season we were connected at the hip because we were doing a lot of strategic work together. And and that allowed the other guys to recruit and they were able to find us some great players. And we just had a great staff. We went together nine years, which is  somewhat rare.

And nine years when we had a lot of success, when we made it to NCAA tournaments and advanced deep in the field at both Boston College and Ohio State, and we went from last place to first place in both leagues. So we kind of learned how to do more with less. We tried a lot of junk over the years. We ran a lot of junk when we just couldn’t line up.

 initially for a player with other coaches, especially in the Big East or Big Ten when we first got there ran a lot of motion offense. Bobby Knight loved Jimmy. He would always compliment him that, hey, you guys play the right way.  always very, very complimentary. We actually had great success against Knights teams.

We beat them twice in the NCAA tournament at Boston college and then had pretty good success in the big 10. But but yeah, unbelievable coach. And I remember as a young coach, the last story I tell you is Jimmy had this feel where occasionally guys would show up and we’d be having a crappy practice.

They just mentally wouldn’t be ready and he would just say, that’s it. That’s it. We’re wrapping it up. That’s it for today. I don’t wanna see you go do whatever you’re gotta do. But like, God forbid you come in tomorrow with this mindset, ? And, and we might be two days before a game, Mike, and I’m like doing the SC report and I’m like, Obie, what the hell?

Like we gotta go at bounce place and.

Sure as hell, every, every time he did it, like we come back the next day and have a great practice, kids would be fresh. He just had a feel for, I think that there are times probably from his pro career, there were times when you just, you’re just tired or you mentally need to get away a little bit or take a break.

Or, and, and if you did try to force a practice under those circumstances, it was, it was unproductive, it might even be useless. And so as a young coach, I was always amazed. I was like, ah, we could never do that. We got to prep for this, ? And we always came back fresher and playing better, ?

So you just always had a good feel for the team and, and those types of things. I

[00:37:00] Mike Klinzing: think that feel for your team is one of the things that really good coaches do very well in terms of what they need at a given moment. And then you could take that and break that down even further when you start talking about.

feel for an individual player and what that player needs and wants. And I think good coaches are able to discern that and figure out, okay, hey, maybe here’s a day where we do need to send them home earlier. Maybe this kid needs a kick in the butt, or maybe this kid needs somebody to put their arm around them or whatever it may be.

And I think really good coaches have a feel for that because Again, they build relationships with their kids. And when you build relationships with your kids, that helps you to really understand it. And so talk a little bit about from, from your perspective, both, obviously your time as an assistant and also as a head coach, when you think about the relationships with your players, how did you go about building and strengthening those relationships over the course of your time with a particular player?

[00:37:58] Rick Boyages: Yeah. Well, before I do that, I’ll give you two other things that I think people would enjoy hearing about Jimmy. Sure. The first one I’d say is when we would play non conference games that they call guarantee games, you’re paying 000 for a team to come in and more often than not, it’s an ass kicking, but every once in a while, we would run into a team that was really well coached or had talent or a player.

And I can remember in those games, a lot of big time coaches. They, they get their ego up and they, they’re not gonna change. They’re like, how can we be losing this team? Just go out and play, play harder, blah, blah, blah. And Jimmy was the type that I remember we had a game from Ohio Estate . I think we were playing Ermine, I wanna say ermine.

I don’t know if that’s was true or not. I don’t even know if they would D two or D one at the time, but I think they, but they had a kid and he had transferred, I think from, from somewhere else. And the kid was destroying us, ? I mean, we couldn’t guard that’s, and he was gonna go for 40 . And we get in the huddle and Jim says, forget that.

Like we’re playing a box and one on , like the amount of big 10 coaches that would put a box and one on a low mid major player or something or a mid that he didn’t, that’s crazy. Like he had total respect for that. There were great coaches or good players, . And then the other thing was, I told you he kept it simple.

I remember playing, we’re playing at Wisconsin. And I don’t know if he was struggling or something, but he was always good at match ups. He was always watching match ups. So, Mike Redd’s playing opposite Schooney, and Schooney’s like 5’9 and Mike’s 6’6 So, we would occasionally, when the clock was down, we’d just go 1 4.

I don’t know why coaches don’t do this anymore. Like, just go 1 4, and give it the ball to your best player. and put shooters in the corners or and guys down at the short corner and see who runs up to double if if they’re going to try to help off a good player, . So he said we’re in a huddle in the call center and I, he says, Scoony, he goes go 1 4.

He’s like, Mike, you got a kid what was his name? Really good, like supposedly their best defensive player. He goes he’s guarding Mike. Scrooney, Mike will run up and, and just give a little dribble handoff and pick his man off. Force a switch. So, basically, he just, in a simple wrinkle, he’d get a, a, a, a 1 4.

Mike would come out of the corner of somewhere, come up to the ball, a little ball screen handoff. And we’d get the point guard on red. So now Mike six, six and a point guard from Wisconsin’s, I don’t know, maybe six feet, and he would just say, tell the guys, you go screw and he’d just go back to the corner where Mike came from, Mike, it’s one full flat, just back, back them down.

And he just back them down, back them down and paint scored on him like four times in a row and then I think it was Dick Bennett, ? Called timeout and he they had to run a double team at him or something But I mean this is what I was saying about my dad like how we learned to play early on Yeah, I just kept it so simple was like all we have to do is switch the smallest defender onto our best offensive player And then get the hell out of his way And we would do stuff like that all the time.

We play one three one and teams would always go two one two so we would put a guard on one of the wing spots And a big man in the back. Usually you put the, like a small guy in the back and he runs corner to corner. Yep. So the team would go two, one, two, and we would put a big man in the back. And one of the two wings then would be a guard, a smaller guard.

Well, if they threw from wing to corner on that side, we would X the guy through to the other side, and we would basically start playing a two, three zone. And what would happen is. What he would teach the kids how to, within one or two passes, basically match up to them perfectly. And in those days, it’s probably the same now, I mean, people run man to man offensive sets and zone sets.

And I remember definitively, we did it at Seton Hall one year at Boston College, some kind of junk, and the point guard would call a zone offense because he saw a zone and then within two passes we were playing man to man and then he would call a man to man set and then we’d go back to the zone again.

There was this cat and mouse and PJ Calisimo started screaming from the sideline, just play, like don’t run anything, just like, just move and cut. It’s like actually a bad defense but if you don’t stand still, . So I wanted to mention those because that kind of gets to the heart of Jim. And, and like I said, the best compliment you can get is that Knight thought, like, he was a great coach and, like, saw through it.

A guy that ran motion offense. And we would steal shit from Indiana back then we would run sets we’d run this thing pairs. Pairs meant, Scrooney has the ball in the middle third of the floor and we have a five and a three and a four and a two in the alleys and they just play by themselves.

They just screen, re screen, curl, pop, whatever. That was the offense, or. The point guard goes into the paint and runs a three man triangle offense with the four and five, and the two and three stay on the, in the alleys and move the ball. And that was the offense. And you would run a three man offense and, or reverse the ball the other side, and if you had your point guard, little scoony, and he’s screening bigs, fours and fives are laying on cross screens and down screens and back screens.

And it was just like simple basketball, but but you did have to work on the fundamental principles of learning how to curl a screen, fade a screen back screen and slip. Just the, the basic techniques for how to take advantage once you notice how you’re being defended. So that was

[00:44:17] Mike Klinzing: those were all What did that look like?

What did that look like in practice? What did that look like in practice to work on, again, those, those types of skills? How did you guys design your practices?

[00:44:26] Rick Boyages: Everything, Mike, was progressions.  you, like, we wouldn’t just practice a shell drill on defense. We’d start with one on one. Then we’d go to help and recover, two on two.

Then we’d go to three, weak side help. Then we’d go to four, and then in a four man box shell, then we’d turn it into a triangle. We’d work one two one. And then we would we would pass, just pass around the perimeter. Then we’d pass on the perimeter, and we’d say, Okay, you can cut. And we’d try to have our cutter’s face cut over the top.

And then we teach our kids to deny that and always make the cutter go behind. And then we would include durable penetration. So like, whether it was offense or defense, everything was built from one on one up to five on fives, and then same with concepts of motion offense. We’d play just three on three basketball.

We’d run a triangle offense with a point and two low post guys are off the lane. Then we’d invert it. We’d play with two guys on the perimeter and, and, and we would run things. We had an offense. We just back screen the passer. That’s all whoever passed the ball was going to receive a back screen from one, two, or three plants, usually two, and then that leaves you people to swing the ball to, to the other side.

Every single time it sounds simple, right? Every single time a player passes the ball, he’s going to receive backscreens from some other players, unselfishly on the team. And if you weren’t the player catching the pass, obviously you couldn’t screen. And, and the other two of the five players, passer, receiver of the pass, two guys would then screen the, the passer.

So there’s your fives.  so, and spacing, if you’re going to do that, you have to have great spacing. And the thing we did a lot was, we always tried to keep the ball in the middle third of the court. So there’s no strong side and weak side. The defense has to play both of those two man games or whatever your offenses are.

They can’t cheat and play 5 on 3 on 2, and load up on the weak side. And then because we did that, we would scout, I would scout teams, and we would sometimes switch at the 1, 2, 3, sometimes at the 1, 4, and sometimes all 5 positions depending on what offenses the other team was running. And if it wasn’t a good, a well run offense, strategically, We would just outnumber it we’d, we’d flood the weak side and just a lot of junk that probably came out of playing when we just weren’t as good.

And we’re trying to compete against great teams, .

[00:47:03] Mike Klinzing: It’s so interesting, just the changes in the game from time when I was playing, and even since I’ve been coaching, and obviously since you’ve been coaching in terms of when you talk about a Bob Knight style motion offense, right? You’re talking about.

Movement off the ball. You’re talking about screening off the ball, whereas now Almost all the screening action that takes place initially starts with a ball screen to get that scoony pen Michael red switch, right? That’s the whole idea of trying to get your offensive player to have an advantage when you, when you switch, but it’s just amazing how the game has evolved and changed from again, 15, 20 years ago, where you had the Bob Knight style of offense versus now, again, everything, like I said, starts off with a ball screen.

And it sounds like you guys were doing some of those things, even back in the day, again, not probably done at the same volume.

[00:48:00] Rick Boyages: Well it’s interesting. It drives me crazy. I watch games now and the star player on a team is being totally denied the ball or he gets doubled on every ball screen and he’s the best back screener out there.

Like they’re so glued to him. Why wouldn’t you have sets ready where he’s a back screener, right? Cause this man’s glued to him. So it’s really a double screen on every time he sets a a screen for a, a player to cut to the basket and the other thing I, I always say to coaches is why don’t you have backdoor plays ready you, you have you got I don’t know, a seven or eight point lead and it gets inside of four minutes.

So that’s some point. Their defense is playing it straight, but now they have to come after you.  or you just went on a 9 0 run, they call a timeout. They’re going to get real, real aggressive. Like, where’s that, where’s that sucker play that’s just so ready to be called?  just clearing a side and getting a backdoor layup.

Great coaches still do it, but I don’t, I don’t, it’s just like, again, it’s, You, you wonder what is the training ground for coaches coming up the ladder or are they, were they recruiters or I, in the NBA, no surprise, a lot of those guys that became good coaches were video guys. They came up through the video room, where I think is still to this day is the great training ground for being an X and O person whether it’s offense, defense, special situations, anything.

If you’re not breaking film down and stealing things from I mean, I laugh I was coaching the Czech national team back in 1987 through like 91. I’ve been over there a few times. When it was communist, they were one of the top five teams in the world in the Olympic ratings. And when I coached the team, we had three seven footers.

I mean, it was a great basketball team, but it was behind the iron curtain and crazy shit would happen. One day a guy got a bloody nose. They took him over to the training table, Mike, and laid him face down. And the trainer started karate chopping the back of his Achilles tendon. And I’m looking and I said to the interpreter, what the hell is he doing?

He says something to the trainer and he turns back to me and he goes, Pressure point. Pressure point. And all of a sudden the kid’s nose stops bleeding. And I’m like, holy shit. Like, cause you go over there thinking everything about basketball, the Americans are the greatest and they’re doing deep, they’re doing double sessions with deep tissue massage.

There’s no ice. There’s, you can’t even find an ice cube in the country.  they, they drink beer and it’s cool, but it’s not, they don’t like ice cold things, ? So you’d learn things like that. But the reason I brought it up is We were playing in a tournament in Sweden. It was the Czech national team, the Swedish national team, the Polish national team and Kansas state university.

And guess who the coach at Kansas state is. This would have been 19, I don’t know, 1987. Oh man. So are we talking Mitch Richmond was there? He’s still coaching a great division one program today.

[00:51:20] Mike Klinzing: And I’m trying to, I’m trying to think who would have been there.

[00:51:23] Rick Boyages: No one ever gets, it was Dana Alton.

[00:51:26] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:27] Rick Boyages: Yeah. Dan is the young coach, head coach at Kansas State, and we’re running a set that I’d never, like, the Czechs taught me the offensive set, and we score three three point shots on the, on the first three possessions of the game. It’s nine to nothing. And it was like a reverse action thing where you swing the ball one way, say right to left.

And then you, you, the low post center was a giant seven footer. He comes up and sets a flare screen for a three point shot, but he bananas out in such an angle, wide, that the defender on the ball has been trained to jump to the basketball. So on the pass, in that middle third of the court, he jumps to the ball.

And every time he jumps the ball, we had cleared out the backside and the five man comes up and and runs a flare screen for a three point shot. So this little guard on Kansas State gets annihilated by a blind back screen side side flare screen on the first three possessions. And we’d been running in practice, but we were running against each other.

So they knew, they knew the set. So I’m watching from the sideline and it’s 3 0, 6 0, 9 0, and Dana’s screaming at the kid, Get over the screen! And the kid screams back at Dana and he goes, I’m jumping to the ball. Like you taught me to jump. And now you want me to go opposite? Like I’m supposed to, the guy, my man passes it to the left and I’m supposed to go to the right?

Like that, we don’t do that. And so I was like, holy shit. Like, I think we could make an offense out of it. So I bring it back to Boston college and we put it in and then we add, we build off of it. And we create an entire offense around this. Which was initially was like a secondary break. We would run it as a secondary break and we called it Czech.

So for years we call it Czech and the players when I see him 25, 30 years later at Boston college or Ohio state, they still think it’s C H E C K Czech, like that was his favorite. And I’m like, I tell him the story now, 20 years, 25 years later. I’m like, guys,  why we call that Czech? I said, cause that was stolen from the Czech national team.

It was actually C E C A. But but again, like there’s no original there’s very few original offenses or defenses or and being a video guy or, or being tasked with trying to come up with game plans and practice plans and drills. The other thing we did was we never took practice shooting drills in spots on the floor that weren’t part of our offensive sets.

So, So that the footwork, like on that situation where you would flare to a three point on the weak side, you would repeat the footwork so often that you were used to catching the ball up near your shoulder as you were moving left to right, catching and then grounding yourself and going up into the shot or, or driving from that position or whatever, .

So I don’t see that as much too when I go watch shoot arounds.  for, for 12 years I ran basketball in the Big Ten. So I was, I’m at games three, four days a week. I’m at practices. And a lot of times I watch the shoot arounds and I don’t see them utilizing the same spots on the floor where they actually get the shots in the game or the exact footwork that they use in their set offense, which always kind of amazes me too, .

[00:54:54] Mike Klinzing: It’s interesting when you start thinking about just the evolution of players working on their game and then coaches coaching that within the confines of their practice or a shoot around. And I think that one thing that players definitely have done over the course of time has become more skilled. You look at the shooting that you see in the game today.

I mean, I’m talking at all levels, but back, you go back 15 or 20 years ago and maybe every team had one or two guys that could shoot it. And now every team has maybe one or two guys that can’t shoot it. And again, it’s all to varying degrees, but I would definitely say the skill level in terms of the shooting in basketball at all levels has improved.

dramatically. And I think part of that is there’s some, you can get good coaching when you’re a kid and you can get bad coaching when you’re a kid, depending upon where you’re at and who’s giving you that coaching. But I think for the most part, when you look at the way kids shoot the ball, you see very little variance anymore.

When you think back to guys that played professionally, you were talking about the ABA, but you think about guys from that era and the way that Jamal Wilkes, world be free. Even Bird, the way they shot the ball, Magic, the way they shot the ball is not the way that you would, if you were going to design a textbook jump shot, those aren’t the guys that you would look at.

And yet they were all very, very good shooters. Whereas today you look at most kids shoot the ball sort of the same way within their own physiology. So it’s just interesting, the evolution of the game and how much better the shooting has become over time.

[00:56:33] Rick Boyages: No, it’s a really good point. Like in bringing up Europe, I mean, when we, in the seventies, eighties.

90s, we thought of European basketball that way because they just played in the gym all the time. And they drilled and they drilled and they drilled. And in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, we played in playgrounds. We played outside. Like the Americans were known as one on one, like I told you, we played hours and hours and hours of one on one basketball.

Yeah, it was, it was like improvised jazz it was much more like Free flowing and we didn’t probably run a lot of set plays or things like a ton of that stuff. And now it’s kind of flipped where, because of the AAU system and the club system and kids playing year round, they’re probably in gyms all the time where the conditions that you can just shoot and shoot and shoot, and they have the gun and different tools like that.

But yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of interesting now. I agree that there was. Even like Mike Redd. I give Mike so much credit. Mike was not a good three point shooter in college. And he had this quirky, like, he brought his left elbow way up. And he had like a slingshot. And what was lucky for Mike was, he was drafted by the Bucs.

And he ended up kind of behind Ray Allen or under Ray’s wing. And I think he learned just how to practice. And shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot in the repetition because for us he was an unbelievable slasher and maybe the best player I ever coached in using the backboard. Mike had an uncanny knack of using the backboard and but he really deserves all the credit for making himself a three point shooter at the NBA level because he would make some threes in college but that really wasn’t his game and we were taking advantage of the fact that he was 6’6 It could get down in a low stance and handle a ball and cross it over and spin dribble and, and slash and get to the glass and use the glass.

But yeah, it was kind of interesting to think about. I say this a lot of times, even with NIL, it’s almost as if the American system is moving more towards the professional club system of Europe, the way it was when we knew it. None of those guys played in the school system. They went to school and at two o’clock they went to the local sports club.

And that’s where they got their training and they played in their youth games and then they played other sport clubs in cities across Europe and things. But it’s almost like we’ve moved into that direction now. Like we pay players they’re playing indoor basketball 12 months a year. They don’t play outside anymore.

I mean, a lot of communities you can’t even find outdoor courts or people don’t use them a whole lot. So it’s just different how the game evolves, like you said.

[00:59:23] Mike Klinzing: Let’s talk a little bit about the NIL piece of it. And I’m assuming that you’ve talked to a lot of people in the game since NIL has come on board.

And so I’m just curious to get, A, your thoughts and B, just some of the feedback that you’ve gotten from some of the people that you’ve had the opportunity to interact with over time. Just where are we with NIL and where do you think it’s headed?

[00:59:46] Rick Boyages: Well, it’s funny We talked about Jim O’Brien, but I also worked with another legendary Jim, Jim Delaney.

And I think in my 12 years at the Big Ten  we, Jim basically invented it the Big Ten network and college television network. And since, since he did it, everybody’s kind of copied, the other power conferences have copied it. But he, he was revolutionary that way.

And I think he realized about a decade ago that, We were losing the argue, the amateur argument we, the big 10 had money to pay players. Initially it was what they call cost of attendance, which is all athletes were looking for at that time was just some spending money. The scholarship covered room and board board.

tuition books and fees. But that was it. So if you wanted to go out for pizza or go to the movies or go out with a girlfriend or,  buddies or have your parents come visit or come to some games or go home a couple times, they really didn’t have the pock loose change.  at Ohio State, we were lucky.

A lot of our kids lived off campus. And they pocketed the stipend money for what was that, that room charge. Yeah. For the dormitory. But cause in Columbus, three or four of them could live for for so inexpensive of a, of a rent, a monthly rent charge, they’d end up with 500 bucks in their pocket every month.

But at Boston College, you couldn’t afford to get an apartment somewhere in Boston. You had to be in the dorm, . Right, right. But but I think Jim sensed it and the real problem was that the NCA got, even to this day, it’s too big and it’s too immobile. And it’s too laden with committees and bureaucracy and they can’t, they couldn’t nimbly move in any way at any time.

And then they were belligerent in the ways they demanded, no, this is how we’ve always done it, or this is how it’s going to go. And and so Jim’s argument, I think he recruited Mike Sly from the SEC and they got together and they, they basically went to the membership and were threatening to almost break off.

If we didn’t change the voting structure, because the way the NCAA was set up, Mike, every school had one vote. So if there were 350 schools in Division I, can you imagine  I don’t know  North Carolina A& T has the same vote that Ohio State University has with 50, 000 students.

 so coaches were starting to bounce around, get million dollar contracts, and they had freedom of movement. And then we were putting millions into Taj Mahal of athletic facilities and the kids weren’t getting anything. I mean, they got a, they might’ve got a multi hundred, multi,  not million dollar, but maybe two to three to 400, 000 education paid for.

Wasn’t like it wasn’t worth anything, but there wasn’t that trickle down. And as the network television money grew, We needed to pay the players. The problem is we probably lost a decade. And so finally we did get permissible voting through for the, it was power five at that time, and we got in cost of attendance and they used to, they used a formula for it.

So maybe the, the top division one athletes were getting five to 8, 000. And if they were doing it in the mid American, they could do nothing or they could do 800 or 1, 500, but they didn’t have to match the big 10. But we still, we lost kind of the public sentiment as to what the kids should get as a piece of all this growth and development and  obviously the, the money and so that was kind of the start of it and now they give even some money, some Alston money for academic performance.

But we just lost a lot of ground. We lost 10 or 15 years where people now all of a sudden weren’t even talking about the value of an education and what a four year degree is worth and how it impacts you over the next 50 years of your life in earnings and things. And the other funny thing is when those kids wanted to work the NCA is telling them you can’t have any job, nothing,

[01:03:59] Mike Klinzing: you can’t

[01:04:00] Rick Boyages: for a kid in basketball, you can’t run a camp.

But really what they want to do. They wanted to be influencers. It was all social media. They were like you mean you get paid if you have 50, 000 followers that that you get a checker that’s really what they wanted to do. They didn’t want to, I mean, occasionally someone would write a children’s book or, or, or  they could have autograph signings or things like that, but I can remember Mike they were selling Ohio state uniforms in the, in the gift shop or the bookstore that’s at the Schonstein Center.

And Scoony came up to me. And this probably would have been 98, 99, 2000. And he goes, coach, I know my name’s not on the jersey, but they’re selling, that’s my jersey with my number on it. Nike knows, like, they’re either going to want to, kids are going to wear my number, a Mike’s Red’s number, and we don’t get anything from that.

And I, and I was like, That’s a pretty good question, Scooney. I really don’t have an answer for you and then you you fast forward 15 years, 18 years, and you see how, how we got to this place.  I think, I like to think that if we could have got them four or five, 6, 000 cash in, in with everything else, we could have stayed on track.

I mean, at some point the, the, the network television contracts are so immense now, you, you probably couldn’t have held it back. But you could have stemmed the tide a little bit as far as appreciating what an education means. Because now a lot of the kids are transferring to two, three, four places, and for the right reasons, they can immediately play.

They don’t have to sit out a year academically anymore. But Jim would, Jim Delaney would reflect back when he played for North Carolina, and they freshmen were ineligible. So. It’s just amazing how things evolve over time and a lot of it’s technology and usually it’s, it’s changed for the better.

But people do get nostalgic for,  a low post back to the basket center. They do get nostalgic for Mikhail or Elijah one every once in a while.

[01:06:10] Mike Klinzing: See somebody with some post moves, right? I understand. There’s no doubt about that. Yeah. The, the NIL landscape is so interesting to me. I look at it and I’m, I try to go and go back and picture myself and what that would’ve looked like in terms of money and just like I, you, you mentioned about the guys at Ohio State, sort of skimming off the top of the, of their, of their rent payments and I can remember.

Living off campus my two year, two years and being able to save some of that money. I remember getting, I get 300 bucks every year during Christmas break. And I would try to make that I’d, I’d save 150 bucks and every year I’d try to get myself a pair of buy a pair of shoes over Christmas break for myself.

And, and I think about how, again, how excited myself and my teammates were to have that, whatever, a hundred bucks or 150 bucks and, and then trying to think about what it’s like now, where. Guys are getting in again. We’re talking about different levels of money, depending on what the level of the school is, obviously.

I mean, if I would have been playing at Kent and somebody would have given me 5, 000 for a season, I mean, that would have been unbelievable, Rick. I mean, I, I couldn’t even try, try to even fathom that is crazy. And then you hear the stories about guys that, and we’re not even talking about giant schools, but guys who are getting, I mean, real money, real money in terms of what  what, what, what you can do with it.

And so, It’s to navigate that as a player, as a kid who’s 18, 19 years old, and then as a coach to try to help those kids to navigate it, but then also to navigate it yourself and then throw the portal on top of it, where if I’m not getting what I want at school X, then I can go and make that bargain at school Y.

It’s really a challenging landscape. And yet I still go back to, and I think you made the same point, that when I think about this whole thing in totality as a landscape, When you think about the fact that in the past coaches could take a job, recruit a kid, get a better offer, leave, immediately go and coach, have that bigger salary.

Now the kid who was recruited there by that school, by that coach, suddenly that kid, if that kid wants to leave, has to sit out a year. And so the system was inherently unfair to players. And I think you made a great point about the runway of, it went, it went from zero to 60. In such a short period of time.

Whereas if it had that 10 year run up,

[01:08:38] Rick Boyages: yeah,

[01:08:39] Mike Klinzing: probably could have been figured out in a much more organized fashion, as opposed to sort of a wild West that we have right now, if that makes any sense.

[01:08:47] Rick Boyages: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. And even, even the role of this, I mean, we still don’t have any federal legislation, so that states have different laws.

 they’re finally kind of getting there. It’s almost like the IRS has threatened the collectives that you’re not nonprofit. So if donors want to contribute, they can’t write that off, . But there’s still going to be a lot of litigation ahead. It’s going to take another, I don’t know. I really think it’ll take six to 10 years to sort it all out.

No one’s. We don’t know the impact of Title IX as they start to distribute this revenue. We don’t know the impact on Olympic sports. It’ll be interesting to see just how it shakes out, whether the conferences keep expanding.  football will be the kind of the experiment. I think they’re they’re not really aligned with the NCAA as far as the CFP.

And they’ll, they can break off into their own federation at some point. and decide how big they want to be or how much you have to pony up to be part of that club. And depending on the success or growth of that sport, basketball would probably be watching. And then it’ll be interesting to see if, if that would be something that, that sport would then take some lessons from what they see football do and see how that might work.

But yeah, it’s it’s just really been interesting to follow all that.

[01:10:07] Mike Klinzing: All right, let’s switch gears and talk a little officiating because for years, You were in charge of basketball officiating in the Big Ten. Just tell me a little bit about that experience and what you learned about officiating during your time overseeing the Big Ten officials.

[01:10:26] Rick Boyages: Well, when I was associate commissioner for the Mid American Conference every league typically has a coordinator of officials. So I worked with a guy named Sam Licklider. He was an older ex Big Ten ref.  as a basketball coach for 25 years,  what a good call is and a bad call.

But I didn’t know any of the mechanics, what we call mechanics of officiating. I mean, I knew there were three guys. I didn’t know how they rotate positions. I didn’t know the coverages. I just knew if it was a blown call or a great call or if you confirm with a video of whether the ball hit the backboard first or it was a clean block, I mean, those types of things.

And so sitting next to Sam at games and asking questions and watching video, it was like anything. It was just retraining yourself. In my years at, say, the Ohio State program, I’d have student managers cutting film for me and different staff and they’d always say, Rick, how do you see all 10 players moving it?

Like, because I’d be like, freeze it. You see this guy over here? And they’re like, how do you see that? And I’m like, I don’t know. And I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just training. And it was, so it was that type of adjustment I had to make where I was also seeing three refs now and where they were positioned and how they rotated or didn’t rotate or when they were in good position to see a play.

or teaching them how to anticipate those things. So first I had to kind of learn the mechanics. I understood play calling. No coach is very good on the rules, so you really have to get in the rule book and study it and ask a lot of questions. So I’ve learned a lot the first couple of years at the mid American.

And then. When I got to the big 10, Jim actually asked me to do both. He wanted to rebuild. We had aging, we had seven or eight like aging big 10 officials that were kind of legendary. You’d see him on all the games for a couple of decades. And, but they were all slowing down and immobile and kind of past their prime, but we didn’t have any feeder system.

So again, Jim was an unbelievable visionary. He basically created an LLC for us. So we basically started an outside business that I was the executive director of. It was called the Collegiate Officiating Consortium. And we recruited other commissioners leagues in with us. So basically it was two things, Mike.

It was one that we would be a better take better use of the finances of the low mid majors if we teamed up with them. And then the other thing that I would do is I would on off nights share some of the top officials in America down as crew chiefs in those leagues. And then we would also create a whole, basically, identification, training, development, and performance assessment program.

So we built this whole entire operation. At its height, we were managing 65 Division I schools in like 22 states. And we were overseeing all the officiating. We were basically using the low mid major as a feeder system up to the big 10. But we also had journeymen refs that would have, for whatever reason, had years of experience, but had never kind of cracked through to the power conference level, but were great low mid major refs and could be creed chiefs, crew chiefs, or we would take kind of officials at the big 10 level of the power conference level that should probably be getting less games.

and supplementing their decreasing assignments with increases in the max summit horizon metro atlantic america east forever and basically i would say to them there’s an exit ramp for you to keep reffing but it’s going to go in the opposite direction now and it’s going to involve mentoring you’re also going to become a coach if your ego is such that You can’t take going from 25 Big Ten games this year to 15 next year, then you need to, you’re going to need to retire or we just won’t, they’re all independent contractors.

So it’s, we can decide whether to offer them a contract or not, ? Right. So it’s kind of that whole process. And over a decade, I mean, one of the things I’m most proud of is we put 20 referees into their first NCAA tournament. Meaning they had to start somewhere in division one, and they usually start in D2 and D3 and move up.

But to get a referee, like to break into the NCAA tournament, as long as they stay healthy and have a great attitude and continue to work more often than not, a very, very high percentage of them are right in the NCAA tournament the next year and the next year. So if you can develop a referee by the time he’s 35 or 38 and get him into the NCAA tournament, you may have an NCAA tournament ref for the next 20 years.

And we did that with 20 young officials in the Big Ten. And then they would also still like go back into the leagues where they cut their teeth.  the challenges are that you have to, you have to watch them and you have to grade them out every game. And you have to do tons of video breakdown and analysis to really get a handle on who who’s qualified or not, who’s ready.

And then you have to bring it along slowly. No, I would, I would take a young ref and give them five or six non conference games and some of those guarantee games. I protect them with a couple of veterans because the coaches will always come at you as like, who the hell is this guy? I never seen him before and on occasion it gets comical.

I remember I had a young, I had a young ref Tyler Ford who was breaking into division one, but also in the NBA training ground and they were really high on him and I put him on a game at Michigan state. And Tom ended up losing actually to Texas Southern. And it wasn’t close. It was like eight points or something.

It wasn’t a buzzer beat or one of those. And we talked the next day and we were just talking about plays. And  Tom was obviously not happy with losing to Texas Southern and probably handed him a check on their way out the door. But he was like, and who is the young kid? And I was like, well, it’s Tyler Ford.

I’m trying, I’m trying to break him into the big 10, but. He goes, well, where’s he work? I go, well, just to give an example, Tom, last year, he worked in the MAAC, in the summer, in the Horizon, he did, like, 28 Division I games, and then he worked in the G League, he did 32 games in the G League, and he did 4 NBA games, and there’s a quiet pause, and all of a sudden, Tom goes, get the F out of here.

And I’m like, you gotta trust me a little bit. Like I’m charged with developing the next generation of refs and he’s really good. But to be honest, we’re going to lose him to the NBA. And sure enough, the next season he was in the NBA and I don’t know, it’s probably, it’s probably been six or eight years.

He’s worked deep into the NBA playoffs now,  he’s from, he’s an Indiana kid. He worked in the, he ran intramural sports at Purdue. Which was the other thing I had to tell Tom. I was like, Tom, he can never do produce games ever. Cause he works at Purdue, ? And I have to be careful. Like he hasn’t advanced to the point where he’d even be on big, big 10 games late, cause I would have to scrutinize.

 what people would say if a Purdue employee was working a big game between Michigan State and Wisconsin.  so that’s the other thing behind the scenes as always. We have strict conference conflict of interest rules. We have rules on policies and procedures on how early they get to get to the to the venues.

All the reporting they have to, they’re required to watch video. So much goes on behind the scenes, but It was kind of a neat concept of regionalizing, officiating. And really what happened was Tom Jim Delaney went to some meetings where 31 referees 31 coordinators officials were representing 31 conferences and Jim was like, we can never get 31 guys on the same page for what’s good for the game.

And Jim had done a huge study back when the scoring got down into the fifties, Mike. And he was like, this is not good for the game. And he took it upon himself. He, he created a competition committee and he looked at 50 years of college basketball, and he basically came to the realization that the defense has way too much of a advantage and the games are way too physical and, and we had to make a real philosophical change nationally to open up the games and, and start to call fouls for hand checking and body bumping and plays off the ball and  really deal with the physicality of the game.

So that was, that was kind of an interesting part of my job.

[01:19:07] Mike Klinzing: So you’re developing a young guy and you’re looking at somebody that you’re bringing in and you’re interacting with them, what were some of the intangible qualities of a good official?

[01:19:20] Rick Boyages: Well, first of all, they have to have like all those mechanics down.

So all the positioning and signaling and rotations and being in the right spot to see plays. is first and foremost, but then as they work, you start to get an analysis of their judgment. And I would tell them it’s like having a college degree. Now you’re starting on your master’s, but these guys that have been veterans working the Big Ten or the ACC or any of the power conferences, they’ve got like PhDs.

Not only do they do all these things from a fundamental level. But now they understand the nuance of the game.  they match plays up at each end. If there’s a an over the back file here and there’s one slightly over the back, they’ll, they’ll try to match it up or there’s a lot of nuance in it that kind of falls into this judgment category.

And you’ll see other officials sometimes just don’t have a feel for it. It’s like a call that doesn’t fit the game kind of that stuff. So it’s really, it’s really interesting is really both an art and a science to it. And then as they progress, then it’s a question of talking to coaches. One of the hardest things to teach young officials is to go to a coach.

And especially if he’s reasonable and he wants an explanation or being honest that you missed it, or you didn’t have a good look at it, or you wish you had it back the worst thing you can say is, no, no, I was right. Cause they’re going to go in at halftime and look at the video.  there’s so much technology now.

Or it’s going to be on social media. Someone’s going to take a screenshot and post it on X so that’s a, that’s kind of a big developmental thing. And then obviously dealing with the pressure. I mean, it’s interesting, the big 10 now because of Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC, they’re bringing in West coast reps in the big 10 games.

But what happens initially is they’re bringing in guys that the majority of the league the coaches have never seen before. Right. And I do think that, that there’s difference in styles of play as much as we want to rough this, the whole country the same way there’s, there can be a physicality difference or a style play difference, but even more than that, in the big 10, the big 10 has led the country in attendance.

For like 45 consecutive years. So I was just noticing the other day, they had 6, 000 in Oregon. I mean, 6, 000 in the big 10 is like half empty everywhere.  you don’t see it. I mean, it’s even bloodthirsty at Rutgers and at Nebraska sold out arenas. So there’s pressure that comes with that in every game in the big 10 is nationally televised.

So there’s no, there’s scrutiny everywhere and millions of people are watching the games and you have to. Be able to deal with all that pressure night after night after night. So those are kind of the, the hurdles that even great young rafts have to kind of get over.

[01:22:25] Mike Klinzing: Well, that makes a lot of sense.

I mean, I think, right, the ability to. Have confidence in yourself. First, you have to have, as you said, the mechanics down and be able to have that feel and then to be able to have the confidence to A, back up your call, but B, be able to admit when you make a mistake. Sort of like just about, just about anything in life.

Probably that’s a, that’s a, that’s probably an apt description of just about anything. All right, we’re coming up on an hour and a half, Rick. I want to ask you one final two part question. So part one, When you look ahead over the next year and you think kind of about what you’re doing, where you’re at, what you’ve done, what do you see as being your biggest challenge?

And then the second part of the question is when you think about what you’ve gotten to do in your career, what you’re going to do, what brings you the most joy? So your biggest challenge and your biggest joy.

[01:23:14] Rick Boyages: Well, I think the challenge for me now I’ve shifted a little bit. I do some consulting. I’m working with some tech firms.

I still, I do some kind of quiet basketball. Analysis for coaches behind the scenes here and there. Sometimes a lot of these guys, even some of the great coaches, they just want some feedback from someone outside of the program, usually acknowledge what they’re seeing is accurate. Or to kind of bounce a couple new ideas off of them.

But this year I joined the faculty at Denison University, so I’m I’ll be teaching a leadership theory class in the spring. I think the challenge for me right now is that 62, in working with young college people, can I still be like, can I be relevant generationally? I’m, I’m not the greatest on technology.

I mean, I mean, I lived for years in a video room and video editing and some of that tech, but AI and things like that that’s, that’s new to our generation. And we’re trying to figure out Excel spreadsheets and some, some basic stuff like me trying to get on this program on my left.

I lucky I’ve got three daughters that are all relatively recent college grads. So they, they helped me out a little bit. But I think it’s just that, like they basically hired me to, as a practitioner in the, in the sports industry, to go onto campus that’s laden with professors with PhDs and try to give the students some real life advice about networking, interviewing the grit you need to, after you hear no dozens of times to keep kind of plugging that, trying to find that at least the first internship or the first job, or, so it’ll be interesting to see, .

As my experience on campus  how, how can I give them some lessons, but, but still try to be relevant to what they deal with in the here and now for what they all face. And post COVID, it’s a very different, it’s a lot of things there’s a lot of mental health issues and a lot of things going on.

So I think that’s, that’s probably the challenge. And, and at the same time, I get a, A great sense of benefit from just, again, like giving back. At this stage of my career, I’ve done just about everything I feel like.  there’s certainly things I regret or things I would have liked to have done, but when I look back overall from the standpoint of 40 years in basketball  I’ve coached at different levels.

I’ve, I’ve experienced horrible seasons and championships and a Final Four and multiple NCAA appearances. I’ve, I’ve been on the administrative side where I’ve, I’m looking at officiating or the, I’m the liaison to head coaches, advocating for coaches and rule changes. And the way they select teams for the tournament.

All, all kinds of things. I’ve coached internationally. So. Basketball’s been unbelievable to me and continues to be. I’m going to do some work in Athens in April at a camp overseas but it’s time to give back. It’s time to kind of share a lot of the stories that we got to talk about and I really appreciate being able to reminisce and tell some of those stories or to try to get people to understand how good a coach Jimmy O’Brien was or what an amazing,  visionary Jim Delaney was with regard to the Big Ten, the commissioner for over 30, 30 years.

And so so yeah, so I, I think that’s probably the best answer to your question.

[01:26:33] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. That’s very well said. Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share. How can people reach out to you, get in touch with you, whether you want to share email, whatever, whatever you feel comfortable with.

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

[01:26:47] Rick Boyages: Yeah. These days probably the best is just LinkedIn,  just trying to connect through LinkedIn. And then depending on what people are interested in chatting about or whatever see how it goes from there to either then to share phone numbers or email addresses.

But I think most people are on LinkedIn these days or know what it is. The other thing is, you can probably find me just through Denison University right now, or just like us word of mouth exactly. I know I told you, I’ve got. You always said you want a couple of recommendations too of people to have on the program.

And I think I got a couple of people that you’d really enjoy talking to.

[01:27:27] Mike Klinzing: There we go. Well, shout outs to my daughter Meredith who connected us. So again, Rick, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight. Really, really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on our next episode. Thanks.