Ex-Pitzer Cage Coach Taking Shot at Pros

For the last nine years, 39-year-old Gregg Popovich says he has been perfectly content as the men’s basketball coach of the NCAA Division III program at Pomona-Pitzer in Claremont.

So Popovich wasn’t exactly in the market for a higher coaching position.

But when he received a phone call in June from Larry Brown, coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs who guided the University of Kansas to the NCAA title last year, Popovich wasn’t about to hang up.

They had developed a friendship when Popovich spent his sabbatical leave from Pomona-Pitzer as a volunteer assistant at Kansas during the 1986-87 season.

To Popovich’s astonishment, Brown asked him if he was interested in becoming an assistant coach with the Spurs. The position had become available after assistant Lee Rose left San Antonio to accept a similar position with the New Jersey Nets.

Popovich said he spoke with Brown three times before leaving with University of San Diego Coach Hank Egan for a coaching clinic in Japan. He returned and took the job.

Popovich said it is an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

“Becoming a pro coach wasn’t something I ever thought of,” Popovich said. “It was right out of the blue. I’m also giving up a lot here (at Pomona-Pitzer), but this is such an intriguing challenge . . . that I felt I had to give it a try.”

“Obviously this is a quantum leap from the NCAA Division III to the pros,” he said. “There were probably 5,000 people who would have wanted the job and 50 other people he (Brown) knows whom he could have asked. But he asked me. So to get offered the job is quite flattering.

“It’s a pretty big leap and I’m delighted, but at the same time I’m scared to death.”

Popovich acknowledges that his rapport with Brown was probably the biggest factor in his receiving the offer.

Popovich said it was during his sabbatical that he probably learned the most about coaching basketball.

He had spent the first part of the 1986-87 school year watching Coach Dean Smith run his North Carolina squad through preseason drills before joining Brown’s staff as a volunteer assistant at Kansas.

“We got to know each other and I learned a lot about basketball,” he said. “The thing I learned most was the way they approach the game at the different levels. It’s the same game at any level. It’s just the way they approach it that’s different.”

What Popovich also found was that Brown and he had a similar coaching philosophy.

“He has a heavy emphasis on teaching his players,” Popovich said. “He teaches a lot during his practices, and that’s the way I like to coach. In Division III we spend a lot of time teaching. So we clicked to the point where he felt comfortable with me.”

The experience led Brown to invite Popovich and his team to play the Jayhawks in a non-conference game in Lawrence last December.

Little did Popovich suspect at the time that his next meeting with Brown would be as an assistant coach with the Spurs.

Not that he doesn’t have a lot of experience as a coach.

“It’s not like I just started coaching,” Popovich said. “I’m 39 and I’ve been coaching colleges for 15 years.”

He spent his first six seasons as an assistant at the Air Force Academy, a Division I program, before moving to Pomona-Pitzer. Popovich enjoyed his most successful season in 1985-86 when he guided the Sagehens to their first conference championship in 68 years.

Popovich, who will be Brown’s top bench assistant and coach at practices, joins a staff at San Antonio that includes Ed Manning, R. C. Buford and Alvin Gentry--all assistants to Brown at Kansas. He will play an integral role in Brown’s coaching scheme, although he downplays his function.

“I’m not his right-hand man, but I will be the guy who travels with the team and sits on the bench,” Popovich said.

“Sometimes I think he doesn’t need a lot of help from his assistants, but he’s the kind of coach that likes to involve all of his assistants. Everybody has input with him and we’re all going to participate in the process.”

Maybe so, but Brown has already entrusted Popovich with some not-so-minor responsibilities. Popovich has been coaching the team during the summer pro league season that runs through Sunday at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester.

It was not an easy transition.

“I think I was nervous more than anything at first because I didn’t know these players and suddenly, boom, I’m the coach,” Popovich said. “I just had to go slowly and take it a little at a time.

“I was a little nervous because it was a new situation, but I never felt intimidated because they are young athletes. They’re just a little more talented than the players I was used to coaching.”

He also was wary at first because of other differences between coaching at a Division III school and the NBA.

“At this level (Pomona-Pitzer), the main priority is not to become a pro,” he said. “Here the growth academically and as a person are the goals you’re trying to reach. It’s sort of the extreme opposite of that at the pro level, where we’re looking for growth along athletic terms. It’s also more of a business at the pro level. You can spend more of your time teaching, but at the same time you can’t ignore the business aspects.”

It’s the business aspect that Popovich said he has yet to grasp.

“That side is kind of new to me,” he said. “How you acquire players, let them go and how you draft players are things I haven’t had to deal with at Pomona-Pitzer. But fortunately, Larry is skilled on those matters so I should be able to learn as I go along.”

As for coaching in the pros, Popovich said he is starting to learn. “I’ve made a lot of errors that I wouldn’t normally make because I wasn’t familiar with the differences between here (Pomona-Pitzer) and the pros. . . .

“But I’m learning every game, every practice, every second. It’s a scary time to learn, but I spend my spare time reading the rule book and seeing how the other teams are playing. I’m just trying to take in as much as I can.

“There’s a whole lot of things I haven’t learned, but I guess Coach Brown thought it was the best way to learn, under fire. It’s a great opportunity to spend time there (at the summer league). Hopefully, this will make it easier when we get together in October (for training camp).”

Until then, Popovich said there will be a lot of adjustments to make. The first will come next week when he moves, along with his wife and two children, from Claremont to San Antonio.

There is also the stronger commitment that basketball will have in his life. “At Pomona-Pitzer I did a lot of things besides coaching basketball,” he said. “Now I’m going to be a 100% basketball coach. That’s going to be a challenge.”

But it is a challenge that Popovich is ready to face.

After all, it is not every day that a Division III coach gets an opportunity to coach in the NBA.