Part 2 | The Professor-Coach
I recently spoke with Professor Scott Brooks, Director of Research at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, about his childhood, his athletics coaching, research interests, and more. Check out part 2 (of 5) of my interview with Dr. Brooks.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
You had a non-perfect experience as a player, so what drew you to coaching?
Coaching for me started as a community service project to get community service hours at high school. It wasn't a plan. My buddy and I were trying to figure out what we were going to do, and they needed a coach for these third grade girls. We did it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was amazing when we scored our first and probably only bucket of the season and the whole game had to stop because we were celebrating so much. That’s how much fun it was.
The benefit I had was that my high school coach, even though we didn't get along, was one of the winningest coaches in California state history at over 500 wins. We ran plays – even our fast break was a play. You weren't really allowed just to go do a layup. You better really have it. And you better not mess anything up. If you tried to dunk and miss, you were sitting the bench probably the rest of the game. So he had full control, but he taught us fundamentals for sure. That was emphasized. So I could teach the fundamentals. And it was about being organized and people playing a role. That was something that I got behind and implemented right away.
After that, I started coaching again during my junior year of college at Cal Berkeley. I went back to my high school and I talked to somebody from my high school who was coaching – another former player who was now assistant coaching. And he said our coach had asked about me and asked what I was doing this summer. I was like, “Really? I don’t know, why?” I'm like real skeptical. I didn't want to go talk to my old coach. I had quit. I didn't care about him. So he's like, "Coach Phelps said that he would like you to help out coaching." And I'm thinking that's weird, but on the other hand, I knew he realized he had messed up something with me as a player. I’d like to believe that it was because I contributed so much and we didn't get as far as we could cause Scott Brooks quit. That's not the case. I could've contributed for sure, but I was not that key guy like that.
I go back to go to coach, but I never let him talk to me about what went down. He offered to take me to camp and we went to an Adidas camp in Tahoe. It was in the summer of 1993. This is when Nike would pay their college coaches to come out because this was their summer money. And I remember Bobby Knight was there leading sessions. Denny Crum from Louisville. Steve Lavin from UCLA. And I got to listen. And I remember just kind of digging it, but I knew I wasn't going to be doing anything with my coach, and I never went back after that.
So I didn't do any significant coaching until grad school in 2001. I wanted to run recreation programs and I knew I wanted to be with kids, so when I went to Philadelphia to study for my doctorate at Penn, I worked with the Sonny Hill Community League and ended up coaching there. And that's where I got to learn from the old head, the legendary Claude Gross in Philly. And that was the beginning, man.
How did you end up at Penn for grad school, specifically?
The impetus was I had applied for a lot of Parks and Recreation jobs and I was getting beat out by people with Master's degrees. In the 1990’s, just the way the market had gone, there were people who were applying to these social services jobs who were overqualified because they had lost their jobs. And I didn’t want to get beat out again. At the same time, I had went to Black graduation at UC Davis and heard Harry Edwards, the legendary Sport Sociologist, speak about social justice in sport. And I was just reminded. And I say reminded because I grew up knowing who Harry Edwards was. I knew he was on the sidelines with the 49ers. Harry was somebody that you would just see. I can't say that everyone my age knew him, but I was into Malcolm X early. So when I was in high school and I'm reading papers, I was looking at social justice. I knew about the 1968 Olympic protest that Harry Edwards organized. That was stuff that I would just research and read about. I don't know why, but those things would get me excited. I went to Cal, where Harry Edwards was a professor, knowing of him, but I did not know of sociology as a major. I didn't know he was a sociology professor really. My parents both went to college, but my mother went as an adult. I just wasn't fully aware of how this college thing went. I knew I had to go, I was excited to go, but I thought I was going to be a lawyer.
That’s why I didn’t go into sociology as an undergraduate. I was going to go with Legal Studies at first and then I ended up getting an International Affairs major in economies of industrial societies. It was political science, economics, sociology, and more international kind of stuff. So I got a little bit of sociology, but I was the kid who went and sat in Harry's lectures, even though I wasn't a student. And I probably did that on 10 occasions. I remember seeing him walk on campus and seeing a bunch of students trailing behind this 6’8” huge dude. I was scared to go say anything because he was just ‘that dude.’ In 1995 I heard him and I was just like, that's the job. I want to be on the field, I want to help athletes. I don't want anyone to go through what I went through in high school.
And so I went and spoke with him and he agreed to be my mentor. We met every semester. I went to Cal State Hayward to do my Master's because he advised me that my GPA wasn’t high enough to get into good PhD programs. I did that for two and a half years while I was working full time. My whole design was to become Harry, and he was supposed to bring me right into the 49ers and I was going to replace him. But Harry hasn’t left the 49ers yet so there hasn’t been a replacement! That was the original plan. And I was going to go to Berkeley, that was in that plan, but it’s a hard thing whenever you've gotten your undergraduate to be able to go back there for graduate school at the top schools, and I did not get in. So I go to Penn saying I'm going to be a sociologist, knowing that there wasn’t, and there still isn't, a top 30 school that has sport as an emphasis in sociology.
I knew I wasn't going to study sport on the books, so I had fallen in love with being an Urban Sociologist. That made sense because I was going to study Black athletes, and the stereotype is that we're all coming from the city. And then of course I was going to study race. And so that's what I did. When I visited Penn in Philadelphia, I knew it in my bones, this is where I want to be. I looked up to Elijah Anderson, who is one of the foremost race scholars and urban sociologists in the country, arguably the world. And he became my advisor at Penn and that’s who I studied with. He's ‘that dude.’ And I also went over to the business school because I had read a book called "In Black and White: Race and Sport in America" by Kenneth Shropshire and he taught there. I started researching with Shropshire in the Wharton Business School my first year there, helping him with his Sugar Ray Robinson book, “Being Sugar Ray.”
Can you tell me about coaching in Philly?
I immediately started doing my dissertation research when I got to Penn, which led to me coaching in January of 2001. I started getting in the basketball scene in Philly during fall 2000 and coached all four years with Claude Gross, learning this community, meeting all these coaches, and just soaking up Philadelphia basketball history and Black basketball history in general. So that's where it really starts, man. Going to practice five days a week with this man who was a legend as a player and as a coach, and in a summer league that has every Black player that has come out of Philadelphia and made it to the NBA. Kobe Bryant played on our team before I got there. I coached against Kyle Lowry, and Markieff and Marcus Morris. I coached two players that went on to play at Ball State and Coppin State and played professionally.
I learned way more basketball and understanding in one year with Claude Gross than I ever had in my four years under one of the greatest high school coaches in California. I just got all of this understanding, more than the X's and O's. It was about Human Development. It was about young Black men and women, what they're learning from their communities about surviving and how that manifests. People say, "These kids are tough." Well, yes, because they're coming from tough structural social conditions. So what things are they going to do? Well they're going to fight us. They're going to fight us verbally. They're going to challenge us with asking questions and they're not always going to do what you ask them to. They'll fight you physically if they feel they need to, because this is what they're used to. They're “adultified” from an early age because in some ways they're taking on significant responsibilities in their homes. So they don't have a problem with speaking disrespectfully to an adult. If adults are loose or are disrespectful to them, they've had to carry stuff, and they see themselves as equals.
By being with Claude, I learned the whole social-psychological aspect. How do we motivate? We understand how to make best use of the fire that they had. How do you bring the team together? He was a psychologist in that way. If we were there to be servants, then you're not being used by a kid, you're being useful. And that's what our goal is, to be used by these kids who want to be there. So, I'd be there with him, and he'd drive kids who lived on the other side of town because it was unsafe. He'd say, "We need to go talk to this kid, we ain't seen him in a while.” You start talking to mothers, grandmothers, and uncles, and aunts in their living rooms.
All of this for a summer league. This is the kind of effort we're making for a makeshift summer league, where any given practice… on Tuesday, I have a totally different group of guys from Monday. They come when they want to come. The guys who have big names are playing on four different teams – they're managing a schedule and they didn't like our practices, because Claude was old school. He made you stand right on the baseline and listen to the lecture.
Kids would say, "Oh, that kid comes from that school for bad kids." And he said, "None of y'all are geniuses," he leveled the playing field. "Nah, We're not going to do that. You're not going to talk about this kid like that. None of ya'll are geniuses." And he'd make jokes, and he yelled and screamed at them too. He was old school, but it was always about loving these kids, believing in them more than they believed in themselves, and being consistent. Showing up to practice even when kids were not showing up. He'd say, "We still have to be there, because we never know who will be here when they need us.”
And Claude was not just a coach to the team. He was one of the Founders of this league, one of the longest continuous running summer leagues in the country. If a kid was in the league, he was all of the coaches' kid. During a game, even if it was a kid on the opposing team, we'd pull the kid aside and say, "Man I think you can do this, I think you could do that." A lot of the coaches in the league were his former players that he knew. And so I learned that when I coach, if a kid on the other team makes a great play, I tell them, "Great play." We were there for all the kids.
So I learned to really think about where the kids were from, to be there consistently, and to talk about things far beyond the basketball court, so they gain a bigger understanding. To expose them to how big this world is so they don't get stuck in South Philly. And love them as hard as you can. Claude always said, "I love you and there ain’t nothing you can do about it." That's what he said to us as grown men.
But he'd also tell a kid, "Hey, you can't play for my team," if you got your three strikes. And he kicked kids out for messing with girls when they weren't playing. He'd say, "You're not going to do that. You're not going to sit here and make her feel uncomfortable." We're protectors for everybody's experience, including the few girls that showed up to play for our younger teams. He would tell a kid, "Hey, I love you, but you can't play for me." Now, the kid could come back next year, and he'd act like it never happened. It was always about keeping the kids, but you had to have your balance, because otherwise these kids are going to walk all over you. They have to know that there's a structure. That's what I learned, man. That's what I got from him. Things I probably don't even know how to put words to, but it was about serving these kids.