Play Their Hearts Out

by George Dohrmann

  Before the start of the game between FoHi and Etiwanda, Rome climbed to the top row of the bleachers with a video camera, where he would film the game for the coaches. He wore a plaid ski cap so low that it covered the tops of his bloodshot eyes. He was disconnected from the game and from his teammates, and he was no longer the gentle and gregarious soul who Keller had once used to gauge the trustworthiness of new recruits to Team Cal. He wasn’t dying to be out there on the court. In fact, he acted as if he’d rather be doing something else. It wasn’t hard to guess what that was, and where it would lead him.

  Shortly after Rome started the video camera and began recording the action, Demetrius came off a screen, caught the ball near the 3-point line on the right side, and used a head fake to get his defender off balance. He then drove past him, scored on a layup while being fouled, and converted the free throw to give FoHi a 3–2 lead. A few possessions later, he repeated the action, but when his defender didn’t fall for the head fake, he rose up and made a 16-foot jump shot.

  John Finn had not seen Demetrius play in two years, and that made him a good assessor of any progress Demetrius had made. “I can tell you right now, he’s gotten a lot better,” he said, watching as Demetrius assisted on two scores to put FoHi up 10–8. “The form on his shot, the way he is attacking the defense without going into the post—those are things I’ve never seen from him before.”

  With the score tied early in the second quarter, FoHi executed an inbounds pass for a score, using the lure of Demetrius getting the ball on a cut to the basket to free another player for an open layup. It was a noteworthy development because it required a level of execution the team lacked the year before. In all facets, FoHi played more like a team than it had under Mark Soderberg. The players showed more enthusiasm on defense and were more synchronized on the offensive end. The team’s personnel was largely unaltered—it was Demetrius and a bunch of junior-varsity athletes—but the kids played above their talent level. Soderberg might have possessed as much basketball knowledge as Ryan Smith, but he never had a fully committed Demetrius, and with Demetrius buying into Smith’s leadership, there was no disconnect between the teacher and his student.

  The lead changed seven times in the first half, with Etiwanda scoring off its defense and FoHi relying on Demetrius to create shots for himself and others. Occasionally, he went to the low block and scored on a post move, but it was a strategic move, not an act of desperation. He recognized that a smaller player was on him, and he chose the option best suited to exploit that mismatch. In this way, he played like Roberto: analyzing, then attacking.

  Etiwanda’s forte was its man-to-man defense, and it was a testament to the havoc Demetrius caused that Coach Dave Kleckner switched to a matchup zone in the second quarter. He put a man on Demetrius and then a 2-2 zone behind him to guard the basket against Demetrius penetrating. Upon seeing this, Demetrius got the ball atop the key and made a long 3-pointer as his defender—nicknamed “Spider” for his long arms—underestimated the range on his jump shot. Spider adjusted, playing farther out on Demetrius, and so his options were limited. Spider wasn’t going to give Demetrius an open shot on the outside, and four players were in his way when he drove. He began feeding his teammates, finding them open for short jumpers and on cuts to the basket, but they missed open shots and flubbed his passes and Etiwanda pulled ahead, taking a 31–21 lead at halftime.

  In the middle of the third quarter, Demetrius rebounded a miss by an Etiwanda guard and quickly looked upcourt, seeing one of his teammates open ahead of the retreating defenders. On instinct, he whipped a pass toward him, throwing it hard and high, something he had done for years with Team Cal. Andrew or Justin or Jordan would break out after a miss, and he would find them with a long pass that would end with an uncontested layup. The FoHi player was a skinny Mexican kid, and as the ball rushed toward him he looked like a Little League catcher standing in the path of a Roger Clemens fastball. The ball bounced off his hands and went out of bounds. It was a key play in the game. Etiwanda led only 33–30, and Demetrius had fought hard to get FoHi back into the game. He had scored 6 straight points, two baskets coming on long jump shots, and then assisted on a teammate’s 3-pointer. If his skinny teammate had caught the ball and converted the layup, FoHi would have trailed by a single point. Instead, Etiwanda’s Marcus Barrow made a 3-pointer on the next possession to push the lead to 6, killing the momentum Demetrius had worked so hard to seize.

  After his teammate flubbed that pass, Demetrius spun around and put his hands over his face. Compared to how demonstrative he had been when showing up his teammates the season before, his reaction was muted. But not enough for Ryan Smith. He immediately pulled Demetrius from the game and grabbed him by the jersey as he passed him on his way to the bench.

  “First, don’t ever do that again. Ever. Leaders don’t embarrass their teammates like that. Second, that turnover was your fault.”

  “What?” Demetrius shouted, loud enough for people seated behind the bench to hear. “That pass hit him in the hands.”

  “Look, you know he can’t catch. You know it. You’ve seen it in practice. So why would you throw him a pass like that? Part of being a guard and being a leader is knowing what your teammates can and can’t do. You know he can’t catch, but you threw him the ball anyway. How does that help him become a better player? How does that help us?”

  Demetrius nodded. “You’re right. That’s my bad, Coach, my bad.”

  Smith sent him back to the scorer’s table and, as Demetrius reentered the game, he ran over to the skinny player, slapped him on the butt, and then pointed to his own chest and said, “That was my bad. I’m sorry.”

  Demetrius single-handedly kept FoHi in the game the rest of the way, but his teammates missed too many shots, and Etitwanda won 54–47. Demetrius hurried over to his teammates and slapped each of their hands at the end of the game, then he got in the front of the line to congratulate the Etiwanda players and coaches.

  His play had been far from flawless. His jump shot deteriorated by the fourth quarter as his release point began to vary, and although he finished with 25 points, he had eight turnovers. Smith had yet to focus his tutoring on Demetrius’s ballhandling, and it remained atrocious for a player of his stature. Still, it was hard not to be encouraged by that first game and those that followed it during his sophomore season, which unfolded in much the same way.

  As John said while leaving the gym, “Maybe there is hope for Demetrius after all.”

  30

  David and Dana Pump

  Keith Howard (right, seated) and Julius Patterson

  A few days after the end of Demetrius’s sophomore season, Ryan Smith began mapping an off-season program for him. FoHi finished the season 16–13, doubling its win total from the previous season, and Demetrius had gotten better with each game. He was named all–Citrus Belt League and all-area by the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and he scored 51 points against Redlands East Valley, the highest point total by a player in the Inland Empire that year. His average of 31 points per game was also tops in the area. Judging the season as a whole, he had made great progress, but there were times when the breadth of work he had left to do was apparent. Smith’s plan included more work on Demetrius’s jump shot, but most of the emphasis would be on improving his ballhandling. To excel in college, Demetrius would have to play point guard, Smith believed. It was also his only hope of reaching the NBA; at six foot three he was probably too short to be a shooting guard.

  Smith gave Demetrius a few weeks off and then approached him about reviving the one-on-one sessions that had been so fruitful the previous fall. But Demetrius told him the grassroots season would begin soon. “Going to tournaments all over the country isn’t going to help you,” Smith responded. “What you need is to spend every hour in the gym, working on individual skills. I don’t think you should play grassroots basketball at all.”

  Demetrius may have shown people in the Inland Empire that he was no longer the regressing
prospect from the summer before, but news of his exploits never made it down Interstate 10 to Los Angeles and beyond. His ranking remained in the 200s, which he felt was the result of the limited “exposure” he got playing for FoHi. The grassroots season was his chance to show the world that he’d revived his prospects.

  “You need to be worrying about your game, not what other people think,” Smith implored.

  It wasn’t easy for Demetrius to devalue what Keller and the rest of the grassroots machine had impressed upon him. His ranking. The hype. Perception. It still mattered to him, and so, against Smith’s wishes, he intended to play the circuit, putting his future in the hands of a grassroots coach once again.

  During Demetrius’s sophomore season, Julius Patterson and Keith Howard, the coaches of the Inland Empire Basketball Club (IEBP), periodically attended his games. They often came to watch him compete against one of their players; other nights, they just wandered into the gym to see some basketball. They lived in or near Fontana, and it was common to see them in the area’s high school gyms.

  IEBP occupied a unique spot in the pecking order of grassroots programs in Southern California. If SCA and Pump N Run were USC and UCLA, IEBP was San Diego State or Pepperdine. “We’re like a mid-major,” Howard admitted, “but we know that and we’ve come to own that.” The kids who played for IEBP usually ended up at the University of San Francisco or Wyoming or another college outside the major conferences. There were exceptions—Darren Collison played for IEBP before going to UCLA—but Howard and Patterson rarely had a player ranked among the top 150 in the country.

  Patterson—like Howard, a Los Angeles native—played at UC Santa Cruz and contemplated getting into grassroots coaching for many years before he partnered with Howard in 1998. One of the first tournaments he attended was in Houston, where he watched one of the nation’s best players, six-foot-eight George Williams from nearby Elskin High. It occurred to him that the Inland Empire rarely produced players that big and agile. At a meeting with Sonny Vaccaro later, Patterson remarked on this, to which Vaccaro responded: “Well, Julius, if you don’t have them, then you need to get into the gym and make them.” That became IEBP’s mission statement. It was the program that churned out modest diamonds from the Inland Empire’s lumps of coal.

  Patterson and Howard were colleagues of Barrett and the Pumps, but they had more in common with Walt Harris of the Bellevue War Eagles and Gary Franklin, Sr. They held jobs outside coaching—Howard was the coach of the girls’ basketball team at Los Osos High; Patterson worked for Toyota—and you never heard rumors of them chasing the power and money that tempted other coaches. They didn’t push for more influence within Adidas or get tied up with agents or attempt to broker kids to specific colleges in exchange for “donations” to their programs. “They keep themselves clean,” Vaccaro said. “And when you are operating [in Southern California], that is not easy to do.” Perhaps they would have gone down that road if they controlled more top-150 kids, but even operators like Mats admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that Patterson and Howard weren’t the same breed of shark.

  No grassroots program in the country felt the impact of Joe Keller’s rise to power more than IEBP. Had Keller not gotten back into basketball, the Team Cal kids living in and around Fontana, including Rome and Demetrius, would likely have matriculated to play for Howard and Patterson. “But even more than taking that class of kids, what Joe did is, he changed the marketplace,” Howard said. “Julius and I are telling kids that through hard work and perseverance you can win the battle at the end and get a scholarship. Joe was telling them when they are in the fifth or sixth grade that they are going to be in the NBA. He took Pat Barrett’s model and brought it to the younger levels.”

  After the emergence of the Jr. Phenom Camp, Howard and Patterson saw another change. “Before Joe’s camp, there was not an event for people like Clark Francis to come to and rank the Southern California kids. Joe gave the recruiting guys an opportunity to put a number on the young kids out here.” While recruiting one high school freshman, Patterson was told by the player’s father that he expected compensation should his son join IEBP, because he was “ranked” by The Hoop Scoop after one of Keller’s camps.

  “Joe changed everything, and now he’s kind of out of the game and we’ve got to deal with it,” Howard said. “He’s got his camps now and he has, some people would say, legitimized himself. He’s got this product that people think they need. But the way I look at it is like this: Joe is just a capitalist. He was in it all along for the money, and I guess that is a very American thing. His story is a very American story. But Julius and I, we’re not like Joe.”

  An unwillingness to employ more-aggressive tactics cost Howard and Patterson some great players. In 2006–07, they pursued Kendall Williams, the guard that Keller had used sparingly in the early years of the Inland Stars. Kendall had grown to six foot four and become one of the best players in the class of 2010, a grade below Demetrius. He attended a camp at the University of Florida after his freshman season, and Billy Donovan offered him a scholarship on the spot. Offers from Duke and UCLA followed, and soon Kendall, once cast down to the lowly “Silver” version of Keller’s team, had every top school in America pursuing him. He had long dreamed of playing for the Bruins, so early in his sophomore year he verbally committed to play for Ben Howland. At the time, Demetrius wasn’t being contacted by any big-time schools.

  IEBP seemed a shoo-in to land Kendall. It was the grassroots team that practiced closest to his home, and he attended Los Osos High, where Howard coached. Kendall’s parents had also hired Howard to run individual workouts for Kendall on Sundays during his freshman season. If they considered him qualified enough to work Kendall out individually, surely he and Patterson would get the nod. But Kendall’s sudden rise to a national prospect brought other suitors. After UCLA showed interest, so did the Pumps, and before Howard and Patterson even knew IEBP was out of the running, Kendall was on Pump N Run. Howard later asked Kendall’s mother for an explanation, and she said that the family felt obligated to go with the Pumps because “UCLA [recruits] play for them.”

  College coaches often form an alliance with a grassroots coach. Howland’s friendship with the Pumps, however, went beyond the common hobnobbing. When he was a young coach at Northern Arizona and UC Santa Barbara, Howland befriended the Pumps and would sometimes stay at their home when visiting the area. Howland’s hiring by UCLA (an Adidas-sponsored school) was a great victory for the twins—one of their own, running the program that John Wooden built. His arrival in Westwood coincided with the Pumps’ rise at Adidas, when Vaccaro left and they became the de facto heads of the company’s grassroots initiative. Howland would rebuild UCLA into an elite program at the same time the Pumps created a national brand of AAU teams, with “Pump” squads popping up in Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Memphis, Tucson, even Puerto Rico. Their partnership became the most symbiotic of any formed between a college coach and a grassroots program.

  At the core of their alliance were the players both sides wanted, talented kids like Kendall Williams. The Pumps used their connection to Howland to get the best players, and the UCLA coaches encouraged kids to play for the Pumps. If a California prospect verbally committed to UCLA early in his high school career, it was a good bet that he would end up on Pump N Run Elite, the best of the three teams the twins fielded in Southern California, and rival college coaches grumbled that the team was a holding pen for the Bruins. At one point during Kendall’s time on Pump N Run Elite, the team could have fielded a starting five who had committed to play for Howland. This was unprecedented. The Atlanta Celtics never boasted a starting five of Georgia Tech recruits. The Michigan Mustangs didn’t have five future Michigan or Michigan State players in their lineup. Pump N Run Elite was essentially UCLA’s farm team.

  For Patterson and Howard, the loss of Kendall was maddening. The Pumps were part of the same (Adidas) family. Kendall would have been tied to the company regardless of whether he chose
IEBP or the Pumps, and Howard and Patterson were unquestionably the best fit. When one of the Pump brothers showed up at a Los Osos High game, he had to ask Howard the name of Kendall’s mother, and this was after Kendall had played a summer with Pump N Run Elite. “But what are you going to do?” Howard said. “That’s the system.”

  Instead of Kendall in IEBP’s backcourt, Howard and Patterson would have to get by with the type of overachievers they’d long molded into small-time college prospects, Andrew Bock among them. Andrew was skinnier than most players his age, and he had to rely on his smarts. He was not as bad an athlete as Keller had made him out to be, but he wasn’t the kind of physical specimen the major college programs sought. Barrett or the Pumps would have seen no use for such a player, but Howard and Patterson saw a kid who, with a little work, could land a scholarship.

  During his freshman season, Andrew practiced every Sunday with Patterson or Howard. In the spring, IEBP practiced another two days a week. In the summer, IEBP alumni like Collison, Sean Marshall (Boston College), and Anthony Goods (Stanford) returned to the Inland Empire, and Andrew worked out with them every day.

  IEBP played half as many tournaments in the spring and summer (seven or eight) as SCA, Pump N Run Elite, and EBO. A player would not get as much “exposure” playing for Howard and Patterson, and that was by design. They focused on developing better basketball players, not crisscrossing the country attending events. This philosophy perfectly suited the needs of a player like Andrew, and after watching Demetrius play several times during his sophomore season, Howard and Patterson felt IEBP was the perfect fit for him as well. “I would love the opportunity to work with Demetrius,” Patterson said. “I think with the way we run our program, we could make him better in a hurry.”