Winning Isn’t Anything (Cont.)
 

Moving Forward

Coach Dow learned long ago to keep a sardonic sense of humor about his lot in life. Growing up in the tiny town of Dexter, Maine, as the son of an insurance salesman and a homemaker, he recalled a “typical small-town childhood” in which he played all sorts of sports. But his favorite was basketball, a sport in which he excelled enough to be honored as an All-Conference player in high school before going on to play on the varsity team at Colby College.

The Colby teams were good enough to make it to the post-season, and Dow kept his love for the sport strong enough to devote his career to it. He started as an assistant coach at Colby before moving on to start the men’s basketball program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts after that school ended its long history as a women-only institution. Despite the challenges of starting a team from scratch, Dow managed to take his team to the post-season with a 20-5 record by his fourth season there.

That was just the beginning of a successful run that took Dow to the NCAA mountaintop of Division I coaching, with a three-season stint as the coach at Holy Cross before he returned to coaching at Colby for reasons he opts not to explain.

But five years ago, the job at Caltech opened up, and Dow beat a surprisingly competitive field of more than 200 applicants for the post. He’s had to find the upsides in losing ever since, a fact that stems neither from any lack of ability on his part nor a lack of heart and effort from his players.

“Before you even talk about frustrations, what helps you deal with it is Caltech and what the priorities of Caltech are. That being said, I told the kids we will not allow Caltech to be the excuse for losing all the games, or getting beat badly,” said Dow.

“On a simple coaching level, I hate losing personally. Nothing good comes out of it. Having a 59-game losing streak, I don’t think there’s an educational benefit from that. But even in the individual lopsided losses and losing streaks, I still have to find a value in the experience so I can keep moving these guys forward.”

Basketball Smarts

The benchmarks of progress for the Beavers are definitely different than those for most teams. They take some pride in the fact that they now lose by an average of 20 points a game rather than the 60-point average losses of a couple years ago.

But as Dow also notes, the very system of recruiting at the Division III level and especially at Caltech creates inherent disadvantages. That’s because these schools are not allowed to offer athletic scholarships.

Sometimes Dow gets lucky with a player like Hires, who has experience. But often he finds that filling a roster means accepting any student who expresses a desire to play for the team. Several of his players each year are walk-ons, and because he believes in honoring their efforts, Dow maintains a no-cut policy in which he won’t drop a player due to their lack of ability. He also ensures that each and every player gets playing time, even if they’re in need of serious development.

These factors often result in games that are not only painful, but even surreal to watch. One Beaver’s skills are so raw that he’ll bounce the ball too hard while merely dribbling and wind up having the ball fly over his head, resulting in an inevitable steal by the opposing team.

And while the players may all be able to map a stunning array of motion forces on a page or a blackboard, their skills often abandon them on the court, leading to shots that appear to bounce straight off the basket and into another galaxy.

“It’s not about how much different our players are from other schools. It’s how much they’re the same. They’re in an elite intellectual group that can gain admission to that place,” said Dow. “Our kids are just as competitive as anyone else. They don’t wanna lose. But there are significant physical differences against the other teams, in size, weight and development. But one of the interesting things you can’t measure is that my guys’ basketball IQ is just as good as any other team.”

A Measuring Stick

The game at Occidental, a perennially strong team which made it into the Final Eight during the 2003 Division II post-season, proves to be an exercise in frustration from start to finish.

Despite Dow’s claims that the team doesn’t draw any fan support -- “Who wants to spend a night watching their team lose?” -- the crowd for this post-Bard victory game featured about 20 brave souls cheering the Beavers on.

One particularly boisterous fan was Steven Leibowitz, who admitted driving in from Malibu to watch the games regularly. In fact, he cheered so loudly that when he drew a stare from this reporter, he sheepishly noted, “Someone has to do it.”  Then again, he’s the father of Beaver player #24, freshman Ted Leibowitz.

“Today’s my birthday and I can’t think of anything better than to spend it watching Ted. I missed the win, but my son called me right after the game. They win, they lose, but the coach is a great guy,” says Leibowitz. “He’s very positive, supportive, encouraging. But yeah, sometimes you go and there’re 800 fans for the other team and it’s deafening.”

The Occidental game, however, comes amid both schools’ winter breaks, and so the home team only draws about 50 fans of their own. That leaves plenty of time to notice the little things that set games like this apart -- Occidental has only two African-American players and Caltech has none. On the other hand, Caltech has more Asian-American players than just about any team ever seen.

Before the game, the Beavers look like any other team, sinking plenty of shots during the preparatory shoot-around.  But Occidental Coach Brian Newhall noted that they were headed for more trouble than usual this night.

“My guys will be fired up earlier than usual, because of the extra attention,” said Newhall, noting that a cameraman from KCAL Channel 9 was there to record the action.

Occidental did not want to follow Bard into record-book infamy, and they opened the game with a furious 20-2 scoring run. Along the way, a Caltech player stumbled and lost a ball, while another had the ball ripped from his hands and yet another was blocked by a much taller Occidental player on a lay-up. Coach Dow called his first time out of the night with less than three minutes expired from the game clock.

Soon Occidental was up by 25-5, but even then Dow was out of his seat and coiled in a tight crouch that one might expect out of a coach on the verge of a national championship.

Even though Newhall replaced his starters with bench players within the first five blowout minutes, the Tigers were swishing three-pointers as the score widened to 27-7.

When the score hit 42-15, an Occidental player nailed another three-pointer, leaving a desperate Caltech fan to cry out, “Was that really necessary?”

However, it’s not long before everyone notices that even with all the disastrous dribbles, stolen passes and missed shots, the Beavers hustle. Rather than ridicule, they are earning respect, even from some of the nearby Occidental fans.

“I think it’s amazing that they go to practice for years and gain their confidence. I can see even the least skilled players improve month to month and season to season,” said Roz Malmaud, a Caltech fan whose son attends the college but doesn’t play on the team. “Watching them really accelerated my love for college basketball. I just got caught up in it. I always watched basketball, but when you really know what these guys are up against, it’s compelling. Even when they’re down they don’t give away the game. They just keep going. I think that’s really amazing.”

Malmaud attends nearly every Beavers home game but missed the victorious game the week before. So had Greenwald, who regrets not having an upbeat moment to cap his chronicle of good attitudes amid seemingly unending losses. Add in the fact that Leibowitz missed that game too, and it became clear that in yet another case of cosmic irony, many of the Beavers’ most ardent supporters missed the one night they had to shine.

In many ways, luck like that is par for the course. But it also meant that the victory was even more largely one for the players themselves to savor and provided an even stronger lesson than if they had been distracted by the strange sound of strangers cheering.

After the Beavers went on to lose, Hires tried to make sense of it all one more time.

“Our win didn’t help us accept this loss better, but this loss didn’t take away from that win. We have a lot of inexperience on our team and the win was a wakeup call, a measuring stick of how far we’ve come and just how much farther we really have to go,” said Hires. “Obviously, we have a lot to work on and get better at, but that win shows us we can get there — whether it’s the next game, 10 games from now, next year or five years from now. Eventually we’re gonna get there.”

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.
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