Shownotes
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.
Website – https://denison.edu/people/rick-boyages
Email – boyagesr@denison.edu
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Mike Cleansing:The ncaa, even to this day, it's too big and it's too immobile and it's too laden with committees and bureaucracy, and they couldn't nimbly move in any way at any time.
Mike Cleansing:And then they were belligerent in the ways they demanded.
Mike Cleansing:No, this is how we've always done it or this is how it's going to go.
Rick Boyages:Rick Boyages has worked inside the college sports industry as a basketball coach, special assistant, conference administrator and consultant for 39 years.
Rick Boyages:Most recently, he spent 12 years as vice president for men's basketball at the Big Ten Conference in Chicago.
Rick Boyages:His role included oversight of event management, game operations, conduct policies, and officiating.
Rick Boyages:During his tenure, Rick served as Sports liaison to 31 head coaches, 30 athletic directors and dozens of network television executives, arena directors and NCAA stakeholders.
Rick Boyages:As executive director of the collegiate Officiating Consortium, LLC, he simultaneously directed men's basketball officiating operations for 65 Division 1 institutions in 22 states.
Rick Boyages:Boyages also spent time as associate commissioner for the Mid American Conference and special assistant to the athletic director at Ohio State University.
Rick Boyages:His 19 years as a college basketball coach included stops at Ohio State, Boston College, William and Mary and Bates College.
Rick Boyages: nal Four with the Buckeyes in: Rick Boyages:As a consultant, Rick has advised clients in areas including sports tech, higher education, professional and international basketball.
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Rick Boyages:Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Rick Boyages, former college basketball coach and administrator.
Jason Sunkel:Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast.
Rick Boyages:It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Rick, welcome to the Hooped pod.
Mike Cleansing:Thanks, Mike.
Jason Sunkel:Thrilled to have you on, Rick.
Jason Sunkel:Looking forward to diving into everything that you've been able to do in your career.
Jason Sunkel:Let's start by going back in time to when you were a kid.
Jason Sunkel:Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.
Jason Sunkel:What made you fall in love with it?
Mike Cleansing:Well, it was really my dad.
Mike Cleansing:My dad actually was first generation son of Greek immigrants that came overseas and kind of settled in the Boston area.
Mike Cleansing:He went on to play at Everett High School outside of Boston and actually made it to Dartmouth.
Mike Cleansing:And the interesting thing about the story is in the early 50s, he was the captain of Dartmouth and his coach was a guy named Doggy Julian.
Mike Cleansing:And Doggy's famous for being known as the head coach of the Holy Cross Crusaders and winning the national championship with Bob Cousy and Tom Heinson.
Mike Cleansing:So my dad was lucky to.
Mike Cleansing:He played baseball too, but he's lucky to, you know, play for a great college coach.
Mike Cleansing:Doggy 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.
Mike Cleansing:But, um, he, he started the youth basketball program in my hometown, which was Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Mike Cleansing:And it was by the time I was a kid, probably no.
Mike Cleansing:8 or 9 years old, there'd already been a generation of kids in the town that had gone through the program.
Mike Cleansing:So by the time I probably was winding out of it, you know, guys that had played in the league initially had their own kids now they were taking part in the, in the league.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know, that type of secondary education.
Mike Cleansing:So he.
Mike Cleansing:He just treated as intramural, really.
Mike Cleansing:They'd have a draft down in my basement.
Mike Cleansing:I remember being a little kid.
Mike Cleansing:And they'd be coaches down there drinking beer.
Mike Cleansing:They'd have a chalkboard out, and they'd be, you know, putting the names of all the kids up, and they'd have a draft.
Mike Cleansing:And the rule was every kid had to play the same amount, except for maybe the last five minutes of the game.
Mike Cleansing:He really, his philosophy was that, you know, when kids are 10, 11 years old, you don't know who's going to be, you know, five, eight, who's going to be six, eight, you know, and he just wanted to have a good experience with.
Mike Cleansing:With basketball and have fun and get a chance to play.
Mike Cleansing:And then there'd be travel teams and things for.
Mike Cleansing:For kids that want to do a little bit more, you know, had a chance to maybe do something more special.
Mike Cleansing:So it was for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.
Mike Cleansing:Mike.
Mike Cleansing:And I was playing in the sixth grade division when I was probably in first or second grade, you know, as a political connection.
Jason Sunkel:There you go.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah.
Mike Cleansing:I'd hang around the gym, and if kids in the seventh grade games, if anyone was sick or didn't show up, I jump into games.
Mike Cleansing:I'd play, you know, sixth or seventh, eighth grade.
Mike Cleansing:Always play with older guys for four or five years until I actually got into sixth grade.
Mike Cleansing:So those are my experiences, and they were fun and.
Mike Cleansing:And wholesome, and it was a good balance.
Mike Cleansing:You know, it wasn't an overemphasis in esports like today, or, you know, today we got private equity, you know, buying AU teams.
Mike Cleansing:You know, it's going full circle, so.
Jason Sunkel:Absolutely.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah.
Mike Cleansing:And over the years, his program fed a lot of good players into the high school system.
Mike Cleansing:Some kids would go on to play other sports or have other interests, but those that did have fun and stayed with it created really a winning program at the high school level.
Mike Cleansing:So that's really kind of how I fell in love with the game and got involved.
Mike Cleansing:And I had an older brother that was four years older, so I was always competing against him and his buddies.
Mike Cleansing:So, yeah, those are some of my earliest recollections of playing.
Mike Cleansing:Playing basketball.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Mike Cleansing:I was.
Mike Cleansing:He was always empathetic.
Mike Cleansing:I think he, you know, he really got to know the kids as people and their family situations, the socioeconomic background, that type of thing.
Mike Cleansing:The other thing, he kept it simple, and he just taught you good principles and fundamental concepts.
Mike Cleansing:We wouldn't run any plays really, but we would do stuff like run and jump.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I'd be with a back foot.
Mike Cleansing:Maybe teach us how to kind of spin a guy or turn a guy, and a weak side guard would come over and steal the ball.
Mike Cleansing:You know, give and go, moving without the ball.
Mike Cleansing:I don't remember us running a lot of different things.
Mike Cleansing:Just playing, you know.
Mike Cleansing:And then defensively, he'd be like, first thing you got to do, force your guy to his weak hand, you know, or box out or, you know, basic, basic stuff.
Mike Cleansing:But we really had fun, you know, and I think.
Mike Cleansing:I think that's always a big part of it.
Mike Cleansing:And then, you know, he was exposed to good coaches.
Mike Cleansing:And then he actually was a captain in the Marines during the Korean War.
Mike Cleansing:And he played a lot of, like, semi pro ball through the military.
Mike Cleansing:And there were a lot of guys that he was in officer's candidate school, but there were others that enlisted in that era in the 50s.
Mike Cleansing:A lot of those guys played ball on base or traveled to other competitions through the military.
Mike Cleansing:So he had a lot of great experiences that way that he'd like to share.
Jason Sunkel:You get into high school and you start taking the game maybe a little bit more seriously.
Jason Sunkel:What do you remember about your development as a player?
Jason Sunkel:Obviously, it looked a lot different than player development looks like today.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Mike Cleansing:Well, during the season, I just remember it was a really good, structured high school program.
Mike Cleansing:It's typically based on seniority.
Mike Cleansing:Unless you got a break somehow.
Mike Cleansing:Um, you know, the older kids would have a shot before you.
Mike Cleansing:Uh, I got really fortunate.
Mike Cleansing:I.
Mike Cleansing:I think as a freshman, I played freshman basketball and a half a JV and sat on the bench with the varsity.
Mike Cleansing:Um, you could only play so many quarters of a week.
Mike Cleansing:It was one of those kind of deals.
Mike Cleansing:And then as a sophomore, I was behind just some older juniors and seniors, and it was actually a disciplinary situation where before the guards got in trouble.
Mike Cleansing:I forget what they did, you know, and.
Mike Cleansing:And I got a shot to crack in as a starter, and I never lost my position, you know, so there was a little bit of fate that.
Mike Cleansing:That kind of was involved with that.
Mike Cleansing:But as a point guard, I just remember my coaches.
Mike Cleansing:I had a really great, like a hall of fame high school coach outside Boston.
Mike Cleansing:And he basically taught me how to call offenses and defenses and kind of quarterback on the court.
Mike Cleansing:So he had a philosophy where we played one defense after makes one after misses another after turnovers.
Mike Cleansing:And so I, I was kind of calling offenses and defenses and things.
Mike Cleansing:And I had a lot of control on the court to.
Mike Cleansing:To quarterback the team that way.
Mike Cleansing:And I had played so much from such a young age that that was kind of a fun part of my development.
Mike Cleansing:The other thing we did back in those days is we went to overnight camps in the summer and we.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:So we would go to camps with Sam Jones, John Avlichek.
Mike Cleansing:We would bus up to Maine and stay at an overnight camp at a small D3 school.
Mike Cleansing:We take a five hour bus ride.
Mike Cleansing:We'd play other towns around our community, you know, other suburban all star teams and things.
Mike Cleansing:We had summer leagues in town as well.
Mike Cleansing:So it's probably a whole different.
Mike Cleansing:You remember, Mike, like a whole different scenario than what eventually evolved from what would be, you know, kind of a U club ball and how it is today.
Mike Cleansing:And I think, like I said, I've already used the word wholesome.
Mike Cleansing:It was just healthier.
Mike Cleansing:Most of us played two or three sports.
Mike Cleansing:We.
Mike Cleansing:We were encouraged to play multiple sports.
Mike Cleansing:And I think that was always great for our development.
Mike Cleansing:When I was a small college coach, I used to teach sports sociology.
Mike Cleansing:And I remember one of the textbooks was.
Mike Cleansing:It was kind of a case study on great.
Mike Cleansing:On superstar athletes, you know, the Wayne Gretzky's Larry Birds, whole host of athletes.
Mike Cleansing:And they all played multiple sports growing up and they all talked about, you know, they avoided burnout that way.
Mike Cleansing:They used different muscle groups.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:As far as advancing from this point.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, that's totally a different scenario than what we have today, obviously.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, kids.
Jason Sunkel:To play two sports now for most kids is really, really difficult.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:And so it's, it's definitely a different era when it comes to that.
Jason Sunkel:And I like the word wholesome.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:And, you know, now we're driving kids around, you know, hours at a time to find, to find games.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, I mean, the other thing with me was my mom passed away of breast cancer when I was 14.
Mike Cleansing:So for a couple 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, you know, trying to figure out other things and how to cope with all that that was going on.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:I had a buddy in town.
Mike Cleansing:A bunch of us played, but I had one friend in particular, a best friend that, I mean, we played one on one till like it got dark and the neighbors told us, you know, you guys going to go to bed at some point?
Mike Cleansing: You know, it's: Mike Cleansing:Like you said, we did so much of the kind of sandlot, you know, they use that term with baseball.
Mike Cleansing:But in those days we just got our own games together a lot of times too.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I had a.
Mike Cleansing:I had.
Jason Sunkel:A buddy, I used to play it one on one to 100.
Jason Sunkel:We would ride our bikes probably we lived whatever a mile and a half, two miles away.
Jason Sunkel: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 100.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:They're like, what do you play one on one to 100?
Jason Sunkel:What are you, what are you talking about?
Jason Sunkel:So yeah, it's a different, it's a different world, Rick, for sure.
Mike Cleansing:Now that was my exact experience.
Mike Cleansing:The funniest was that the one camp up in Maine, I mean we had 400 kids at summer camp and we were probably 12, 13 years old.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And we had played.
Mike Cleansing:My buddy Peter and I had played for years and years and we ended up in the finals of the camp.
Jason Sunkel:That's awesome.
Mike Cleansing:You know, it was crazy.
Mike Cleansing:But.
Mike Cleansing:But yeah, just, just great experiences, great fun, you know, recollecting those times.
Jason Sunkel:When did playing college basketball get on your radar?
Jason Sunkel: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 sort of become, started to become important to you?
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, I was, my situation was interesting from the standpoint of I wasn't big, you know, I was, you know, five, eight and a half, barely five, you know, I don't know Aaron to five, nine.
Mike Cleansing:But I had great speed and quickness, but I was small.
Mike Cleansing:So the question was then, you know, what level can you play at?
Mike Cleansing:I was an all Boston area kid, you know, I got selected by the Boston Globe, you know, as kind of one of the better players in the, in the area.
Mike Cleansing:I wanted good academic situation too.
Mike Cleansing:So I applied to some schools first time around and I really didn't like my, my opportunities that I had.
Mike Cleansing:And so I took a postgraduate year at a boarding school at a New England prep school, which really even to this day is kind of still a great recruiting ground for college basketball players.
Mike Cleansing:And it was kind of a way to have a fifth year, repeat your senior year and go back, you know, or get some better study habits.
Mike Cleansing:I'm actually do all my homework and study hall and a couple free periods, you know, and then just live to play sport.
Mike Cleansing:So at Northfield Mount Herman, which was a really good private school, we had 90 postgraduates.
Mike Cleansing:It was one of the largest boarding schools in the, in the country.
Mike Cleansing:And it was really like a college freshman team.
Mike Cleansing:So I played basketball captain the team there.
Mike Cleansing:And I also played tennis actually there.
Mike Cleansing:But that was a great kind of redo of my senior year.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:One of the things that happened with me because of the story I told you about my childhood was I never, I always started.
Mike Cleansing:I never once in my entire life came off the bench ever really.
Mike Cleansing:You know, and I figured I had four years to play, four years of eligibility, so why wouldn't I want to just max out?
Mike Cleansing:You know, I.
Mike Cleansing:A lot of, A lot of my friends and people I played against, you know, would throw around the D1 term, but to be honest, I, I even tell people this day there's probably three, four, five divisions within division one, you know, so, yeah, absolutely mean.
Mike Cleansing:You know what I mean?
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:I.
Mike Cleansing:I was a starting point guard at Bowdoin College in Maine for four years.
Mike Cleansing:Played every minute of every game.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And it was me and Division 3 and Patrick Ewing.
Jason Sunkel:Jewish happens.
Mike Cleansing:There you go.
Mike Cleansing:I always say, you know, only get 40 years of play, you might as well max out, you know.
Rick Boyages:Absolutely.
Mike Cleansing:Well, I.
Mike Cleansing:The other thing I would tell kids is go one level below where you aspire to play, and you'll probably just, you know, you'll be able to walk in and compete immediately and have great success, you know, and now it's interesting because you see, you know, a story like Duncan Robinson, who was in the same league at, you know, Williams College, you know, decades later, but actually found a way to go from T3, you know, up to the Big Ten, even.
Mike Cleansing:And with nil now, they're not recruiting freshmen anymore, a lot of these people.
Mike Cleansing:So they go and prove themselves in the d2 ranks or the low d1 ranks and move up from there.
Mike Cleansing:So even the recruiting's changed dramatically with NIL and the transfer Portal.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:And obviously you go back to when we started and NIL and the Portal didn't exist.
Jason Sunkel:And now you think about the impact that those two things have had.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, it really is incredible.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Completely different in terms of thinking about building a team and saying, 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.
Jason Sunkel:And now it's almost a year to year.
Jason Sunkel: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, for whatever reason.
Jason Sunkel:And so it's a, it's certainly become a very challenging profession.
Jason Sunkel:When you think back to your time in college, what were you thinking about as a career when you went to school?
Jason Sunkel:Were you thinking coaching already at that point?
Jason Sunkel:Or was that something that didn't really get to you until, hey, looking around like my playing career is over now I want to figure out how to stay involved in the game.
Jason Sunkel:What was your thought process as you went into school?
Mike Cleansing:No, I really did want to coach.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, it was really my goal.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And you know, Mike, back in those days there were a lot of overnight camps.
Mike Cleansing:So I could work a week at camp on Cape Cod or in New Hampshire or somewhere.
Mike Cleansing:And then, you know, I'd have room and board, I'd get my meals there, I'd make, make a few hundred bucks and I would go on to the next one.
Mike Cleansing:And then you would basically develop a network of contacts by doing that.
Mike Cleansing:And then after two or three years of doing that, I actually developed a ball handling routine and became like a lecturer.
Mike Cleansing:You know, back in those days, every camp after lunch would have a 45 minute to an hour lecture where we kids would digest their flight lunch and sit there and learn something.
Mike Cleansing:And then they would drill on whatever that topic was and then go, you know, do some other drills and play some games in the afternoon and at night, the morning was all fundamental drill stations.
Mike Cleansing:And I even remember when I was a kid I saw, I mean I can remember this day seeing lectures by Sam Jones.
Mike Cleansing:Like I mentioned Havoc, JoJo White, you know, hall of Famers.
Mike Cleansing:I remember Calvin Murphy.
Mike Cleansing:I was at A camp.
Mike Cleansing:Brian Winners, Paul Silas, all kinds of Hubie.
Mike Cleansing:And then on the coaching side, you know, it was far back.
Mike Cleansing:Like what, When Hubie was coaching Rolly, Massimino, Patino when he was very young.
Mike Cleansing:I was a.
Mike Cleansing:Probably a counselor then.
Mike Cleansing:I used to actually Rick would see me at so many camps.
Mike Cleansing:He had this one on one chick.
Mike Cleansing:He would do it, he would do his.
Mike Cleansing:His clinic was one on one basketball, you know, like mine a couple years later was ball handling.
Mike Cleansing:Other guys were, you know, before Dave Hopper, what's his name?
Mike Cleansing:I can.
Mike Cleansing:Oh, George Lehman was the shooting expert.
Mike Cleansing:So there's new people doing it over each decade.
Mike Cleansing:But when I developed a ball handling routine, you know, I juggle balls, spin them on my finger, I'll do crazy tricks, all kinds of things.
Mike Cleansing:And you know, cause I.
Mike Cleansing:I couldn't get near the rim.
Mike Cleansing:I was small, you know, so I had all the other dog and pony show that I'd roll out.
Mike Cleansing:But once I started doing that, then I got booked sometimes two or three camps in a day.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:So by that time I knew everybody.
Mike Cleansing:And then my first job was right out of school was a D3 assistance job at Babson College in just outside Boston.
Mike Cleansing:And then I did that for just a couple years and I was very lucky.
Mike Cleansing:I.
Mike Cleansing:I interviewed for a D3 head job at Bates College in Maine and somehow got the job at like age 24.
Mike Cleansing:And then you and I talked about this in a previous conversation.
Mike Cleansing:You know, when you're a D3 head coach, you do the laundry, drive the van, you know, you wash.
Mike Cleansing:You know, when you're not washing uniform, sweep the floor, you do the recruiting, the scouting, the film work.
Mike Cleansing:It's a great laboratory for being a young coach.
Mike Cleansing:And so I did that, and I did that for four years and still maintained my network all throughout New England.
Mike Cleansing:Still did lectures in the summer and things.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And there wasn't an AAU circuit, you know, so you had to rely on waiting for high school basketball and maybe some summer league stuff here or there.
Mike Cleansing:So I coached in Africa, Czechoslovakia, before the political changes.
Mike Cleansing:And when the wall came down in 87, I coached a lot in Greece.
Mike Cleansing:I've still got some good contacts there.
Mike Cleansing:So I did all that and that led me to Boston College after four years at Division 3.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And then, remember, they hired me at Bates College.
Mike Cleansing:And the president, actually, it came from the College of Worcester, a guy named Don Harwood.
Mike Cleansing:And he said, rick, we want to hire you, but you're going to make me one promise.
Mike Cleansing:I said, what?
Mike Cleansing:He goes, you got to get your master's.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:So I started that summer and knocked that out in a couple years.
Mike Cleansing:But 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.
Mike Cleansing:You could raise a family, your kids be running around the campus at all the events using all the facilities.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I coached, for instance, against.
Mike Cleansing:I played and coached against Dave Hickson at Amherst, you know, and called him, you know, less than a year ago to congratulate him on being the first D3 coach into the Naismith hall of Fame.
Mike Cleansing:But I go back with a core of guys, Dick Whitmore at Colby.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, there were a whole bunch of them that they were just as good a coach as anybody in Division 1.
Mike Cleansing:They just.
Mike Cleansing:They chose that lifestyle.
Mike Cleansing:And so I don't have any regrets about it because I was able to move up within Division 1 and Experience Final Fours and NCAA tournaments and do just about everything you want to do.
Mike Cleansing:But I.
Mike Cleansing:I think I would have been maybe just as happy if I was still that, you know, at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and, you know, living the.
Mike Cleansing:The D3 dream life.
Mike Cleansing:It's.
Mike Cleansing:It's interesting.
Mike Cleansing:A lot of guys that offer that, I have a lot of respect for that.
Jason Sunkel:What was the transition like from that first assistant job at Babson to becoming a head coach?
Jason Sunkel:Obviously, at that point, as you said, you're very young, you've got a couple 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.
Jason Sunkel:What was that transition like for you?
Mike Cleansing:You know, when I think back, I really don't see it as anything problematic.
Mike Cleansing:I was just so excited and enthusiastic about having the opportunity, you know, and.
Mike Cleansing:And I think, you know, we were able to win.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I was able to move the Needle a little bit on the program.
Mike Cleansing:The very first game I ever coached, Mike, was against my alma mater.
Mike Cleansing:It was Bates, Bowdoin, and in, in Maine in Division 3, there's Bates, Bowdoin and Colby.
Mike Cleansing:They're all, you know, great small Ivy League schools.
Mike Cleansing:And so I think it was a home game.
Mike Cleansing:I think we won.
Mike Cleansing:And a local newspaper beat writer was like, do you feel bad, you know, beating your alma mater and you first game?
Mike Cleansing:And I was like, feel bad.
Mike Cleansing:I'm like, I'm undefeated.
Mike Cleansing:I'm.
Jason Sunkel:That's like, yeah, it's like.
Jason Sunkel:That's like beating your brother in a backyard basketball game.
Jason Sunkel:Do you feel bad for your brother?
Jason Sunkel:Absolutely not.
Jason Sunkel:There's no way.
Mike Cleansing: and we would jam: Mike Cleansing:It was insanity.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, there was, it was a blast.
Mike Cleansing:We had a lot of fun.
Mike Cleansing:And then because I was traveling internationally, like I took my team to Prague, you know, one winter, actually during a Christmas break.
Mike Cleansing:So you're able to do a lot of different things.
Mike Cleansing:I also coach tennis and golf, and I, I taught that class I mentioned earlier, taught an academic class.
Mike Cleansing:So I did some other things, but it was a great, just great training ground, you know, And I think that's really what led me to get offered a position with Boston College, which was my next stop.
Mike Cleansing:And I was from Boston and I was, I actually asked the president, 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.
Mike Cleansing:And they had come off only 2, 1 win seasons in the Big Ten, in the Big east.
Mike Cleansing:And the rumor was, you know, he was going to be let go.
Mike Cleansing:It was a lot of pressure on him.
Mike Cleansing:And days before the Big east tournament, his, his.
Mike Cleansing:Tragically, his wife passed away from complications with Hodgkin's disease.
Mike Cleansing:And so I think the AD was in a position where he's like, you know, how am I going to do that?
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, young daughters, whatever.
Mike Cleansing:So I think the trade off was they, they, they told him he could stay on a year, see how it goes.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:So I said, I said to myself, I gotta play this like two ways.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:Like, this is a Great job, a good G2.
Mike Cleansing:And unbelievably, the president said yes.
Mike Cleansing:He said, okay, I'll make a deal with you again, maybe because I got my master's mic and I.
Mike Cleansing:And I came through on the first promise.
Mike Cleansing:But he said, just help me find a coach to replace yourself, someone you trust, someone that would be good for us.
Mike Cleansing:Because I had my best team in my fourth year.
Mike Cleansing:I was going into my fourth year, I think it was, or fifth, and we probably.
Mike Cleansing:It was going to be the best team in the history of the school.
Mike Cleansing:So I helped him find a high school coach that I really respected.
Mike Cleansing:And then we won seven games in the Big east that year.
Mike Cleansing:And we had a great group of sophomores.
Mike Cleansing:We had two NBA players, Billy Curley from Boston and Howard Isley.
Mike Cleansing:And we had two other players that would play professionally as well, two other guards that played international basketball for a long time.
Mike Cleansing:Very successful.
Mike Cleansing:So Jim got a two year extension.
Mike Cleansing:And so I re.
Mike Cleansing:I resigned my D3 job in May.
Mike Cleansing:And I mean, I was so lucky that I had a president like that was, you know, even willing to consider such a thing.
Mike Cleansing:But I think, again, if that hadn't worked out, I probably would have stayed in D3.
Mike Cleansing:You know, it was.
Mike Cleansing:It was a taste of the Big east.
Mike Cleansing:And at that time, the Big east was everything, you know, you can only imagine.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, you know, Allen Iverson and Alonzo Mourning and, you know, it was a little bit after Derrick Coleman, but unbelievable coaches, you know, Carneseca, Patino, Thompson, Boeheim, Massimino.
Mike Cleansing:It was.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, it was a.
Mike Cleansing:It was an unbelievable experience.
Mike Cleansing:And we were good.
Mike Cleansing:We.
Mike Cleansing:We went to the.
Mike Cleansing:We made it the NIT that year.
Mike Cleansing:The next year we went to the Elite Eight.
Mike Cleansing:We were a stone's throw from the Final Four and we lost a heartbreaking game.
Mike Cleansing:We had to play Florida in Miami.
Mike Cleansing:I think we had about six fans there in the Elite Eight games, and we led most of the game and lost in the last couple minutes.
Mike Cleansing:And I was.
Mike Cleansing:It's crazy how things work.
Mike Cleansing:I'm saying to myself, that was my one shot at the Final Four, you know, that was it.
Mike Cleansing:And crazy, two years later, after we have another good year 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.
Mike Cleansing:And our first year was abominable.
Mike Cleansing:We won eight games.
Mike Cleansing:We were, you know, horrendous, but we.
Mike Cleansing:We laid a foundation of, you know, discipline and expectations and developed a culture there.
Mike Cleansing:And.
Mike Cleansing:And we were lucky.
Mike Cleansing:We inherited A couple good players.
Mike Cleansing:And then we brought along Scooney, Penn from Boston College and somehow we went from eight wins to 27 in the final four in, in 99.
Mike Cleansing:And I'm looking at it and I'm saying to myself, you know, I thought that game in Miami with Boston College would have been my last gasp.
Mike Cleansing:And here we are two years later coming off of an eight win season and make it all the way to the Final Four.
Mike Cleansing:So that was, that was a crazy year.
Mike Cleansing:And it was just one of these years.
Mike Cleansing: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, and we just had great kids and we fell into a style of play and just, I think we, early on we were like 6 and 2 or 6 and 3.
Mike Cleansing:We lost at Toledo.
Mike Cleansing:We didn't really know what we want.
Mike Cleansing:We expected, we hoped we would be 500 that year and get to the NIT.
Mike Cleansing:Maybe that was our goal.
Mike Cleansing:And we end up just getting on this tier and you know, we end up, you know, with that unbeknownst most of the time.
Mike Cleansing:But, you know, Michael Redd becomes an NBA player, Scoony's an all American, probably the best point guard and, you know, as good as any point guard Ohio State's ever had.
Mike Cleansing:And he goes to four NCAA tournaments, two with Boston College and two with Ohio State in his four years.
Mike Cleansing:And then we had other great players.
Mike Cleansing:Kenny Johnson led the country in shot blocking.
Mike Cleansing:We had great role players.
Mike Cleansing:So that was a, that was a great run too.
Mike Cleansing:So I, like I said, I, I had a chance to do just about everything.
Mike Cleansing:And then I was head coach at William and Mary.
Mike Cleansing:I left Ohio State and did that for a few years before going back to Ohio State a second time.
Mike Cleansing:But, but yeah, it was, I feel blessed with just all the opportunities I had, the confidence, you know, people had in me as athletic directors or school presidents, and just all the friends you meet, you know, Mike, over the, over the decades, I mean, the basketball fraternity that you get involved with, it's been amazing.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, there's nothing more special than that.
Jason Sunkel:And it's just amazing again, how close knit the basketball community really is.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel: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 have that success and then take that, as you said, the entire staff to Ohio State.
Jason Sunkel:So just talk a little bit about the, both the personal and the professional relationship that you had with Coach O'Brien.
Mike Cleansing:Well, it was interesting in that our staff, we organized ourselves probably a little bit differently.
Mike Cleansing:I was one of the three full time assistants, but I was kind of the X and O guy.
Mike Cleansing:So my role was game plans, practice plans, video breakdown, strategic stuff.
Mike Cleansing:The other two guys weighed in on that.
Mike Cleansing:But they were on the road a lot recruiting.
Mike Cleansing:And at that time, Mike, only two of the three assistant coaches could recruit, one couldn't.
Mike Cleansing:And I don't know if you remember years back there was, they tried to restrict the earnings of one coach.
Jason Sunkel:Yep.
Jason Sunkel:There was a limited earnings guy.
Jason Sunkel:Yep, yep, yep.
Mike Cleansing:Cost cutting measure that was actually an antitrust violation.
Mike Cleansing:So for two years at Boston College, I think I made $16,000 a year and I was the associate head coach.
Mike Cleansing:So what happened in that case was it was interesting.
Mike Cleansing:It took about three or four years, but we finally got paid.
Mike Cleansing:We won the case, which was a landmark antitrust win against the nca.
Mike Cleansing:And what was interesting about it was what really swung things were the associate head coaches that didn't recruit.
Mike Cleansing:So what happened when we got out in front of the jury?
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And it was myself, Pete Gaudette at Duke, Jimmy Rothborough at Arizona, Norm Law at Pitt, Bernie Fine at Syracuse.
Mike Cleansing:And those the lawyers kept asking guys, these guys and myself, about, well, what happens if the coach passed away or had a car accident or a bad flu?
Mike Cleansing:Who coaches the team?
Mike Cleansing:Well, we would probably, you know, for that, for that segment.
Mike Cleansing:And they were like, wait a second, I thought this was a cost cutting measure for entry level coaches, you know, and that kind of swung the case real fairly quickly.
Mike Cleansing: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 you know who his two college coaches were at Boston College?
Mike Cleansing:He was a standout four year player at Boston College.
Mike Cleansing:And they always go, now who?
Mike Cleansing:And I tell him, 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.
Mike Cleansing:By the UConn guys that were prior to Calhoun, you know, it was before that era.
Mike Cleansing:And D.
Mike Cleansing:Rowe was a legendary UConn coach and don Perno, you know, like, they, he.
Mike Cleansing:He was just a genius basketball guy, a former point guard, unbelievable basketball iq.
Mike Cleansing:And again, like, kept it pretty simple and had a real good feel for the players.
Mike Cleansing:You know, it was a really, what, you know, people refer to player, player, coaches, you know, Jimmy.
Mike Cleansing:Jimmy was that type.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:But when he was with the San Diego Conquistadors, he would tell me that the head coach was Wilt Chamberlain and Will.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And it wouldn't surprise me, like, Jimmy was coaching the team a lot of times, you know, so he had, he had unbelievable playing experience and knowledge.
Mike Cleansing:He played for great college coaches, played in with amazing players in the aba.
Mike Cleansing:I still, I collected basketball cards when I was a kid, and I have a lot of ABA basketball cards.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know, Julie Serving and, you know, Marvin Barnes and all kinds of guys that you, you know, you'd laugh now looking at the, you know, their, their baseball playing cards.
Mike Cleansing:But Jim was amazing.
Mike Cleansing:X and O coach, kept it simple, great relationship with players.
Mike Cleansing:And so much of the season we were connected at the hip because we were doing a lot of strategic work together and that allowed the other guys to recruit and they were able to find us some great players.
Mike Cleansing:And we just had a great staff.
Mike Cleansing:We were 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 in Ohio State.
Mike Cleansing:And we went from last place to first place in both leagues.
Mike Cleansing:So we kind of learned how to do more with less.
Mike Cleansing:We tried a lot of junk over the years.
Mike Cleansing:We ran a lot of junk when we just couldn't line up, you know, initially player for player with other coaches, especially in the Big Easter, Big Ten, when we first got there, ran a lot of motion offense.
Mike Cleansing:Bobby Knight loved Jimmy.
Mike Cleansing:He would always compliment him that, hey, you guys play the right way.
Mike Cleansing:You know, always very, very complimentary and we.
Mike Cleansing:We actually had great success against Knight's teams.
Mike Cleansing:We beat him twice in the NCAA tournament at Boston College and then had pretty good success in the Big Ten.
Mike Cleansing:But.
Mike Cleansing:But, yeah, unbelievable coach.
Mike Cleansing: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 and they just mentally wouldn't be ready.
Mike Cleansing:And he would just say, that's it, that's it.
Mike Cleansing:We're wrapping it up.
Mike Cleansing:That's it for today.
Mike Cleansing:I don't want to see you go do whatever you got to do, but, like, God forbid you come in tomorrow with this mindset, you know, and.
Mike Cleansing:And we might be two days before a game, Mike, and I'm like, doing the scone report, and I'm like, obi, what the hell?
Mike Cleansing:Like, we gotta go out of bounds place and we gotta do this and that.
Mike Cleansing:And he'd be like.
Mike Cleansing:And sure as hell, every.
Mike Cleansing:Every time he did it, like, we come back the next day and have a great practice.
Mike Cleansing:Kids would be fresh.
Mike Cleansing:He just had a feel for.
Mike Cleansing:I think that there are times, probably from his pro career, there were times when you just.
Mike Cleansing:You're just tired or you mentally need to get away a little bit or take a break or.
Mike Cleansing:And.
Mike Cleansing:And if you did try to force a practice under those circumstances, it was you.
Mike Cleansing:It was unproductive.
Mike Cleansing:It might even be useless.
Mike Cleansing:And so as a young coach, I was always amazed.
Mike Cleansing:I was like, ah, we could never do that.
Mike Cleansing:We gotta prep for this, you know, and we always came back fresher and playing better, you know, so he just always had a good feel for the team and those type of things.
Jason Sunkel:I think that feel for your team is one of the things that really good coaches do very well in terms of what.
Jason Sunkel:What they need at a given moment.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel: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 him home earlier.
Jason Sunkel:Maybe this kid needs a kick in the butt, or maybe this kid needs somebody to put their arm around him or whatever it may be.
Jason Sunkel:And I think really good coaches have a feel for that because, again, they build relationships with their kids.
Jason Sunkel:And when you build relationships with your kids, that helps you to really understand it.
Jason Sunkel:And so talk a little bit about from.
Jason Sunkel: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?
Mike Cleansing:Yeah.
Mike Cleansing:Well, before I do that I'll give you two other things that I think people would enjoy hearing about Jimmy.
Jason Sunkel:Sure.
Mike Cleansing:The first one I'd say is when we would play non conference games, you know that they call guarantee games.
Mike Cleansing:You're paying 70, 80, $90,000 for a team to come in and you know, 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.
Mike Cleansing:And I can remember in those games a lot of big time coaches, they, they get their ego up and they, they're not going to change.
Mike Cleansing:They're like how can we be losing this team?
Mike Cleansing:Just go out and play, play harder, blah blah blah.
Mike Cleansing:And Jimmy was the type that I remember we had a game for Iowa State, I think we were playing Bellarmine, I want to say Bellarmine.
Mike Cleansing:I don't know if that was true or not and I don't even know if they would D2 or D1 at the time but I think up.
Mike Cleansing:But they had a kid and he had transferred I think from, from somewhere else and the kid was destroying us, you know, I mean we couldn't guard and he was going to go for 40.
Mike Cleansing: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 Ten coaches that would put a box in one on a low mid major player or something, you know, or mid, you know, he didn't crazy like he had total respect for that there were great coaches or good players, you know.
Mike Cleansing:And then the other thing was, I told you he kept it simple.
Mike Cleansing:I remember playing, we're playing at Wisconsin and we were struggling something but he's always good at matchups.
Mike Cleansing:He's always watching matchups.
Mike Cleansing:So Mike Red's playing opposite Scoony and Scoony's like 5, 9 and Mike 6, 6, 6.
Mike Cleansing:So we would occasionally when the clock was down we just go 1 4.
Mike Cleansing:I don't know why coaches don't do this anymore.
Mike Cleansing:Like just go 1 4, give it the ball to your best player and put shooters in the corners or you know, and guys down at the short corner and see who runs up to double if you know if they're going to try to help off a good player, you know.
Mike Cleansing:So he said we're not huddling the Cole center and I He says, scoony.
Mike Cleansing:He goes, Go, 1 4.
Mike Cleansing:He's like, Mike, you got a kid.
Mike Cleansing:What was his name?
Mike Cleansing:Really good.
Mike Cleansing:Like, supposedly their best defensive player.
Mike Cleansing:He goes, he's guarding Mike.
Mike Cleansing:But Scooney, Mike will run up and just give a little dribble handoff and pick his man off, force a switch.
Mike Cleansing:So basically, he just, in a simple wrinkle, he'd get a 1 4, Mike would come out of the corner of somewhere, come up to the little ball screen handoff, and we'd get the point guard on red.
Mike Cleansing:So now Mike six, six, and a point guard from Wisconsin's maybe six feet.
Mike Cleansing:And he would just say, tell the guys.
Mike Cleansing:He goes, scooney, just go back to the corner where Mike came from.
Mike Cleansing:Mike, it's 14 flat.
Mike Cleansing:Just back, back him down.
Mike Cleansing:And he just back him down, back him down and paint, you know, scored on him like four times in a row, you know.
Mike Cleansing:And then I think it was Dick Bennett, you know, called timeout, and he.
Mike Cleansing:They had to run a double team at him or something.
Mike Cleansing:But, I mean, this is what I was saying about my dad, like, how we learned to play early on, just kept it so simple.
Mike Cleansing:It's 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.
Mike Cleansing:And we would do stuff like that all the time.
Mike Cleansing:We play 1, 3, 1, and teams would always go 2, 1, 2.
Mike Cleansing:So we would put a guard on one of the wing spots and a big man in the back.
Mike Cleansing:Usually you put the.
Mike Cleansing:Like, a small guy in the back and he runs corner.
Mike Cleansing:The corner, Yep.
Mike Cleansing:So the team would go 2, 1, 2, and we would put a big man in the back.
Mike Cleansing:And one of the two wings then would be a guard, a smaller guard.
Mike Cleansing: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 2, 3 zone.
Mike Cleansing:And what would happen is what he would teach the kids how to within one or two passes basically match up to them perfectly.
Mike Cleansing:And in those days, it's probably the same now.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, people run man to man offensive sets and zone sets.
Mike Cleansing:And I remember definitively, we.
Mike Cleansing:We did it at Seton hall one year at Boston College, some kind of junk.
Mike Cleansing:And the point guard would call a zone offense because he saw his own.
Mike Cleansing:And then within two passes, we were playing man to man.
Mike Cleansing:And then he would call a man to man set.
Mike Cleansing:And then we go back to the zone again.
Mike Cleansing:There was this cat, mouse, and PJ Kalisimo starts Screaming from the sideline, just play like, don't run anything, just like just move and cut.
Mike Cleansing:It's like actually a bad defense but if you don't stand still, you know.
Mike Cleansing: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 get is that Knight thought like he was a great coach and like saw through it.
Mike Cleansing:A guy that, you know, ran motion offense and we would steal shit from Indiana, you know, back then we would run sets, we run this thing pairs.
Mike Cleansing:Pairs meant Scooney 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.
Mike Cleansing:And they just played by themselves.
Mike Cleansing:They just screen, re, screen curl, pop, what 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.
Mike Cleansing:And that was the offense.
Mike Cleansing:And you would run a three man offense and, or reversible the other side.
Mike Cleansing:And if you had your point guard little scoony and he's screening big fours and fives, a lane on cross screens and down screens and back screens and it was just like simple basketball.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:Just you know, the basic techniques for how to take advantage once you notice how you're being defended.
Jason Sunkel:What did that look like in practice to work on again those, those types of skills?
Jason Sunkel:How did you guys design your practices?
Mike Cleansing:Everything Mike was progressions, you know, you like.
Mike Cleansing:We wouldn't just practice a shell drill on defense.
Mike Cleansing:We'd start with one on one.
Mike Cleansing:Then we go to help and recover two, one, two.
Mike Cleansing:Then we go to three weeks, I'd help, then we go to four.
Mike Cleansing:And then in a four man box shell that we turn it into a triangle.
Mike Cleansing:We'd work 1, 2, 1.
Mike Cleansing:And then we would pass, just pass around the perimeter.
Mike Cleansing:Then we'd pass on the perimeter and we'd say okay, you can cut.
Mike Cleansing:And we try to have our cut is face cut over the top.
Mike Cleansing:And then we teach our kids to deny that and always make the cutter go behind.
Mike Cleansing:And then we would include dribble penetration.
Mike Cleansing:So like whether it was offense or defense, everything was built from one on one up to five on five.
Mike Cleansing:And then same with concepts of motion offense.
Mike Cleansing:We'd play just three on three basketball.
Mike Cleansing:We'd run a triangle offense with a point and two Low post, guys are off the lane, then we'd invert it.
Mike Cleansing:We'd play with two guys on the perimeter and we would run things.
Mike Cleansing:We had an offense, we just back screen the passer, that's all.
Mike Cleansing:Whoever passed the ball was going to receive a back screen from one, two or three players, usually two.
Mike Cleansing:And then that leaves you people to swing the ball to, to the other side every single time.
Mike Cleansing:It sounds simple, right?
Mike Cleansing:Every single time a player passes the ball, he's going to receive back screens from some other players unselfishly on the team.
Mike Cleansing: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 passer.
Mike Cleansing:So there's your five, you know, so.
Mike Cleansing:And spacing.
Mike Cleansing:If you're going to do that, you have to have great spacing.
Mike Cleansing: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 sides.
Mike Cleansing:The defense has to play both of those two man games or whatever your offenses are, they can't cheat and play 5 on 4, 4 on 3, 3 on 2 and load up on the weak side.
Mike Cleansing: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, 2, 3 and 4 and sometimes all five positions depending on what offenses the other team was running.
Mike Cleansing:And if it wasn't a good well run offense, strategically we would just outnumber it, you know, we'd, we'd flood the weak side, you know, and just a lot of junk that probably came out of playing when we just weren't as good.
Mike Cleansing:And we're trying to compete against great teams.
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Jason Sunkel:It's so interesting, just the changes in the game from time when I was playing, 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.
Jason Sunkel:Whereas now almost all the screening action that takes place initially starts with a ball screen to get that scoony Penn Michael Red switch, right?
Jason Sunkel:That's the whole idea of trying to get your offensive player to have an advantage when you, when you switch.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:And it sounds like you guys were doing some of those things even back in the day, just getting, not probably done at the same volume.
Mike Cleansing:Well, you know, it's interesting.
Mike Cleansing:It drives me crazy.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And he's the best back screener out there.
Mike Cleansing:Like, they're so glued to him.
Mike Cleansing:Why wouldn't you have sets ready where he's a back screener, right?
Mike Cleansing:This man's glued to him.
Mike Cleansing:So it's really a double screener.
Mike Cleansing:And every time he sets a screen for a player to cut to the basket, you know, and the other thing I always say to coaches is, why don't you have backdoor plays ready?
Mike Cleansing:You know, you, you have, you got a, I don't know, a seven or eight point lead and it gets inside of four minutes and at some point their defense is playing it straight.
Mike Cleansing:But now they have to come after you, you know, or that you just went on a, you know, 9, 0 run.
Mike Cleansing:They call timeout.
Mike Cleansing:They're going to get real, real aggressive.
Mike Cleansing:Like, where's that, where's that sucker play that's just so ready to be called?
Mike Cleansing:You know, just clearing a side and getting a back door layup.
Mike Cleansing:Great.
Mike Cleansing:Coaches still do it, but I don't, I don't.
Mike Cleansing:It's just like again, it's you, you wonder what is the training ground for coaches coming up the ladder?
Mike Cleansing:Or are they, were they recruiters or, you know, in the NBA?
Mike Cleansing:No surprise.
Mike Cleansing:A lot of those guys that became good coaches were video guys.
Mike Cleansing:They came up through the video room where I think is still to this day is the greatest training ground for being an X and O person.
Mike Cleansing:You know, whether it's offense, defense, special situations, anything.
Mike Cleansing:If you're not breaking film down and stealing things from.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, I laugh.
Mike Cleansing: e Czech national team back in: Mike Cleansing:I've been over there a few times.
Mike Cleansing:When it was communist, they were one of the top five teams in the world in the Olympic ratings.
Mike Cleansing:And when I coached the team, we had three seven footers.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, it was a great basketball team, but it was behind the iron Curtain and crazy shit would happen.
Mike Cleansing:Like one day a guy got a bloody nose.
Mike Cleansing:They took him over to the training table, Mike, and laid him face down.
Mike Cleansing:And the trainer started karate chopping the back of his Achilles tendon.
Mike Cleansing:And I'm looking and I said to the interpreter, what the hell is he doing?
Mike Cleansing:And he goes, he says something to the trainer and he turns back to me and he goes, pressure point, pressure point.
Mike Cleansing:And all of a sudden the kid's nose stops bleeding.
Mike Cleansing:And I'm like, holy shit.
Mike Cleansing:Because you go over there thinking, you know everything about basketball.
Mike Cleansing:The Americans are the greatest, you know, and they're doing deep.
Mike Cleansing:They're doing double sessions with deep tissue massage.
Mike Cleansing:There's no ice.
Mike Cleansing:You can't even find an ice cube in the country.
Mike Cleansing:You know, they, they drink beer and it's cool, but it's not.
Mike Cleansing:They don't like ice cold things, you know, so you learn things like that.
Mike Cleansing:But the reason I brought it up is we were playing in a tournament in Sweden.
Mike Cleansing:It was the Czech national team, the Swedish national team, the Polish national team and Kansas State University.
Mike Cleansing:And guess who the coach at Kansas State is.
Mike Cleansing: , I don't know,: Jason Sunkel:Oh, man.
Jason Sunkel:So are we talking.
Jason Sunkel:Mitch Richmond was there.
Mike Cleansing:He's still coaching a great Division 1 program today.
Jason Sunkel:And I'm trying to, I'm trying to think who would have been there.
Mike Cleansing:No one ever get it was Dana Altman.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, okay.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike Cleansing:So Dana's the young coach, head coach of Kansas State.
Mike Cleansing:And we're running a set that I never like the check taught me, the offensive set.
Mike Cleansing:And we score three three point shots on the, on the first three possessions of the game.
Mike Cleansing:It's nine to nothing.
Mike Cleansing:And it was like a reverse action thing where you swing the ball one way, say right to left.
Mike Cleansing:And then you, you.
Mike Cleansing:The low post center was a giant seven footer.
Mike Cleansing:He comes up and sets a flare screen for a three point shot.
Mike Cleansing:But he bananas out in such an angle wide that the defender on the ball has been trained to jump to the basketball.
Mike Cleansing:So on the pass in that middle third of the court, he jumps to the ball and every time he jumps to 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.
Mike Cleansing:So this little guard on Kansas State gets annihilated by a blind back screen side, you know, side flare screen on the first three possessions.
Mike Cleansing:And we'd been running in practice, but we were running against each other, so they knew the set.
Mike Cleansing:So I'm watching from the sideline and it's three nothing, six nothing, nine nothing.
Mike Cleansing:And Dana's screaming at the kid, get over the screen.
Mike Cleansing:And the kid screams back at Dana and he goes, I'm jumping to the ball like you taught me to jump to the ball.
Mike Cleansing:And now you want me to go opposite.
Mike Cleansing:Like, I'm supposed to.
Mike Cleansing:The guy, my man, passes it to the left and I'm supposed to go to the right like that.
Mike Cleansing:We don't do that.
Mike Cleansing:And so I was like, holy shit.
Mike Cleansing:Like, I think we could make an offense out of it.
Mike Cleansing:So I bring it back to Boston College and we put it in and then we add.
Mike Cleansing:We build off of it and we create an entire offense around this, which initially was like a secondary break.
Mike Cleansing:We would run it as a secondary break.
Mike Cleansing:And we called it check.
Mike Cleansing:So for years we call it check.
Mike Cleansing: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 check, like.
Mike Cleansing:And I'm like, I tell them the story.
Mike Cleansing:Now, 20 years, 25 years later, I'm like, guys, you know why we call that check?
Mike Cleansing:I said, because that was stolen from the Czech national team.
Mike Cleansing:It was actually the eca, you know, but.
Mike Cleansing:But again, like, there's no original, you know, there's very few original offenses or defenses or, you know, and being a video guy or, you know, being tasked with trying to come up with game plans and practice plans and drills.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know, up near your shoulder as you were moving left to right, catching, and then, you know, grounding yourself and going up into the shot or, or driving from that position or whatever, you know, So I don't see that as much too.
Mike Cleansing:When I go watch shoot arounds, you know, for, for 12 years I ran basketball in the Big Ten.
Mike Cleansing:So I was.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, 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.
Jason Sunkel:And I think that one thing that players definitely have done over the course of time is become more skilled.
Jason Sunkel:You look at the shooting that you see in the game today.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, I'm talking at all levels.
Jason Sunkel:But back you go back 15 or 20 years ago, and maybe every team had one or two guys that could shoot it.
Jason Sunkel:And now every team has maybe one or two guys that can't shoot it.
Jason Sunkel:And again, it's all to varying degrees.
Jason Sunkel:But I would definitely say the skill level in terms of the shooting in basketball at all levels has improved dramatically.
Jason Sunkel:And I think part of that is there's some.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:But I think for the most part, when you look at the way kids shoot the ball, you see very little variance anymore.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Those aren't the guys that you would look at.
Jason Sunkel:And yet they were all very, very good shooters.
Jason Sunkel:Whereas today you look at most kids shoot the ball sort of the same way within their own physiology.
Jason Sunkel:So it's just interesting the evolution of the game and how much better the shooting has become over time.
Mike Cleansing:No, it's a really good point, Mike.
Mike Cleansing:And bringing up Europe, I mean, when we in the 70s, 80s, 90s, like, we thought of European basketball that way because they just played in the gym all the time and they drilled and they drilled in a drill.
Mike Cleansing: And in the: Mike Cleansing:Like the Americans were known as one on one.
Mike Cleansing:Like I tell you, we played hours and hours and hours of one on one basketball.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, it was, it was like improvised jazz, you know, it was much more like free flowing.
Mike Cleansing:And we didn't probably run a lot of set plays or things like, you know, A ton of that stuff.
Mike Cleansing: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 condition.
Mike Cleansing:Absolutely.
Mike Cleansing:That you can just shoot and shoot and shoot and they have the gun and, you know, different tools like that.
Mike Cleansing:But yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting now.
Mike Cleansing:I agree with you.
Mike Cleansing:There was even like, you know, Mike Red.
Mike Cleansing:I give Mike so much credit.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And you know what was lucky for Mike was he was drafted by the Bucks and he ended up kind of behind Ray Allen or under Ray's wing.
Mike Cleansing:And I think he learned just how to practice and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and the repetition because for us he was an unbelievable slasher and maybe the best player I ever coached in using the backboard.
Mike Cleansing:Mike had an uncanny knack of using the backboard, 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.
Mike Cleansing:And we were taking advantage of the fact that he was 66 and could get down in a low stance and handle the ball and cross it over and spin, dribble and slash and get to the glass and use the glass.
Mike Cleansing:But yeah, it was kind of interesting to think about.
Mike Cleansing:I say this a lot of times, even with nil.
Mike Cleansing:It's almost as if the American system is moving more towards the professional club system of Europe.
Mike Cleansing:The way it was when we knew it that none of those guys played in the school system.
Mike Cleansing:They went to school and at 2 o'clock they went to the local sports club and that's where they got their training.
Mike Cleansing:And they played in the youth games and then they played other sport clubs in cities across Europe and things.
Mike Cleansing:But it's almost like we've moved into that direction now.
Mike Cleansing:Why?
Mike Cleansing:You know, we pay players, they're playing indoor basketball 12 months a year.
Mike Cleansing:They don't play outside anymore.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, a lot of communities, you can't even find outdoor courts, you know, or people don't use them a whole lot.
Mike Cleansing:So it is just different how the game evolves.
Mike Cleansing:Like you said, let's talk a little.
Jason Sunkel:Bit about the NIL piece of it.
Jason Sunkel:And I'm assuming that you've talked to a lot of people in the game since NIL has come on board.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Just where are we with Nil, and where do you think it's headed?
Mike Cleansing:Well, it's funny, you know, we talked about Jim O'Brien, but I also worked with another legendary Jim, Jim Delaney.
Mike Cleansing:And I think, you know, in my 12 years at the Big Ten, you know, we.
Mike Cleansing:Jim basically invented, you know, the Big Ten network in college television network.
Mike Cleansing:And, you know, since.
Mike Cleansing:Since he did it, everybody's kind of copied the other power conferences have copied it.
Mike Cleansing:But he.
Mike Cleansing:He was revolutionary that way.
Mike Cleansing:And I think he realized about a decade ago that we were losing the Argum, the amateur argument.
Mike Cleansing:You know, we, the Big Ten, had money to pay players.
Mike Cleansing:Initially, it was what they call cost of attendance, which is all athletes were looking for at that time was just some spending money.
Mike Cleansing:The scholarship covered room and board, tuition, books and fees, but that was it.
Mike Cleansing:So, you know, if you wanted to go out for pizza or go to the movies or go out with a girlfriend or, you know, buddies or have your parents come visit or come to some games or go home a couple times, they really didn't have the loose change.
Mike Cleansing:You know, at Ohio State, we were lucky.
Mike Cleansing:A lot of our kids lived off campus, and they pocketed the stipend money for.
Mike Cleansing:What was that?
Mike Cleansing:That.
Mike Cleansing:That room charge?
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, for the dormitory.
Mike Cleansing:But because in Columbus, three or four of them could live for, you know, for so inexpensive of a.
Mike Cleansing:Of a rent, a monthly rent charge.
Mike Cleansing:They'd end up with 500 bucks in their pocket every month.
Mike Cleansing:But at Boston College, you couldn't afford to get an apartment somewhere in Boston.
Mike Cleansing:Like, you had to be in the dorm.
Mike Cleansing:You know what I mean?
Mike Cleansing:But I think Jim sensed it, and the real problem was that the NCAA got even.
Mike Cleansing:To this day, it's too big and it's too immobile and it's too laden with committees and bureaucracy, and they couldn't nimbly move in any way at any time.
Mike Cleansing:And then they were belligerent in the ways they demanded.
Mike Cleansing:No, this is how we've always done it or this is how it's going to go.
Mike Cleansing:And so Jim's argument, I think he recruited Mike Sly from the sec, and they got together and they basically went to the membership and were threatening to almost break off if we didn't change the voting structure.
Mike Cleansing:Because the way the NCA was set up, Mike, every school had one vote.
Mike Cleansing:So if there were 350 schools in Division 1.
Mike Cleansing:Can you imagine?
Mike Cleansing:You know, you know, I don't know.
Mike Cleansing:You know, NC A and T has the same vote that Ohio State university has with 50,000 students.
Mike Cleansing:You know, so coaches were starting to bounce around, get million dollar contracts and they had freedom of movement.
Mike Cleansing:And then we were putting millions into Taj Mah, Taj Mahal of athletic facilities and the kids weren't getting anything.
Mike Cleansing:I mean they got a, they might have got a multi, you know, hundred multi, you know, not million dollar, but maybe 2 to 3 to $400,000.
Mike Cleansing:Education paid for wasn't like it wasn't worth anything.
Mike Cleansing:But there wasn't that trickle down.
Mike Cleansing:And as the network television money grew, we needed to pay the players.
Mike Cleansing:The problem is we probably lost a decade.
Mike Cleansing:And so finally we did get permissible voting through for the, it was Powell 5 at that time and we got in cost of attendance.
Mike Cleansing:And you know, they used a, they used a formula for it.
Mike Cleansing: or: Mike Cleansing:But we still, we lost kind of the public sentiment as to what the kids, you know, should get as a piece of all this growth and development and you know, obviously the money, you know, and so that was kind of the start of it.
Mike Cleansing:And now they give even some money, some Alston money, you know, for academic performance.
Mike Cleansing:But we just lost a lot of ground.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And the other funny thing is when those kids wanted to work the NCA's telling them you can't have any job, nothing.
Jason Sunkel:Exactly.
Mike Cleansing:You can't for a kid in basketball, you can't run a camp.
Mike Cleansing:But really what they wanted to do, they wanted to be influencers.
Mike Cleansing:It was all social media.
Mike Cleansing:They were like, you know, you mean you get paid if you have 50,000 followers that you know that you get a check?
Mike Cleansing:You know, that's really what they wanted to do.
Mike Cleansing:They didn't want to, I mean occasionally someone would write a children's book or you know, you know, they could have autograph signings or things like that.
Mike Cleansing: ,: Mike Cleansing:And he goes, coach, I know my name's not on the jersey, but they're selling.
Mike Cleansing:That's my jersey with my number on it.
Mike Cleansing:Nike knows like they're either going to want to.
Mike Cleansing:Kids are going to wear my number or Mike's Red's number and we don't get anything from that.
Mike Cleansing:And I, and I was like, that's a pretty good question, Scoonie.
Mike Cleansing:I really don't have any, an answer for you.
Mike Cleansing:You know, and then you, you know, you fast forward 15 years, 18 years, and you see how, how we got to this place.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I think I, I like to think that if we could have got them, you know, four, five, six thousand dollars cash in with everything else, we could have stayed on track.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, at some point, you know, the, the, the network television contracts are so immense now.
Mike Cleansing: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 2, 3, 4 places and for the right reasons, they can immediately play.
Mike Cleansing:They don't have to sit out a year academically anymore.
Mike Cleansing:But Jim would, Jim Delaney would reflect back when he played for North Carolina and they, you know, freshmen were ineligible.
Mike Cleansing:So it's just amazing how things evolve over time.
Mike Cleansing:And a lot of it's technology and usually it's, it's changed for the better.
Mike Cleansing:But people do get nostalgic for, you know, a low post back to the basket center.
Mike Cleansing:They do get nostalgic for Mikhail or Elijah one every once in a while.
Jason Sunkel:See somebody with some post moves.
Jason Sunkel:Right.
Jason Sunkel:I understand.
Jason Sunkel:There's no, there's no doubt about that.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah.
Jason Sunkel:The nil landscape is so interesting to me.
Jason Sunkel:I look at it and I'm, I try to go and go back and picture myself and what that would have looked like in terms of money.
Jason Sunkel:And just like I, you, you mentioned about the guys at Ohio State sort of, you know, 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.
Jason Sunkel:I remember getting, I get 300 bucks every year during Christmas break and I would try to make that, you know, I, I'd save 150 bucks and every year I try to get myself a pair of, you know, buy a pair of shoes over Christmas break, you know, for myself 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.
Jason Sunkel:But 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.
Jason Sunkel:Rick.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, I, I couldn't even try.
Jason Sunkel:Trying to even fathom that is crazy.
Jason Sunkel:And then you hear the stories about guys that.
Jason Sunkel:And we're not even talking about giant schools, but guys who are getting, I mean, real money.
Jason Sunkel:Real money in terms of what, you know, what, what, what you can do with it.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Yeah, it's really a challenging landscape and yet I still go back to.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:And so the system was inherently unfair to players.
Jason Sunkel:And I think you made a great point about the Runway of it went.
Jason Sunkel:It went from 0 to 60 in such a short period of time.
Jason Sunkel:Whereas if it have had that 10 year run up.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah.
Jason Sunkel:Probably could have been figured out in a much more organized fashion as opposed to sort of the wild west that we have right now, if that makes any sense.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.
Mike Cleansing:And even, even the rolling of this, I mean, we still don't have any federal legislation so that states have different laws.
Mike Cleansing:You know, they're finally kind of getting a.
Mike Cleansing:It's almost like the IRS is threatening the collectives that you're not nonprofit.
Mike Cleansing:So if, you know, donors want to contribute, they can't write that off, you know.
Mike Cleansing:But there's still going to be a lot of litigation ahead.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:No one's.
Mike Cleansing:We don't know the impact of Title nine as they start to distribute this revenue.
Mike Cleansing:We don't know the impact on Olympic sports.
Mike Cleansing:It'll be interesting to see just how it shakes out, whether the conferences keep expanding.
Mike Cleansing:You know, football will be the kind of the experiment, I think.
Mike Cleansing:They're, you know, they're not really aligned with the NCAA as far as the cfp, and they'll.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And depending on the success or growth of that sport, basketball would probably be watching.
Mike Cleansing:And then it'll be interesting to see, you know, if.
Mike Cleansing:If that would be something that that sport would then, you know, take some lessons from what they see football do and see how, you know, that might work.
Mike Cleansing:But, yeah, it's.
Mike Cleansing:It's just really been interesting to follow all that.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Just tell me a little bit about that experience and what you learned about officiating during your time overseeing the Big Ten officials.
Mike Cleansing:Well, when I was associate commissioner for the Mid American Conference, every league typically has a coordinator of officials.
Mike Cleansing:So I worked with a guy named Sam Licklider.
Mike Cleansing:He was an older ex Big Ten ref.
Mike Cleansing:And, you know, as a basketball coach for 25 years, you know what a good call is and a bad call.
Mike Cleansing:But I didn't know any of the.
Mike Cleansing:What we call mechanics of officiating.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, I knew there were three guys.
Mike Cleansing:I didn't know how they rotate positions.
Mike Cleansing:I didn't know the coverages.
Mike Cleansing:I just knew if it was a blown call or a great call, you know, or, you know, if you confirm with a video of whether the ball hit the backboard first or was a clean block.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, those type of things.
Mike Cleansing:And so, you know, sitting next to Sam at games and asking questions and watching video, it was like anything.
Mike Cleansing:It was just retraining yourself.
Mike Cleansing:When in my years at, say, the Ohio State program, I'd have student managers cut and film for me and different staff, and they'd always say, rick, how do you see all 10 players moving at, like.
Mike Cleansing:Because I'd be like, freeze it.
Mike Cleansing:You see this guy over here?
Mike Cleansing:And they're like, how do you see that?
Mike Cleansing:And I'm like, I don't know.
Mike Cleansing:I don't how to explain it.
Mike Cleansing:Just training you know, 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.
Mike Cleansing:So first I had to kind of learn the mechanics.
Mike Cleansing:I understood play calling.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:So, you know, I learned a lot the first couple years at the mid American and then when I got to the Big Ten, Jim actually asked me to do both.
Mike Cleansing:He wanted to rebuild.
Mike Cleansing:We had aging.
Mike Cleansing:We had seven or eight like aging Big Ten officials that were kind of legendary.
Mike Cleansing:You'd see him on all the games for a couple decades and.
Mike Cleansing:But they were all, you know, slowing down and immobile and kind of past their prime.
Mike Cleansing:But we didn't have any feeder system.
Mike Cleansing:So again, Jim was an unbelievable visionary.
Mike Cleansing:He basically created an LLC for us.
Mike Cleansing:So we basically started an outside business that I was the executive director of.
Mike Cleansing:It was called the Collegiate Officiating Consortium and we recruited other commissioners leagues in with us.
Mike Cleansing:So basically it was two things, Mike.
Mike Cleansing:It was one that we would be a better take better use of the finances of the low mid mages if we teamed up with them.
Mike Cleansing:And then the other thing that I would do is I would on off night share some of the top officials in America down as crew chiefs in those leagues.
Mike Cleansing:And then we would also create a whole basically identification, training, development and performance assessment program.
Mike Cleansing:So we built this whole entire operation at its height.
Mike Cleansing:We were managing 65 Division 1 schools in like 22 states and we were overseeing all the officiating.
Mike Cleansing:We were basically using the low mid major as a feeder system up to the Big Ten.
Mike Cleansing:But.
Mike Cleansing:But we also had journeyman refs that 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 shifts, true chiefs, or we would take kind of officials at the big ten level or the power crunch level that should probably be getting less games and supplementing their decreasing assignments with increases in the Max, Summit, Horizon, Metro, Atlantic, America, east, wherever.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know, or we just won't.
Mike Cleansing:They're all independent contractors, so it's, we can decide whether to offer them a contract or not, you know.
Jason Sunkel:Right.
Mike Cleansing:So it's kind of that whole process.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And they usually start in D2 and D3 and move up.
Mike Cleansing: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's tournament the next year and the next year.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:And we did that with 20 young officials in the Big Ten.
Mike Cleansing:And then they would also still like go back into the leagues where they cut their teeth.
Mike Cleansing:You know, 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.
Mike Cleansing:And then you have to bring them along slowly.
Mike Cleansing:You know, I would, I would take a young ref and give them five or six non conference games and some of those guarantee games.
Mike Cleansing:I protect them with a couple veterans because the coaches will always come at you as like, who the hell is this guy?
Mike Cleansing:I never seen him before, you know, and on occasion it gets comical.
Mike Cleansing:I remember I had a young, I had a young rep, Tyler Ford, who was breaking into Division 1, but also in the NBA training ground.
Mike Cleansing:And they were really high on him.
Mike Cleansing:And I put him on a game at Michigan State.
Mike Cleansing:And Tom ended up losing actually to Texas Southern.
Mike Cleansing:And it wasn't close.
Mike Cleansing:It was like eight points or something.
Mike Cleansing:It wasn't a buzzer beat or one of those.
Mike Cleansing:And we talked the next day and we were just talking about plays.
Mike Cleansing:And you know, Tom was obviously not happy with losing to Texas Southern and probably handed them a check on their way out the door.
Mike Cleansing:But he was like, and who's the young kid?
Mike Cleansing:And I was like, well, that's Tyler Ford.
Mike Cleansing:I'm trying, I'm trying to break him into the Big Ten.
Mike Cleansing:But he goes well, where's he work?
Mike Cleansing:I go, well, just to give an example, Tom, last year he worked in the, you know, Mac in the summer, in the horizon.
Mike Cleansing:He did like 28 Division 1 games.
Mike Cleansing:And then he worked in the G league.
Mike Cleansing:He did 32 games in the G League, and he did four NBA games.
Mike Cleansing:And there's a quiet pause.
Mike Cleansing:And all of a sudden Tom goes, get the F out of here.
Mike Cleansing:And I'm like, well, Tom, you gotta trust me a little bit.
Mike Cleansing:Like, I'm charged with developing the next generation of refs.
Mike Cleansing:And he's really good, but to be honest, we're gonna lose him to the NBA.
Mike Cleansing:And sure enough, the next season he was in the NBA.
Mike Cleansing:And I don't know, it's probably.
Mike Cleansing:It's probably been six or eight years.
Mike Cleansing:He's worked deep into the NBA playoffs now.
Mike Cleansing:You know, he's from.
Mike Cleansing:He's an Indiana kid.
Mike Cleansing:He worked in the.
Mike Cleansing:He ran intramural sports at Purdue, which was the other thing I had to tell Tom.
Mike Cleansing:I was like, tom, he can never do Purdue's games ever, because he works at Purdue, you know, And I have to be careful.
Mike Cleansing:Like, he hasn't advanced to the point where he'd even be on big.
Mike Cleansing:Big Ten games late.
Mike Cleansing:Cause I would have to scrutinize, you know, what people would say if a Purdue employee was working a big game between Michigan State and Wisconsin, you know, so that's the other thing.
Mike Cleansing:Behind the science scenes, as always, we have strict conference conflict of interest rules.
Mike Cleansing:We have rules on policies and procedures on how early they get to the.
Mike Cleansing:To the venues, all the reporting they have to.
Mike Cleansing:They're required to watch video.
Mike Cleansing:So much goes on behind the scenes.
Mike Cleansing:But it was kind of a neat concept of regionalizing officiating.
Mike Cleansing:And really what happened was, Tom, Jim Delaney went to some meetings where 31 referees, 31 coordinators, officials were representing 31 conferences.
Mike Cleansing:And Jim was like, we can never get 31 guys on the same page for what's good for the game.
Mike Cleansing:And Jim had done a huge study back when the scoring got down into the 50s, Mike.
Mike Cleansing:And he was like, this is not good for the game.
Mike Cleansing:And he took it upon himself.
Mike Cleansing:He.
Mike Cleansing:He created a competition committee and he looked at 50 years of college basketball.
Mike Cleansing:And he basically came to the realization that the defense has way too much of a advantage and the games are way too physical.
Mike Cleansing:And we had to make a real philosophical change nationally to open up the games 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.
Mike Cleansing:So that was kind of an interesting con.
Mike Cleansing:Part of my job.
Jason Sunkel:You're developing a young guy.
Jason Sunkel:You're looking at somebody that you're bringing in and you're interacting with them.
Jason Sunkel:What were some of the intangible qualities of a good official?
Mike Cleansing:Well, first of all, they have to have, like, all those mechanics down.
Mike Cleansing:So all the positioning and signaling and rotations and being in the right spot to see plays is first and foremost.
Mike Cleansing:But then as they work, you start to get an analysis of their judgment.
Mike Cleansing:And I would tell them, you know, 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.
Mike Cleansing:Not only do they do all these things from a fundamental level, but now they understand the nuance of the game.
Mike Cleansing:You know, they match plays up at each end.
Mike Cleansing:If there's a, you know, an over the back file here and there's one slightly over the back, they'll.
Mike Cleansing:They'll try to match it up, or there's a lot of nuance in it that kind of falls into this judgment category.
Mike Cleansing:And you'll see other officials sometimes just don't have a feel for it.
Mike Cleansing:It's like a call that doesn't fit the game, you know, kind of that stuff.
Mike Cleansing:So it's really.
Mike Cleansing:It's really interesting.
Mike Cleansing:There's really both an art and a science to it.
Mike Cleansing:And then as they progress, then it's a question of talking to coaches.
Mike Cleansing: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 miss it or you didn't have a good look at it or you wish you had it back.
Mike Cleansing:You know, the worst thing you can say is, no, no, I was right.
Mike Cleansing:Because they're going to go in at halftime and look at the video.
Mike Cleansing:You know, there's so much technology now, or it's going to be on social media.
Mike Cleansing:Someone's going to take a screenshot and post it on X.
Mike Cleansing:You know, so that's a.
Mike Cleansing:That's kind of a big developmental thing.
Mike Cleansing:And then obviously dealing with the pressure.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, it's interesting.
Mike Cleansing:The Big Ten now, because of Oregon, Washington, UCLA and usc, they're bringing in west coast refs in the Big Ten games.
Mike Cleansing:But what happens initially is they're bringing in guys that the majority of the league, the coaches have never seen before.
Jason Sunkel:Right.
Mike Cleansing:And I do think that, that there's difference in styles of play.
Mike Cleansing:As much as we want to ref the whole country the same way, you know, there's, there can be a physicality difference or a style of play difference.
Mike Cleansing:But even more than that, in the Big Ten, the Big Ten has led the country in attendance for like 45 consecutive years.
Mike Cleansing:So I was just noticing the other day they had 6,000 in Oregon.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, 6,000 in the Big Ten is like half empty everywhere.
Mike Cleansing:You know, you don't see it.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, it's even bloodthirsty at Rutgers and at Nebraska, you know, sold out arenas.
Mike Cleansing:So there's press pressure that comes with that in every game in the Big Ten is nationally televised.
Mike Cleansing:So there's no, there's scrutiny everywhere and millions of people are watching the games.
Mike Cleansing:And you have to be able to deal with all that pressure, you know, night after night after night.
Mike Cleansing:So those are kind of the, the hurdles that even great young refs have to kind of get over.
Jason Sunkel:That makes a lot of sense.
Jason Sunkel:I mean, I think, right.
Jason Sunkel:The ability to have confidence yourself.
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:Sort of like just about, just about anything in life.
Jason Sunkel:Probably that's a, that's a.
Jason Sunkel:That's probably an app description with just about anything.
Jason Sunkel:All right, we're coming up on an hour and a half.
Jason Sunkel:Rick, I want to ask you one final two part question.
Jason Sunkel: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?
Jason Sunkel: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.
Jason Sunkel:So your biggest challenge and your biggest joy.
Mike Cleansing:Well, I think the challenge for me now, I've shifted a little bit.
Mike Cleansing:I do some consulting.
Mike Cleansing:I'm working with some tech firms.
Mike Cleansing:I still, I do some kind of quiet basketball analysis for coaches behind the scenes here and there.
Mike Cleansing:Sometimes a lot of these guys, even some of the great coaches, they just want some feedback from someone outside the program, usually acknowledge what they're seeing is accurate or to kind of bounce a couple new ideas off of them.
Mike Cleansing:But this year I joined the faculty at Denison University.
Mike Cleansing:So I'm.
Mike Cleansing:I'll be teaching a leadership theory class in the spring.
Mike Cleansing:I think the challenge for me right now is that 62 in working with young college people.
Mike Cleansing:Can I still be like, can I be relevant generationally?
Mike Cleansing:You know, I'm.
Mike Cleansing:I'm not the greatest on technology.
Mike Cleansing:I mean, I mean, I live for years in a video room and video editing and some of that tech, but AI and things like that, you know, that's new to our generation.
Mike Cleansing:And, you know, we're trying to figure out, you know, Excel spreadsheets and some basic stuff like me trying to get on this program on my laptop.
Mike Cleansing:I lucky I've got three daughters that are all, you know, relatively recent college grads.
Mike Cleansing: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, 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, you know, the grit you need after you hear no, you know, 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, you know, as my experience on campus.
Mike Cleansing:You know, how, how can I give them some lessons but.
Mike Cleansing:But still try to be relevant to, you know, what they deal with, you know, in the here and now for what they all face and post Covid it's a very different.
Mike Cleansing:It's a lot of things.
Mike Cleansing:You know, there's a lot of mental health issues and there's a lot of things going on.
Mike Cleansing:So I think that's, that's probably the challenge.
Mike Cleansing:And, and at the same time, I get a great sense of benefit from just again, like giving back or at this stage in my career, I've done just about everything.
Mike Cleansing:I.
Mike Cleansing:I feel like, you know, there's certainly things I regret or things I would have liked to have done.
Mike Cleansing:But when I look back overall from a standpoint of 40 years in basketball, you know, I've coached at different levels.
Mike Cleansing:I've.
Mike Cleansing:I've experienced horrible seasons and championships and a Final Four and multiple NCAA appearances.
Mike Cleansing:I've.
Mike Cleansing:I've been on the administrative side where I.
Mike Cleansing:I'm looking at officiating or the.
Mike Cleansing: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.
Mike Cleansing:I've coached internationally.
Mike Cleansing:So basketball has been unbelievable to me and continues to be.
Mike Cleansing:I'm going to do some work in Athens and in April at a camp overseas, but it's time to Give back.
Mike Cleansing:It's time to kind of share a lot of the stories that we got to talk about.
Mike Cleansing: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, you know, visionary Jim Delaney was with regard to the Big Ten, the commissioner for over 30, 30 years.
Mike Cleansing:And so, so, yeah, so I think that's probably the best answer to your question.
Mike Cleansing:Absolutely.
Jason Sunkel:That's very well said.
Jason Sunkel:Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share.
Jason Sunkel:How can people reach out to you, get in touch with you, whether you want to share, email, whatever, whatever you feel comfortable with.
Jason Sunkel:And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.
Mike Cleansing:Yeah, these days probably the best is just LinkedIn, you know, just trying to, you know, connect through LinkedIn and then depending on what, you know, people are interested in chatting about or whatever, you know, see how it goes from there to either then to share phone numbers or email addresses.
Mike Cleansing:But I think most people are on LinkedIn these days or know what it is.
Mike Cleansing:The other thing is, you know, I, you can probably find me know, just through Denison University right now or, or just like, like us, you know, word of mouth, you know.
Jason Sunkel:Right, exactly.
Mike Cleansing:I know.
Mike Cleansing:I, I told you, I've got.
Mike Cleansing:You always said you want a couple recommendations too of people that have on the program and I think I got a couple people that you'd really enjoy talking to.
Jason Sunkel:There we go.
Jason Sunkel:Well, shout outs to my daughter Meredith, who connected us.
Jason Sunkel:So again, Rick, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight.
Jason Sunkel:Really, really appreciate it.
Jason Sunkel:And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we'll catch you on our next episode.
Jason Sunkel:Thanks.
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Mike Cleansing:Thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads podcast presented by Head Start Basketball.
