Joey Meyer Discovers There’s a Lot More Pressure Than Fun

Joey Meyer expected the pressure, but he was looking forward to some fun as well. Halfway into his first season as successor to his own father as basketball coach of DePaul, he is turning out to be half right.

“If I had to pick a theme so far, that would be it--it just hasn’t been fun yet,” Meyer said. “There’s never been a time in the locker room or practice when I’ve been able to say to the kids, ‘OK, let’s go,’ and leave it at that.

“There’s always something taking the edge off, something to struggle over, whether it’s trying to get the kids to play exactly the way I set the floor, or getting them to show up for pre-game meals at 9 instead of one, two, or five minutes after.”

Joey Meyer inherited a team loaded with blue-chip players, many of them recruited by him while he served 10 years as as assistant to his father, Ray Meyer, who retired last year after 42 years as the Blue Demons’ coach.

The Blue Demons opened the season in a familiar position--near the top of the rankings--but escaped their first outing with a shaky one-point decision over unheralded Northern Illinois. Five straight victories hid the problems, but DePaul was unmasked at top-ranked Georgetown and upset four days later at Western Michigan.

Since then, the Blue Demons have stumbled four more times, three of them on the road at Alabama Birmingham, Dayton and Louisville. And when Dayton repeated the feat last Wednesday at the Horizon, it snapped DePaul’s 36-game consecutive win streak at home, dropped the Blue Demons to 14-6, and almost certainly greased their slide from the top 20 rankings for the first time since 1978.

The education of Joey Meyer has been anything but fun.

“I just haven’t been able to solve the whole puzzle, to get five guys playing well and playing together on a given night,” he said. “That’s been the biggest surprise. By this time of the year, I expected to be able to do that.”

Lord knows he is trying. Still as trim as he was during his playing days at DePaul, and looking just as studious behind tortoise-shell glasses, Joey sits in the back of the locker room after games, trying to unscramble statistics and young men’s motivations.

He looks into their eyes for intensity during practice and into their souls in private meetings. He remembers when he was more “Pal Joey” than “Coach Joe.” He was a safe harbor back then, an assistant the kids could talk to when they were the center of one of Ray Meyer’s fabled storms.

He remembers how the clock showed 0:00 when Dayton put in the winning basket, where his defenders weren’t when Alabama-Birmingham put on a decisive scoring run, and where his players were supposed to be when they broke curfew before the Louisville game.

And he understands better Marquette’s Rick Majerus telling him the first year would be the worst, North Carolina’s venerated Dean Smith telling him no one would be sympathetic about a tough schedule once the season got started, and former coach and TV commentator Al McGuire saying referees almost never defer to a rookie coach’s protests.

Joey still looks considerably younger than his 35 years, but time and pressure are splitting the difference in a hurry.

“I feel losing in my stomach more than I used to and I thought after some of our tournament losses that would never happen,” he said, referring to early round losses in the NCAA tournament in recent years. “My family is just about my only release from basketball. When I get wound up, the first thing I do is hug my little one (4-year-old son Brian) and he ends up helping me more now than I help him.

“But my wife says I’m not happy even when we win, and that if I don’t learn to enjoy it, I won’t be around for very long.”

Joey’s father hung around DePaul long enough (42 seasons) to compile 724 wins, good for a plaque in the basketball Hall of Fame and the fifth spot on the all-time Division I coaches victory list.

With his son’s help, Ray built the small Catholic university under the “el” tracks into a national power.

That legacy was supposed to be handed over intact when the school’s seventh head coach annointed No. 8.