Mum Is Word at Chapman : Little Is Being Said as Panthers Struggle Under Kevin Wilson

The Kevin Wilson Story would be a lot easier to tell if the basketball team he coaches, the Chapman College Panthers, were winning.

Maybe then, Chapman players could speak freely and openly about their coach, without fear of reprimand.

Maybe then, Chapman’s athletic director wouldn’t have to stop one of Wilson’s former players before he was interviewed by a reporter and caution him about speaking out against the coach.

Maybe then, the keen sense of humor Wilson’s friends speak of would come bubbling to the surface, piercing a demeanor perceived by some as aloof and arrogant.

Maybe then, Wilson’s recruitment of clean-cut student-athletes who pass their classes and the school’s emphasis on academics could be viewed solely with admiration--rather than as a point of debate.

Maybe then, one could look at Wilson’s quirky fixation with defense--his license plate reads “MATCHUP,” and his players must enter his office crouched in a defensive stance--and see the method to his madness.

The Kevin Wilson story could be a lot of fun. Here’s a coach who uses magic tricks as recruiting aids, who calls his defense the “hyperbolic paraboloid transitional floating zone,” who taught his 4-year-old son how to take a charge, who once coached a real-life version of the Bad News Bears at a junior college in Minnesota, who played his collegiate basketball under the nonconventional Bill Musselman, and conducted the early portion of his coaching career as if he’d learned Musselman’s lessons all too well.

This is a story that should be all laughs and winks and nudges into the ribs.

If only Chapman were winning.

But the fact is that Wilson’s Panthers are losing, big. They are 5-14 overall and are buried in last place of the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. with a conference record of 1-6. They have won two of their last 13 games. They have won once since Christmas.

Chapman has crashed on the court and the lack of success has cast a pall over virtually everything and everyone associated with the team. There’s an underlying tension around the athletic department when the subject of the men’s basketball team is broached, a defensiveness, a prevailing us-vs.-them mentality.

And it grows with every loss.

The result has been a circling of the wagons, a throwing up of the great cardinal and gray wall. Don’t criticize the coach. Talk to reporters at your own risk. Ignore the negative, emphasize the positive.

Wilson has spearheaded the rose-colored-glasses movement. Once regarded as an outspoken free-thinker--”I like to be controversial,” he said when he arrived at Chapman to replace Walt Hazzard in 1984--Wilson has been pure Wonder Bread in his postgame reviews this season.

An exhibition loss to an obscure team from the University of Manitoba was called “a good learning experience.” Close losses are considered moral victories. After a rare win, in the wake of two narrow defeats, Wilson proclaimed: “We should be 3-0. . . . I think this is a great team.”

A poor shooting performance in a three-point loss was summarized this way: “If you would have told me that Mike Kelly would go 1 for 5 and John Bragg would go 0 for 4 and we’d get outrebounded by three and we’d shoot 62% from the foul line and 39.5% from the field, I’d have said we would have lost by 20. We lost by three and could have won--playing like that .”

And when there’s nothing good to report on the court, well, there are always the grades. Wilson is quick to point out that this year’s club has a cumulative grade-point average of 2.56--up substantially, he says, from the 1.65 posted by the 1982 Panthers.

Positive thinking is all well and good, and academics are indeed important, but 5-14 after a 13-14 finish last season indicates something is amiss on the court.

Wilson, though, maintains that all is going pretty well. “We have a different measuring stick than wins and losses,” he said. “We’re setting the proper foundation. The kids here do an excellent job in the classroom, and they represent the school well on the road.”

This sort of happy talk might sound peculiar to those who knew Wilson when he was an outspoken coach who took immense pride in his victories at Metropolitan Junior College and San Francisco State.

“I’m sure some of my former players are saying, ‘What’s the deal? Coach is being nice to these guys,’ ” Wilson said. “Well, this team needs assurance, it needs confidence.

“I see my role this year as being more of someone teaching confidence: ‘You guys can play with these guys.’ I don’t need to browbeat them.”

Wilson said he has long been misunderstood.

“Basically, I’m sensitive and shy, and that sometimes gets mistaken for arrogance,” he said.

If so, there may be something to the old saw that says a sports team eventually takes on the characteristics of its coach. Right now, the Chapman men’s basketball program is sensitive.

Very sensitive.

A few examples:

--Mike Brennan, a Chapman junior, played basketball for both Walt Hazzard and Wilson but quit before this season. Before a reporter’s interview with Brennan, Athletic Director Walt Bowman met with the former player and cautioned him about remarking about Wilson.

Brennan, still on athletic scholarship and a member of the Panther baseball team, had very little to offer for the record.

“I don’t feel I was treated fairly and decided not to play due to the fact of a personality conflict with Coach Wilson,” Brennan said carefully. “Coach Wilson, Dr. Bowman and I decided it was best to go our own ways.”

Brennan on the differences between playing for Hazzard and Wilson: “I can’t compare them.”

--Steve Lavin, a redshirt guard who played for Wilson at San Francisco State, talked briefly with a reporter after Friday night’s loss to UC Riverside. Saturday night, after discussing his interview with Wilson, Lavin phoned the reporter at home, asking to retract his comments.

--After his interview for this story, Wilson met with Bowman for a “debriefing” session, reviewing the subjects that were covered during the interview.

“Any time a story is being done about one of our sports teams, there is obvious concern over whether the treatment will be positive or negative,” Bowman said.

All of this leads to one question: Why the fuss? Losing teams are nothing new to Chapman. The school has certainly had them in the past.

Part of the reason may be Hazzard. In his two years as Panther coach, Hazzard led Chapman basketball to national prominence--recording successive 20-win seasons and earning two berths in the NCAA Division II playoffs before leaving for UCLA.

But the on-court success had a price. Hazzard won, but on the sideline, he stomped and yelled and cursed. Some of his players were marginal students. Priorities changed.

The view of the Chapman administration was that they had changed too much. Hazzard, according to certain school officials, had strayed from the basic Chapman philosophy of academics and sportsmanship first.

“The record would seem to suggest so,” Chapman President G.T. Smith said. “Of course, we want to win, but winning isn’t our No. 1 concern. We’re looking for quality on and off the court. We want our student-athletes to have the total life experience, to develop the total person.”

So, the pendulum swung back. Academic success became re-established firmly as the main objective at Chapman. Hazzard’s successor would have to recruit student-athletes with a heavy emphasis on student .

“Some were admitted in an earlier day who had athletic potential and brought along whatever academics they had,” Smith said. “Now, we admit only those with (athletic) ability who have already demonstrated academic ability.”

So, this became the grand experiment at Chapman. Wilson was given his assignment: Put together a team that studies well, dresses well and behaves well--and try to win with it.

So far, the experiment has blown a few test tubes. The Panthers have excelled at hitting the books but have hit the skids on the hardwood.

Perhaps that’s why Wilson and Bowman don’t want anyone inspecting the laboratory.

History shows that Wilson has dealt with adversity before. In fact, his stint as coach-babysitter-ringmaster at Metropolitan JC in Minneapolis is a tale Wilson relishes recalling.

The year was 1976. Wilson was in his first season as a head basketball coach. He had inherited a roster of seven players--some of whom had problems. “We started the season with six guys on the team,” Wilson said. “One guy was in A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous) and left when his problem resurfaced.

“My team captain had to be back in jail every night at 5. I found another guy in a toilet stall with a gun before a game. He was hiding in there, loading it. When I found him, he says, ‘Does this mean I’m suspended?’ ”

There were problems on the court, too.

“We had nine days of practice before one kid learned there was such a thing as double dribble,” Wilson said. “Nine games, we wound up with less than five players on the floor. I had to devise a lot of two- and three- and four-man offenses. Against Golden Valley JC, we had two guys on the floor. One guy took the ball out and passed it to the other guy.”

Metro’s lack of depth was borne out by its record, 2-19.

After Metro, Wilson would seem conditioned and readied for anything the sport could dish out. Yet, the losing at Chapman has had a visible effect.

Some players privately suggest that Wilson has lost some intensity. Maybe the strain of two difficult seasons in succession is beginning to show. Or, according to another theory, maybe the college’s desire to project a clean, well-mannered image on the court has stifled the real Wilson.

Said one player: “I think he’s being used as a pawn in a way. With Hazzard, it was his mission to win. With Coach Wilson, the administration has said, ‘Hey, we have to get people to graduate.’ That’s the attitude he’s trying to instill in us and I’m not saying I disagree with it. I just think Coach Wilson should be allowed to do what it takes to win. That’s his mission.

“I think he’s being stifled. Why are we losing? We have a lack of heart, a lack of intensity. It’s kind of a mental thing--’Oh, no, here it comes again.’ We lose the lead and we lose our minds.

“We need a leader. I’d like to see Coach Wilson give us a little more charge.”

Wilson admits that he has mellowed, but says the change has been by his own design.

“I don’t punch blackboards anymore,” he said. “I used to kick the bleachers and throw my whistle a lot. But these kids need assurance. I think I can do more by teaching techniques than by yelling.”

Wilson denied being stifled--by any departmental rules of etiquette or any college admission requirements.

“Some people think good students can’t be good players and vice versa,” Wilson said. “Not true. They’re there.

“I could recruit a Tito Horford and say, ‘There, I won the national championship.’ There are programs like that. But that’s the quick fix. That’s trying to hold a program together with baling wire.

“I think we have the right philosophy. We have good kids here now. It’s like laying the foundation for a house. Once it gets done here, it’s going to be real solid.”

Waiting for it to get done, however, has been a problem. The transition continues to be a rocky one.

Winning may not be everything, as Chapman administrators profess, but losing is taking its toll on a coach who once was as colorful as he was successful, who didn’t need to shelter his players and watch his words.

That has changed and that’s a shame. The Kevin Wilson story deserves better.