You Play May’s Way, or You’re Off the Team : Cal Poly Pomona Women’s Coach Emphasizes Harmony--and Winning

Darlene May was incensed. Her Cal Poly Pomona women’s basketball team, the defending national champion, had just lost the 1983 Division II final to Virginia Union.

Some coaches would have been satisfied, having the country’s No. 2 team, but as May sat in a plane on the return flight from Springfield, Mass., site of the tournament, she made a difficult decision.

Convinced that infighting had cost the team the national championship, May decided essentially to drop three undergraduate starters from the team, among them Jackie White, the 1982 Division II player of the year. Although it meant disbanding perhaps her best team, May did not hesitate.

“I knew we wouldn’t win the next year with those players,” she said. “It was better to get rid of those people then. . . . I made up my mind on the plane back: It was change time. I’d rather be happy than have those players back. It wouldn’t have made a difference the next year even if they played.”

Six players did not return the next season, four of them at May’s only somewhat subtle behest. If they wanted to play the next season, they were to see her by a certain date.

“Some of them made it easy on me,” May said. “They never came.”

White, who transferred to Cal State Long Beach for her senior year and now is one of two women playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, holds no apparent grudge.

“There were some hard feelings between myself and the coaching staff,” White said. “But (May) is fair.”

Said May: “I think they knew what they’d done.”

Those who know May understand her motivation for tearing down what she had built. May, Cal Poly Pomona’s coach for 13 seasons, accepts nothing less than winning.

With five junior college transfer students on the team the next season, Pomona won the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. title but lost in the West Regional final to Chapman College, a conference rival of such proportions that Pomona players refer to the Panthers as “the enemy.”

Then, in the 1984-85 season, with the same group, plus one of the players who had left in 1983 and then returned, Pomona won the national championship. In 1986, the Broncos became the first team to repeat as NCAA Division II women’s champions.

By then, May, a Placentia resident who spent her first four years after graduating from high school working as a parts inspector in a Monrovia factory, had become the premier women’s coach in Division II.

Her competitiveness extends to card games, as well.

“When she’s winning (at canasta), everything’s dandy,” said Paula Tezak, a starting guard who played at La Habra High School. She’s making fun of the other (card) team, telling them they’re bad. But when she’s losing, you don’t joke around.”

But for all May’s apparent competitiveness, there also seems to be a side to her that would rather just take it easy.

She says she would leave basketball if someone would only set her up in a lakeside bait-and-tackle shop so she could pass her days near the water, renting boats and watching the fishermen head out in the mornings.

She has passed chances to coach in Division I. There have been at least three offers--from San Jose State, Washington and Cal State Fullerton--in the last five years.

“I feel like I have a big enough challenge right here,” May said. “If I ever moved up, it would be more headaches. Maybe 10 years ago, I might have thought a little more about it. Right now, I’m sort of settled. I feel like I really don’t want to go out and start over.”

It was not her competitive nature that led her into coaching.

After graduating from high school, she had so little interest in further schooling that she took a factory job. Four years later, 22 and realizing that she was going nowhere, she enrolled at Cal State Los Angeles. The next year she went to Fullerton College, eventually earning a degree at Cal State Fullerton.

“I figured I’d teach, and at least I’d have my summers off,” May said.

While in school, though, she started coaching swimming. A few of the girls she was coaching mentioned that Connelly High School in Anaheim needed a basketball coach and May went there to start her basketball career.

She stayed for 10 years, along the way coaching Ann Meyers and Nancy Dunkle, future members of the U.S. national team. Meyers played at Connelly her sophomore year, after which she went to La Habra Sonora. Dunkle played her final two years for May. In those years Connelly was 55-1.

In 1974, May was named Pomona’s coach. She has compiled a 335-80 record, 23-2 this season, and the Broncos are ranked second in Division II going into their regular-season finale tonight at arch-rival Chapman.

The years have been good, with the losses coming few and far between.

Three in particular, though, have been especially painful for May. All were dealt her by Chapman, which until this season was coached by Brian Berger, May’s bitter rival. Berger left Chapman after last season and is coaching at Colorado State.

“Maybe we can put this thing behind us now,” said May, who called the relationship between herself and Berger a mutual “personal vendetta.”

In the five years that Berger was at Chapman, his teams were 3-7 against Pomona--a good record, compared to most. Berger’s three victories were also consecutive, and one of them cost May the NCAA regional title in 1984. Pomona beat Chapman for the regional title in 1983 and 1985.

It was a relationship marked by fierce games on the court and numerous incidents off the court, including an NCAA reprimand of Berger for his behavior toward May after the 1985 regional final.

For all her triumphs, May is not convinced that she has been one of the reasons for Pomona’s success.

“I still don’t know that I’m really good at this,” she said. “Some days, I get to thinking I’m doing a pretty good job, and then others I think I’m an absolute failure.”

One thing is certain--she is not a coach who just lets things happen.

In a recent game against Cal State Northridge, May crouched by the sideline, shouting directions: “Rebound, get the rebound! Move! You’re doing nothing! You’re not playing offense. You’re not playing defense. Move. Move. Move!”

The score was 54-31, Pomona.

That night, May used five offenses and three defenses, not counting two varieties of defensive traps.

She shouts and cajoles, and when she substitutes, she kneels next to the player who has just come out and gives more directions. Then the player returns to the game and the next one out gets the instructions, directions, exhortations.

“She doesn’t change, whether it’s a 30-point game or a two-point game,” said Barb Thaller, who played for May at Pomona and is in her eighth year as May’s assistant coach. “She can’t just sit there. She’s too antsy.”

May is so antsy, in fact, that she does not get enough basketball from coaching. She also officiates, and is considered one of the country’s best women’s referees. She officiated in the 1984 Olympics and in the Goodwill Games last summer at Moscow. During the season, she makes time to work Division III games on nights off from coaching.

But in the off-season, she slows the pace with her beloved fishing trips. She says, again and again, that given the chance, she would “absolutely” stop coaching to go live by a lake and run a store.

“I don’t see her doing that,” Tezak said. “Whenever you talk to her, it’s basketball this, basketball that. No, I can’t see her doing that.”