BASKETBALL NOTEBOOK : Coach Doesn’t Lose His Cool in the Summer

Among those who follow the fortunes of the Granada Hills High basketball team, perhaps the least informed about the team’s progress this summer is the head coach. Bob Johnson arrived at Birmingham High to see his team play Tuesday night, which brings his total of games attended this summer to two.

While many coaches pay lip service to the unimportance of summer league games--even as they schedule their teams for as many as four a week--Johnson acts on his beliefs.

He takes a seat in the stands when the summer rolls around.

Johnson, who has coached at Granada Hills for eight years, simply hands the team to Lou Cicciari, the school’s junior varsity coach who is running the summer league program for his third season.

The past two summers, Johnson served as a spectator for many games and met with Cicciari frequently to discuss the team’s development. This summer those conversations would have produced an enormous phone bill.

Johnson attended the team’s first summer league game at the end of June and then headed halfway around the world for a monthlong vacation in Greece.

“My wife and I travel every summer but we usually wait until August so I can watch some of the summer league games,” said Johnson, who returned home Friday. “This year we were advised to visit Greece early because of the heat and the crowds later in the summer.”

Johnson may seek a new travel agent. When he and his wife left their Athens hotel room, which had no air conditioning, the temperature reached 112.

Which is about how hot it seems in some of the Valley’s gymnasiums, where summer leagues are played in sauna-like conditions. But it wasn’t the heat that drove Johnson to the sidelines.

“I just got tired of it,” he said. “We always had trouble getting guys to the games and then we disciplined them. It was just a hassle.”

Faced with those headaches, Johnson developed a hands-off philosophy, suitable for coach and player. He may not endorse a team vacation to the Mediterranean, but if a player wants to skip some summer league games, he does so with impunity.

“We have a different philosophy, one that we developed over the years,” he said. “Summer league basketball is still a team sport, but it’s not a highly organized activity. If a guy doesn’t want to play with the team, he doesn’t have to. There’s no punishment for not playing.”

Cicciari, who admits he wants to win as often as he can during his short stint as varsity coach, adheres to the same philosophy.

“I’m sure coaches out there demand that their players be there in the summer,” he said. “Some coaches really get into it and even get thrown out of games. That’s ridiculous. They say, ‘We play four or five games a week. If you’re not out there, you can’t play in the season.’

“That’s wrong. Everybody needs a break. If you pressure kids to do something they really don’t want to do, they will resent it. We don’t feel we should pressure a guy to come out and play.”

Johnson employed that line of thinking last summer when All-City center Gary Gray and 6-5 guard Sam Puathasnanon frequently missed Granada Hills’ summer games. And Sean Brown, perhaps the team’s best athlete, missed the entire summer league schedule to concentrate on football and baseball.

Those absences didn’t seem to bother Granada Hills, which won the City Section 3-A title and posted a 20-5 record last season.

But Johnson does not endorse idleness. “Gray and Sam didn’t play with us much last summer but they were playing for various all-star teams. I hate to see them sit around all summer. If they like basketball, they’re going to play somewhere and probably get better.”

Johnson said he expects his players to improve on their own.

“My involvement is to watch kids and see individual improvement,” he said. “City teams don’t practice in the summer and they get worse. There’s plenty of time once school starts to put a team together.”

Add Granada Hills: Brown is missing his second straight summer with the team to concentrate on football and baseball and may have played his last basketball game for the Highlanders. Brown, who shared football MVP honors with teammate Jeremy Leach in last month’s L.A. Games, won’t decide on basketball until after the football season.

“I’m not counting on him,” Johnson said. “He’s got so much going with football and baseball and his future is in that. If he came to me and said he wasn’t going to play basketball, I would say, ‘Great, Sean, because you’re going to make it in one of those other sports in college.’ ”

Granada Hills has played much of the summer without Kyle Jan, the team’s tallest returning player at 6-3. Jan, also a football player, underwent an emergency appendectomy at the end of June. He returned and played one game two weeks ago but is gone again this week, joining junior guard John Johnson, playing with the American Roundball Corp. in the Nike-sponsored tournament in Las Vegas.

Injury report: Butch Hawking, Simi Valley’s senior point guard, had his summer league season cut short when he suffered strained ligaments in his right thumb last week in a game against Hart at Cleveland High.

Hawking played the remainder of the game despite injuring the thumb in the first half. It was put in a cast the next day.

Said Hawking: “I’ve been doing everything with my left hand, practicing my shooting and dribbling. I’ve been lifting weights left-handed, trying to make the best of it.”