Irvine Savors a Winning Formula : Coach Keith Blends the Styles of Wooden and Knight

Steve Keith, Irvine High School basketball coach, is innovative without appearing to be.

For inspiration, Keith has turned to the giants of college basketball--John Wooden, Bobby Knight and ESPN.

From these sources, and from a lesser-known coach named Tim Tift, a distinctive, yet simple system has evolved that Keith has installed at Irvine.

It’s a disciplined passing game and determined man-to-man defense that Keith, 39, nurtured and perfected in 10 seasons at Glendale High before coming to Irvine.

“The system is very basic, but Irvine does it so well,” El Toro Coach Tim Travers said.

At Glendale, Keith’s teams won five league championships and two Southern Section titles. In the 1984-85 season, Keith’s team won all 53 games it played, including summer-league action.

For Irvine, winning has been an unusual experience. Before Keith became coach in 1987, the Vaqueros had never reached the Southern Section playoffs in the 11 seasons they had played varsity basketball.

“We’re trying to duplicate here what we did with the Glendale program,” Keith said.

So far, it appears to be working.

Last season, Keith’s first at Irvine, the Vaqueros were 13-14 and made their first playoff appearance by way of a third-place finish in the highly competitive South Coast League.

Irvine currently is the No. 4 team in the Orange County Sportswriters’ Assn. poll with a 19-3 record and is a cinch to post its first winning season. The Vaqueros’ only losses this season were to Radford of Hawaii by 6 points, Corona del Mar by 2 in overtime and to league rival Capistrano Valley by 1.

“I believe there are a lot of ways to win,” Keith said. “I’m a strong believer in what we do, although sometimes I think I’m too stodgy and conservative.”

But it’s the strict attention to the most insignificant detail that suits Keith so well.

“He stressed the fundamentals so intensely,” said USC basketball player Rich Grande, a point guard on Keith’s 1985 4-A title team at Glendale.

“He was the type of coach who would just work for hours on setting screens and learning how to defend a particular player.”

For example, in a recent game Keith called a timeout after only 2 minutes had been played because the Vaqueros didn’t get back on defense fast enough to prevent a dunk. At the time, the score was 4-2 in favor of the other team.

“Anybody growing up in my era was influenced by John Wooden and Bobby Knight,” said Keith, who played at Burroughs High in Burbank and was a starting guard at Cal State Northridge.

Wooden’s UCLA teams always played man-to-man defense, and Knight, at Indiana, has continued that tradition. Knight believes playing a zone is a sign of a team’s weakness.

“It was hard not to be a believer in their defenses,” Keith said.

Keith found inspiration for the passing-game offense from Tift, a former UC Irvine coach.

“When I was at Northridge, we played UC Irvine,” Keith said. “and the passing game was the new vogue at the time. I remembered that it was exhausting playing against it. I thought it must be good if it’s so hard to play against. It all goes back to that experience.”

Then there’s ESPN, the cable company that broadcasts a seemingly endless schedule of college basketball games.

“I learned a lot from watching games on cable,” Keith said. “We get a lot of our (offensive) patterns from Big East teams. We score 80% of the time on a play that Dean Smith designed for Brad Daugherty at North Carolina.”

Keith learned his lessons well and, after spending 4 seasons as junior varsity basketball and baseball coach at Hoover High in Glendale, established a dynasty of sorts at Glendale.

His first season, 1978-79, was a disaster as the Dynamiters went 6-15. But in Keith’s second season, Glendale won the Pacific League championship, the first of five league titles his teams would win.

Glendale also won the Southern Section 2-A title in 1981 and the 4-A championship in 1985.

Keith’s Glendale teams often won with players of lesser ability than the opposition. In that way, they were similar to his current squad at Irvine. The patient, patterned offense works wonders against teams of superior talent.

“I just feel we have to be more structured and disciplined,” he said.

Even the 1985 team, which starred Grande and Jan Svoboda, a 6-foot 8-inch center now at San Jose State, stuck to the format to win the 4-A championship.

“Glendale was a great situation for me,” Keith said. “I got to establish myself and gain an identity for myself.”

But as good as things were at Glendale, Keith began to feel the need for a new challenge. He said he wanted to try something else, but wasn’t sure what.

“I don’t know if I was having a mid-life crisis or what,” Keith said with a laugh.

When Irvine principal Gary Norton asked Al Herring to resign as basketball coach following the 1986-87 season, Keith applied for and got the job.

“Realistically, it was a personal life style move,” Keith said. “It was a sideways move basketball-wise. Professionally, I was a little bored at Glendale. I didn’t know what to do for an encore.”

At least one rival coach wondered if Keith wouldn’t make a successful college coach.

“I’m surprised he hasn’t moved into a collegiate coaching position,” Crespi Coach Paul Muff said at the time.

Keith admitted the thought crossed his mind, but he quickly discounted it.

“From a fan’s standpoint, it seems like the natural progression, but it isn’t,” he said. “If you’re going to be a college coach, the best thing you can do--and I’ve told some of my former players this--is hook on as a graduate assistant when you’re 23.”

And so, for now at least, Keith is content living in Irvine with his wife, Jan, and their two children. His attention is focused on making Irvine basketball as successful as the program he had at Glendale.