Team Frieder : Arizona State Coach Has Two Former Head Coaches for Assistants--One to Direct the Offense, Another to Coordinate the Defense

Bill Frieder has a right-hand man on his right, and a right-hand man on his left.

They flank him on the Arizona State bench, one on either side, an ear for each.

When Arizona State gets the ball, Lynn Archibald rises to his feet, calling out instructions. A turnover, and George McQuarn steps to the fore, shouting and holding up four fingers to signal the defense.

The other team scores, and McQuarn slumps to his seat for a second, but in a moment he is pulling a player from the bench, pushing him toward the scorer’s table, whispering to Frieder that one of the forwards is tired and needs a rest.

Frieder watches, paces, yells, listens and nods. His is no easy domain. He is presiding over what surely must be the deepest bench in America at one position--head coach.

Frieder, Archibald and McQuarn were all head coaches the day basketball practice began last season--a season that ended with Frieder watching from his Seattle hotel room as his Michigan team won the national championship.

Now they are together in Tempe, all running their hands nervously along their waistbands, all shouting directions, all moving up and down the sideline so often that the Arizona State radio broadcast team considered asking for a transfer from its bench-side seat.

The coaching staff, it seems, obscures their view.

Frieder, of course, is the frantic basket case of a basketball coach who tried to accept the Arizona State job on the QT last year, planning to coach Michigan in the NCAA tournament before announcing his resignation. But when his intentions were discovered by Bo Schembechler, then the Michigan athletic director, Frieder was forbidden to coach the Wolverines in the tournament.

Michigan’s victory all but forced Schembechler to hand the job to assistant Steve Fisher, for which Frieder says he is happy.

“If I had been allowed to coach in the tournament, Fisher wouldn’t have gotten the job,” Frieder said. “Somebody new would have come in. Bo was in the newspapers saying he was going to ask Bobby Knight who to hire.”

“Hell, I didn’t want a Knight man coaching the Michigan team.”

Fisher gained a job, but Frieder lost a staff. He had built his success as recruiter but was preparing to enter the recruiting grounds of the West after spending an entire career in Michigan.

He needed two assistants, and he needed experience.

Archibald last season was the coach at Utah, where his team finished with a 16-17 record. He had taken his teams to the NCAA once and the NIT twice during his six seasons, but he was criticized because of the academic performance of his players. Athletic Director Chris Hill, said to be unhappy with the direction of the program, fired him at the end of the season.

“Frieder got the job, and after I was released, fired, booted out, excommunicated, whatever you want to call it, he got hold of me,” said Archibald, who met Frieder when Archibald was an assistant to Jerry Tarkanian at Nevada Las Vegas and Frieder was a Michigan assistant who made occasional runs to Las Vegas to play blackjack, gaining a reputation as a card-counter.

Archibald, in turn, recommended McQuarn, as did Tarkanian, under whom McQuarn had also worked as an assistant.

McQuarn had been the coach at Cal State Fullerton for nine years when practice began before last season, but he didn’t make it to the first game, resigning suddenly and without comment in early November. Although sources agree he was under no pressure to resign, McQuarn had been criticized because of the poor graduation rate of his players, and his relationship with University President Jewel Plummer Cobb had become tense.

“Go home on your own terms,” McQuarn said of the decision later, laughing. “Don’t wait until it’s 2 o’clock when they say the party’s over. Leave about 11.”

In hiring Archibald and McQuarn, Frieder hired a knowledge of West Coast talent with loads of contacts.

McQuarn came with a particularly appealing connection: He is a friend of Ed O’Bannon Sr., the father of Artesia High’s Ed O’Bannon, one of the top high school players in the country. That friendship is one reason O’Bannon included Arizona State among his final five college choices.

“Bill needed two quality guys, and those two both needed a break,” Tarkanian said. “The Michigan staff would have been lost out in Southern California. The best thing that ever happened to Frieder is getting those guys.”

It might have been a volatile mix, three head coaches fighting for the soul of one team.

“We as coaches have big, big egos around the country, you and I know that,” McQuarn said. But Frieder’s staff of chiefs seems to have worked, largely because of the amount of responsibility Frieder has given his assistants, building his staff on what Frieder readily admits is the football model: Archibald is the offensive coordinator, and McQuarn is the defensive coordinator.

Frieder coordinates the coordinators.

“All the decisions are mine,” he said. “There is a lot of discussion, but absolutely no conflicts. They’re going to do it my way and do it as a family, with all loyalty and togetherness.”

McQuarn and Archibald have had to adjust from giving directions to taking them, from making decisions to merely influencing them.

“You have to watch yourself,” Archibald said. “Number one, you don’t want to get a technical. Number two, you want to make sure one person is giving the signals. One person has to stay on the bench and do that. You get too many people talking to the kids, too much going on, and the kids get confused.”

And not least of all, they had to adjust to Frieder.

Last summer, McQuarn made the mistake of rooming with Frieder while they scouted players at an all-star basketball camp.

“We were on the East Coast, and it was 1 or 2 in the morning, so he was calling kids on the West Coast,” McQuarn said. “I’m tired as heck and I want to go to bed, and he’s walking around between the beds, talking to kids. He has that high energy. He’s saying to me, ‘What’s up, man? Who did you talk to?’ I’m right there in the same room with him. There’s one phone. Who did I talk to? Who could I talk to? I say, ‘How could I talk to anyone, Coach, you’re on the phone the whole time! I’ve been right here, trying to sleep.’ ”

F rieder bristles at the suggestion that by hiring two former head coaches he gives credence to the widespread criticism of his ability as a bench coach.

“That’s the biggest nonsense,” Frieder said. “That (perception) all started with (television commentator Dick) Vitale. I won state championships. I won back-to-back Big Ten championships. You don’t win Big Ten titles if you can’t coach. I won the NIT. We went to the NCAA six or seven years (actually six) in a row. . . . I’m as good as they come. I’ve beaten all those guys, Eddie Sutton, Gene Bartow. I’ve beaten teams that have been to the Final Four. . . . “

But he has never coached in the Final Four, and Arizona State is a long way from getting there.

The job Frieder has taken is a big one, and he is impatient to get it done, as the unfortunate co-workers who step onto the elevator with him in the athletic office building have learned. Frieder makes them ride past their floor to his stop on the fifth floor, allowing them to get off only on the way back down.

“I can’t stand waiting for that damn thing,” Frieder said. “It drives me nuts. One elevator for an entire building.”

Frieder said the experience of his assistants allows him to do other things.

There are times when Frieder will pop in and out of practice, leaving it to Archibald and McQuarn to put the players through their paces while he makes appearances or works on his passion, recruiting. Occasionally, he misses practice altogether.

“It’s a fun situation to have two head coaches for assistants,” said Isaac Austin, the Sun Devils’ 6-foot-10 forward. “Frieder doesn’t have to do that much.”

Frieder spends his time away from the court pushing Arizona State basketball, to students, to community groups, and most of all, to high school basketball players, writing letter after letter.

“He tells me I’m the recruiting coordinator,” McQuarn said. “I tell him I’m not the recruiting coordinator, Bill, you’re the recruiting coordinator.”

Frieder works hard to recruit the talent that can turn the program around. Maybe, someone suggests, he should leave the team in the hands of Archibald and McQuarn during the season and spend all his time recruiting.

Frieder actually considers.

“I ought to,” he said. “But that wouldn’t be fair to the players we have here now.”