Titan Coach: Alone Again, Naturally

“I hope this job is a little easier to keep than it was to get.”

John Sneed, March 11, 1989

And who says John Sneed doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Looking back on Sneed’s just-completed tenure as men’s head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, about the only thing that didn’t register up, up and off the agony chart was the lobbying process for the job. Sneed lobbied for it by winning--taking over George McQuarn’s motley discards on an interim basis and piecing together a 16-13 season in 1988-89.

That was the fun part.

That was the part that earned him the position on an official basis, for the next three seasons, beginning on that bright March morning in 1989.

That was where the sense of humor went one way and Sneed the other.

Having forged this break in his career out of crisis, Sneed and crisis quickly became inseparable. He had his own office inside the Fullerton athletics building, but throughout the duration of that contract, Sneed might as well have been working out of a bunker.

Year One: With four starters back from that 16-13 surprise, Sneed became a marked man. He had the best player in the Big West in Cedric Ceballos, a proven supporting cast and, suddenly, expectations.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough basketballs. Ceballos wanted one for himself. So did guard Mark Hill. So did the supporting cast. Limited to only one per team, the Titans didn’t know what to do with it. They squabbled. They struggled. They finished 13-16, as disappointing as the previous year had been inspiring.

Year Two: A wildly erratic 14-14 season was only the least of it. Two Titans were arrested for shopping with a stolen credit card. Sneed ran off one of them--the one who couldn’t play. Another Titan, point guard/malcontent Wayne Williams, organized a team mutiny against Sneed, calling on the athletic director to fire Sneed. Sneed stayed, some of the ringleaders were purged, but the residue of resentment never entirely faded.

Year Three: A decent starting lineup and an early near-miss against UCLA got Fullerton fans dreaming about initials, NIT if not NCAA. Then, a trademark of the Sneed regime--the late-season slump. Then, another trademark--late-season team dissension. The Titans lost five of their last seven games, finishing 12-16 and leaving Sneed with 55 victories and 59 losses to show for his full term.

Based on that, Fullerton Athletic Director Bill Shumard decided against an extension. The announcement came Monday, but the decision was in the making from the day Shumard was hired last summer.

Shumard has been outspoken in his desire to make Fullerton basketball high-profile. In his mind, Sneed didn’t have the numbers, nor the personality, to complete the ride.

“There was a consensus feeling in the conference that when we were playing well in the second half of the season, we could come on strong and win the (Big West) tournament,” Shumard said Monday. “The consensus was that we were among the most talented teams in the conference. We weren’t as deep as some teams, but our starting lineup matched up well with most teams.”

But losing isn’t everything. Across the county, Rod Baker went 7-22 during his first season at UC Irvine, but has people excited about his program because he’s upbeat and gregarious in a way Sneed never was. Charisma alone won’t turn a basketball team around. What it will do is buy a coach the necessary time and space to get it done. This season, Baker’s personality ran the same kind of interference Jerry Kramer once ran for Jim Taylor.

Coaching at Cal State Fullerton is like trapeze jumping; you need helping hands. Sneed didn’t cultivate friendships within the Big West or the community. His relationship with the media, in its better moments, was detente. Assistant coaches came and went with the passing of each season.

As he tried to convince a new athletic director he was worth re-hiring, Sneed needed allies that weren’t there.

“(Shumard) comes in and people get in his ear,” said someone familiar with the situation. “Fullerton has the kind of program where the janitor has a say. (Sneed) was there for 12 years and through all that time, he made enemies within the department.”

Sneed was no ogre. He was, however, shy and private, which was often interpreted as aloofness, and he was unusually sensitive to criticism, which was often interpreted as paranoia. These are not crimes, but in the highly visible profession of Division I Basketball Coach, they are handicaps.

Example: Ceballos is benched during the opener of the 1990 Big West Tournament for, in Sneed’s words, showing up late for practice. After the game, Ceballos tells reporters he was late because he attended a memorial service in Los Angeles for Hank Gathers, and Sneed is portrayed as a heartless, bloodless disciplinarian.

In fact, Sneed was covering up for Ceballos, who actually had been benched because of his arrest for assault and battery against a former girlfriend.

So Sneed took the heat and suffered in silence. According to his quirky ethical compass, taking one for the team was the right thing to do.

“I try to take the brunt of it, I guess, to take the pressure off my players,” Sneed said earlier this year. “It makes it tough on me and my family sometimes. . . . but I think I’m loyal to my players. You can’t please everyone out there.”

As it turned out, Sneed couldn’t even please his players, who had more than an assist in his firing. In 1991, they revolted on him. In 1992, they bailed on him. Shumard considered it a trend and on Monday, he struck out to set a new one.

In the end, Sneed went out the way he conducted business the previous four years. Alone. Cal State Fullerton can be a prison for its coaches, but solitary confinement is a tough way to serve out the sentence.