Fiery Coach Gets Team’s Attention at St. Genevieve : High school basketball: Donovan’s doses of discipline help turn woeful program around.

First day of basketball practice. Fall, 1991. The blacktop court at St. Genevieve High.

The Valiants have a new coach, so the players are checking out Dan Donovan. Trying to get a read on the guy.

It doesn’t take long.

“I told them when I was talking or instructing to listen and not be talking or looking around,” Donovan said.

Ryan McGinnis must not have gotten the message.

“I was showing them proper positioning on defense,” Donovan said. “I turned around and (McGinnis) was basically standing back and talking to some other kids. I told him to leave.

“That set the tone that I was here for business.”

McGinnis came back to the team a couple of days later. Lesson learned.

“At first no one really liked (Donovan) because it was the first time we’d had a coach who really got on us and yelled at us,” McGinnis said. “But I think the discipline and having him on us all the time really helped.”

Seems that way. The St. Genevieve basketball team is a pushover no more.

Ask St. Monica.

Last Friday, the Valiants upset the Mariners, who are ranked seventh in the Southern Section in Division IV. St. Monica began the season as a co-favorite, along with Serra, to win the Camino Real League. St. Genevieve was thought to be a contender for third, at best.

A week earlier, St. Genevieve beat Kennedy, 68-66, in overtime, and lost close games to Birmingham and El Camino Real, which are among the top City Section teams in the San Fernando Valley.

St. Genevieve is 8-7, 1-0 in league play. Nothing to shout about, unless you’re at St. Genevieve, which has become synonymous with losing in most sports.

The St. Genevieve football team snapped a 23-game losing streak by winning its final game of the season last fall.

The baseball team is 5-25 in league play over the past three seasons.

Before Donovan’s modest success last year--4-6 in the San Fernando League, 9-14 overall--St. Genevieve’s basketball team had won one of 20 league games. The Valiants were 10-36 overall in those two seasons.

Success is relative. And they’ll take it any way they can get it at St. Genevieve, a private school in Panorama City.

“In a lot of sports, we don’t do so great,” said McGinnis, who has been a large part of the basketball team’s story this year by averaging 20.3 points and 13.9 rebounds. “School morale isn’t so great, but I think basketball is helping.”

The change likely started 15 months ago, when Donovan, who says his idol is Bobby Knight, first brought his fiery style to the school.

Edwin Morales, a guard who graduated last spring, played under Donovan last season and the previous season under Scott Smith. Morales remembers the impression Donovan left on him by kicking McGinnis out of that first practice.

“The first thing that came to mind was, ‘Don’t mess with this guy.’ ” Morales said. “I don’t mean to take anything away from the other coaches--they did the best they could--but Coach Donovan brought the program up to a higher level. He instilled discipline.

“The years before he came, players could do what they wanted. Miss practice and start the next day. Talk back to the coach and still play.”

The attitude at St. Genevieve, Morales said, was that winning and losing weren’t that important.

“If we would win, we would be happy,” Morales said, “and if we would lose it was like it didn’t matter. We were just there to have fun.”

Donovan, 30, has changed that. He played baseball for two years at St. Joseph’s College in Indiana until he injured his shoulder and transferred to Cal Poly Pomona. Basketball was his first love, though.

“I played basketball all the way through high school,” he said. “I just didn’t grow tall enough.”

A history and health teacher at St. Genevieve, Donovan came to the school after two years as a junior varsity coach and varsity assistant at Bosco Tech and a year in the same roles at Alemany.

“It was pretty much in disarray,” Donovan said of the program he inherited. “It’s been like starting over, teaching kids positive attitudes, changing the image of St. Genevieve. They are so used to losing.”

The program at St. Genevieve was bad enough that McGinnis, who transferred from Notre Dame before his sophomore year, didn’t even want to play.

“All I heard was negative stuff about the team,” he said.

Donovan, who had heard from other basketball players that McGinnis would be an asset to the team, persuaded him to come out for the squad. After being kicked off the team in that first practice, McGinnis has remained one of the senior leaders on the team and one of the reasons for the turnaround.

Last season, the Valiants had moderate success. The season’s pinnacle was a 73-62 upset over Mojave in the first round of the playoffs. It was St. Genevieve’s first playoff win in 18 years.

“That was incredible,” said guard Jeremy Iaccino, who is averaging 20.4 points this season. “All the kids at school said, ‘Wow. You won a playoff game!’ ”

That victory convinced players that all Donovan’s yelling might have done some good. Players point to that game as the benchmark for this season.

“Everyone said Serra or St. Monica was going to take league,” forward Alex Muller said.

“(St. Monica) came in kind of cocky. We were going out for warm-ups and they were getting in our way. They weren’t showing us any respect.”

What makes the Valiants’ turnaround more impressive is that they have done it without their own gym.

On Wednesday night, St. Genevieve’s game against Bell-Jeff was postponed because of leaks in the roof at the old gym at Birmingham High, where the Valiants play their “home” games.

Donovan calls the gym “The Dungeon.” Muller compares it to the gym in “Hoosiers,” a movie about a small-town high school basketball team in Indiana in the 1950s.

Practices are worse. When Donovan isn’t able to find a gym the team can use at a public park, the Valiants practice outside on the blacktop courts at the school.

Unless, of course, it’s raining.

“Last year, I got rained out (of practice) for almost a week,” Donovan said. “We had chalk talks and talked about game situations. You have to be imaginative.”

Practicing outdoors does have its benefits. Leaving bits of flesh on the cement, for example.

“It toughens us up,” Muller said. “We get scabs from the ground.”

Games at Birmingham, when the roof holds up, are intimate gatherings. It doesn’t take many people to fill the place, which is good, because not that many people go.

The school has fewer than 600 students and, despite this season’s success, many of them still don’t include St. Genevieve basketball games among their favorite leisure activities.

“I ask the kids if they are going to the games,” Donovan said, “and they say, ‘I don’t know. I think I’ll go to the mall tonight.’ ”

Forgive students for not jumping on the bandwagon. The idea of a winning basketball team is still relatively foreign--even to the players.

“I don’t think it registers with them yet,” Donovan said of the way his players have handled the team’s success.

“I don’t think they understand what they are doing. Before games they are always relaxed and goofing around and it worries me. It drives me crazy because I don’t know if they are ready to play. But they always are.

“We don’t look like a great basketball team. We just play hard for 32 minutes.”

The play-hard-for-32-minutes theme is one Donovan comes back to repeatedly.

Iaccino said the team is better fundamentally this year than in the past and Donovan stresses the basics. Donovan has to, he said, because his players aren’t that great.

“People watch us play and they laugh at us,” he said. “There’s no standout talent.”

Donovan and his players agree, the key is attitude.

The players finally have the attitude that basketball at St. Genevieve is no joke.

“I think we surprised ourselves at the beginning,” Iaccino said. “(Donovan) told us all along we could win, but we didn’t have the confidence. Now we have the confidence.

“We believe we can win any game.”