Coach Isn’t Just a Title for Hilliard : He Makes Most of Talent at Harvard-Westlake

At first, you think Greg Hilliard must be on Valium or something.

The Harvard-Westlake High basketball coach sits quietly during games. A bad play by his team or questionable call by an official? He just winces and stares at his cowboy boots.

You want to tell him to stand up, to yell. You want to remind him coach is also a verb.

“I find that even if I’m standing up, my kids can’t hear me sometimes,” Hilliard says. “I think it’s more of a show when a coach is up pacing the sideline and having all kinds of antics. I’ve yet to figure out how a coach gets the attention of his players other than distracting them from what they are supposed to be doing.”

Well, what about. . . ?

“Besides, if you’ve ever played in a big game where the arena is noisy, there’s no communication going on between the coach and the players anyway,” he says. “And they’re going to have to know how to function without you.”

But Bobby Knight wins and. . . .

“Most of the work takes place in practice anyway,” Hilliard says. “The players are either ready or they aren’t.”

Got an answer for everything, doesn’t he?

He ought to. He has spent 19 of the past 20 years as a high school basketball coach, which is exactly how he’d like to spend the next 20.

Hilliard, 268-154 in his career, has no interest in coaching a college team, or even a powerhouse high school team. There’s no challenge if you just have great athletes season after season, he says.

Hilliard, 44, is happiest when he’s showing future computer scientists and neurosurgeons how to beat a full-court press. In his ninth season at Harvard, he’s taken a team consisting of only three scorers--6-foot-7 freshmen Jason and Jarron Collins and senior shooter Scott Garson--and molded it into the No. 1 team in the Southern Section’s Division III.

If the Wolverines (22-2) beat Workman tonight at home in the first round of the III-A playoffs, they will tie the school record for victories, which was set by a bunch of volleyball-turned-basketball players under Hilliard’s instruction in 1990.

Three victories after that and the Wolverines will have the first Southern Section boys’ basketball championship in school history.

Meeting such challenges is why Hilliard gets out of bed every morning.

This is a guy who quit his previous coaching job because he was winning too much. A fitness nut who stopped running marathons after he finally completed one in less than three hours. A guy who left law school because what he really wanted to do was teach Fred Smith how to throw a baseball.

Smith was 7 years old, playing for a team Hilliard coached during his sophomore year of high school in Beaverton, Ore.

Fred couldn’t throw the ball like the other kids. Wearing his glove on his left hand and throwing with his right, Fred couldn’t throw the ball within 15 feet of his target. Then Hilliard had an idea. He had Fred try a throw with his left hand.

“He picked it up with his left hand and threw me a strike,” Hilliard remembers. “So I said, ‘Fred, you’re left-handed,’ and he said, ‘No, my mom and dad told me I’m right-handed.’ So I had a little conversation with his mom and she said, ‘We’d like him to be right-handed because right-handers have it lot easier. Could you make him right-handed?’ ”

Hilliard laughed and simply turned Fred into the team’s star left-hander.

He must have thought of Fred years later when he dropped his plans to “save the world, like everyone in the ‘60s and ‘70s was trying to do.” A political science major during his basketball and tennis careers at Occidental College, Hilliard dropped out after two years of law school at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., to become a teacher and coach.

“Seeing kids get some enjoyment out of improving and having fun out there was what I liked,” Hilliard says. “I just loved to see them smile.”

He earned a master’s degree in history and planned to be a history teacher and coach. Just out of school, Hilliard was hired in 1974 by the Catlin-Gabel School, a private school in Portland, to coach the high school basketball team and teach physical education. So much for history. He’s been a physical education teacher ever since.

He taught all 13 grades at Catlin-Gabel, and even drove the bus for basketball games, but what he did most was win at a school that had about 180 students in the ninth-through-12th grades and zero basketball tradition. In 10 seasons, he was 134-73 at Catlin-Gabel. The highlight was 1982, when the team had a 21-2 record, won the regional championship and finished sixth in the state.

“We didn’t match up athletically with other teams, but Greg got the kids to believe,” says John Hamilton, Hilliard’s assistant and successor at Catlin-Gabel. “That’s why they might have gone farther than some thought they could in the playoffs.”

But the challenges soon ran out at Catlin-Gabel. Hilliard had built the program to the point where it could go no higher. He returned to Southern California and worked for a year as a personal trainer in Newport Beach.

When the job opened at Harvard, Hilliard saw it as the perfect new challenge. The school’s tuition and academic standards eliminated most of the best basketball players.

In Hilliard’s first season with Harvard, the team was 4-16. Hilliard remembers one game that season against Morningside, which had Elden Campbell, now of the Lakers. During the first few minutes of the game, Campbell caught two Harvard shots out of the air. Didn’t block them. Caught them.

“That sort of summed up the first season,” Hilliard says.

After that season, Hilliard told his players they were going to be league champions in a year.

“They thought I was high on something,” Hilliard says.

Of course, Hilliard was right. The Wolverines were 21-6 in 1986-87, and won the Santa Fe League title. The team would continue to dominate that league, which later became the San Fernando League. Including this season, Hilliard is 134-81 at Harvard, coaching players who have gone on to do just about everything but play Division I college basketball.

The Wolverines won by running. Contrary to popular belief, Hilliard says, less talented teams win by speeding the tempo, not slowing it. After all, how good or tall do you have to be to make a layup on a two-on-one break?

The key to Hilliard’s offense was conditioning, which was perfect for him. Hilliard has run five marathons, the last in 2 hours 57 minutes about eight years ago, and a mini-triathlon. He works out for three hours a day before class.

Getting his team in shape was no problem. Finding better players? That has always been a problem, but not Hilliard’s.

Hilliard has gone out of his way to build a reputation as a coach who stays within the rules. He avoids the American Roundball Corp., a Valley-based basketball organization that traditionally showcases the area’s top pre-high school players. Hilliard refused to let ARC use the gym at Harvard, fearing even the appearance of recruiting.

When the Collins twins, known for years in ARC circles as top prospects, showed at Harvard last fall, some might have wondered how Hilliard coaxed them to attend an academic school with little basketball tradition. He didn’t coax them at all. He insists he hadn’t even heard of them.

Garson, this year’s three-point specialist, attended Montclair Prep as a freshman, but then started shopping for another school. His father, Lee Garson, called Hilliard and asked to chat about his son playing for the Wolverines.

“He said, ‘Mr. Garson, I’d love to meet you, but I can’t even talk to you until you’ve made an application,’ ” Lee Garson says.

Hilliard’s ideal world would be one in which high school basketball coaches walk into the gym at the start of practice each season and make do with whoever has shown up.

“I’ve been told by some fathers that I will never be successful unless I learn to play ‘The Game,’ ” Hilliard says. “I don’t know what game that is. I’m coaching basketball.”

Seeking the new challenge of a tougher league than the San Fernando, Hilliard pushed for the Wolverines to move into the Mission League before the 1992-93 season.

The move happened to coincide with a dearth of talent at Harvard, which went 5-20, but that’s turned around this season.

A husband and father of 2-year-old daughter Megan, Hilliard does not let basketball engulf him.

“There’s not a whole lot of wisdom that goes on during the game,” Hilliard says. “Every fan knows when to call a timeout, and they all know in a 45-second timeout you can say one to three things, and they can probably all say those things. The real work is the organization and planning and developing the players to function effectively without you.”

Granted, the type of player Hilliard sees at Harvard is not likely to require too much redundant drilling or aggressive manhandling. Hilliard learned that was no way to coach when his high school football coach smashed a clipboard over his head.

“I’ve never played for a more classy coach,” Garson says. “You never see him ranting and raving like some other coaches. You always hear of Harvard-Westlake being a class team, but now we also have the reputation of being a good team.”

Adds J.W. Hobson, who graduated from Harvard last spring: “He treats you like an adult unless you prove you need to be treated otherwise.”

Hilliard respects his players enough to risk the No. 1 seeding in the playoffs. One of his traditions at Harvard is to start the senior reserves in the final home game. Last week against Bishop Montgomery, the team behind Harvard in the standings, Hilliard was tested. A Wolverine loss would drop them from the top spot in the division. But Hilliard kept his promise.

“He had enough confidence in us,” says Andy Yeatman, one of the reserves who started. “That was pretty cool.”

The reserves played Bishop Montgomery close--the game was tied at halftime--and the Wolverines won, 64-52. By keeping his promise, he took a risk. But the last thing Hilliard wants is easy victories, anyway.