Cady’s Way Was the Highway : Coach Starts Over at San Fernando After Leaving Notre Dame

The sun departed the earth hours ago and the gym is nearly empty.

Another basketball practice at San Fernando High has ended.

Coach Mick Cady sits down, rests his head against the fold-away bleachers, and looks into his life.

“There are some days where I go, ‘Jeez, Mick, what did you do?’ ” he says.

As if on cue, Cady raises his voice to scatter a few stragglers still shooting around.

“This is definitely stretching me as a coach,” he adds, before walking off the court and into the darkness, the thought of a championship game in 1993 a remote memory, but the possibility of a future title game a blazing desire.

*

This is heaven, Cady realized with a dazed smile as an entire student body bathed in the ecstasy of a championship.

Players wept, students rejoiced and the coach reached a peak most coaches only wish for when Notre Dame High captured the 1992-93 Southern Section Division III-A title.

And yet the very next day, Cady realized something was wrong.

“I was lost,” he says. “It was so much easier when I had a purpose and a direction. I spent a whole part of my life trying to get to this position and I’d done it. What was I going to do?”

Some parents at Notre Dame had a definite opinion of what Cady, a self-admitted “abrasive” coach, could do.

Quit. Leave. Take the trophy and run.

Cady, who says he will never be confused with the “light-speaking, kiss-your-tail type,” began to feel pressure from parents and school officials.

Winning was nice, they felt, but the yelling needed to stop. And while we’re on the subject, they added, did the kids have to be pushed so hard every practice?

“We had some parents that weren’t happy with the way he did things,” Notre Dame Athletic Director Kevin Rooney says. “That seemed to wear on Mick.”

Within a month of winning the title, Cady, who led the Knights to the playoffs six of his seven seasons as coach, resigned, as tired of the critical parents as they were of him.

Former standout guard Monte Marcaccini, an instrumental cog in Notre Dame’s championship season, always felt that Cady’s way was the right way.

“I love Coach Cady,” says Marcaccini, a freshman starter at Pepperdine, “and he yelled at me more than anybody. Maybe some people didn’t like (Cady’s style), but he’s a great motivator.

“He’s probably one of the biggest reasons why I went on to play Division I basketball.”

Cady stayed on at Notre Dame in a teaching capacity during the 1993-94 school year. And when a herniated disk developed in Cady’s back, surgery and recovery shoved basketball even further down his priority list. So did night school at St. Mary’s College to get a master’s degree.

“I didn’t really miss (coaching) a hell of a lot,” he says. “The season came and went and I didn’t even know it did.”

Yet somewhere between the agony of a stubborn back and the pain of having a winning system rejected by private-school parents, lay a desire to work the magic elsewhere, to see if his approach could fly somewhere else.

*

Chaos.

That’s what a San Fernando High practice looks like.

The varsity and junior varsity practice at the same time on adjacent courts, 20-some players running around, milling about.

Cady stands alone in the middle of it all and shouts instructions at one court while keeping half an eye on the other.

A school official taking in the scene reveals where all the assistant coaches are.

“You’re looking at them,” he says, sweeping his hand at nobody.

At Notre Dame, Cady had the luxury of seven assistants. At San Fernando, there’s one coach. For two teams.

Near the end of practice, Cady takes the varsity into a makeshift locker room for a chalk talk. As the varsity players sit on rolled up wrestling mats--no benches yet--and listen earnestly to Cady, the junior varsity scrimmage, briefly unsupervised, disintegrates into street ball.

Such is life without any help.

“There’s only salary for one guy,” Cady says. “It’s a little different.”

As is his life.

At Notre Dame, he lived a block from campus and rode to school on his bicycle. The neatly manicured campus, complete with Mission-style architecture--markedly different from the rusty chain-link fences and dreary walls at San Fernando--greeted him every morning.

His teaching schedule varied every year, but usually included self-esteem or religion classes. Not exactly quantum physics or Roman architecture.

“In defense of what I taught, they knew I was a basketball coach so they didn’t want to stick me with five (college-preparatory) classes and then I’d have to go coach basketball,” Cady says.

“It really was an ideal schedule.”

Then came basketball practice to top off the perfect day.

Cady’s first year at San Fernando has been more than a slight adjustment.

He has traded in his two-wheel commute for four wheels. He teaches American History. And this season’s team (2-3) likely will be going to the City Section playoffs only as spectators.

San Fernando plays Notre Dame at 3:30 p.m. today in the first round of the La Canada tournament. Cady says he feels no need to prove himself and doesn’t relish the matchup.

“I don’t think it’s really fair for the kids,” he said. “We’re trying to get something going here and this is kind of a distraction.”

Over the summer, Cady nearly found himself striving for a championship at a different level when he came close to landing an assistant’s job at Pepperdine.

But in August, he was informed that another applicant was chosen.

Cady, 34, already had told Notre Dame he wouldn’t return, forcing him to look elsewhere. Quickly. There are, after all, his wife and child to care for.

Cady remembered playing a talent-laden San Fernando team two years ago while at Notre Dame.

Why not, Cady thought. He applied and got the job. One problem.

“I came here and found all the seniors left,” he says.

Also gone was self-motivation among his players, never a problem at his previous job.

“When I was at Notre Dame, they’d come in and already be thinking about four-year universities and some of the better academic institutions,” Cady says. “Those kind of kids aren’t hard to motivate--they come in self-motivated.

“Here, I think they underestimate their potential. You need to create horizons.

“I have some kids that play basketball and they didn’t even know they had to take the SAT (to get into college). That kind of stuff is new to me.”

Cady’s tactics might work at San Fernando, and if they do, he won’t be asking himself questions any longer.

And maybe, just maybe, he will someday be wearing that same glazed grin on his face watching a mass of humanity storm the court after a championship team wins.

His new championship team.