Cassidy’s Fortunes Just .500

Pete Cassidy must be a pretty good basketball coach if he’s lost 300 games.

Think about it. A bad coach would be fired long before he had a chance to lose 300.

Cassidy, in the middle of his 25th season coaching at Cal State Northridge, is in a class with Denny Crum and Bobby Knight when it comes to longevity.

But while those coaches have each won national titles, Cassidy wakes up this morning with a career record of 331-331. This, his seventh consecutive losing season, has spoiled his once-impressive winning percentage, reducing it to a nondescript .500.

Cassidy won’t answer questions about his record. It would mean complaining that he spent six years as the coach of an underfunded Division I team, or admitting that he’s lost his touch as a coach, and neither option is too appealing.

Others are not shy about explaining that the problems have been unrelated to Cassidy.

“I think he’s a great coach,” Northridge point guard Trenton Cross says. “I’ve learned a lot of basketball from him.”

Mike Johnson, who was at Purdue before joining Cassidy’s staff as an assistant, says, “Offensively, I probably learned more in the first year from Pete than I had ever known.”

Tom McCollum, who has known Cassidy since the 1970s and been his top assistant for six years, adds: “If you ask any coach in the West to list the people he would talk to for some fundamental advice, Pete is one of the guys they would go to, because what Pete teaches is solid. It works.”

It just hasn’t produced a winning team since 1988-89.

When Northridge moved from Division II to Division I in 1990, the level of competition rose dramatically. But the resources did not keep up and Northridge has since struggled to a 49-112 record.

The Matadors, 4-14 this season, have never been funded with scholarships equal to most of their opponents. Their facilities are clearly not Division I.

Cassidy chooses his words carefully when he’s asked about how it feels to have been placed in such a competitive disadvantage.

“While the season is on, I can’t allow myself to succumb to the frustrations that are obvious,” he says, content that he has dodged the question.

But some are not so quick to attribute Northridge’s problems to external factors alone.

There are whispers among former players and other observers that the 61-year-old Cassidy is out of touch, that he thinks he’s still coaching in 1966 instead of 1996.

“Some of his ways may be a little bit in the past,” said Patrick Bolden, who played at Northridge from 1984-88.

Add to those criticisms the fact that Cassidy is in the final year of a three-year contract and a new athletic director is due to take over in the summer, and you see why some are wondering if Cassidy’s 25-year string is coming to an end.

Interim Athletic Director Paul Bubb said all coaches have an administrative evaluation at the conclusion of their seasons, and Cassidy will have his in April. Bubb said no decision on Cassidy’s status will be made until then.

Cassidy refuses to answer questions about his future, saying he’s too consumed by the present.

At least one option that can be ruled out is Cassidy quitting. If you read in the spring that he’s resigning to spend more time with his family, don’t believe it. It will mean he has been forced out.

“You are going to have to carry him out on his shield,” McCollum says. “That is the only way you are going to get him out of here. There is no facet of him that has quit in it. Unless they want a fight on their hands, dragging him out kicking and screaming, they better wait until he keels over.”

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Pete Cassidy is the ultimate Valley guy: a Little League teammate of Don Drysdale, for heaven’s sake.

Cassidy has lived in the area since he was 9, with the exception of a two-year military stint in Europe.

Upon his return, he enrolled at Northridge, which was then called San Fernando Valley State College. He played for the school’s first basketball team, in the 1958-59 season.

The next year, he was captain of the basketball and baseball teams and was the school’s athlete of the year.

But Cassidy knew his future was in coaching, so after graduation he took a job at Montclair Prep.

Cassidy coached football, basketball and baseball at the private school in Van Nuys. Just to make sure he had absolutely no free time, he also taught biology and physiology, went to night school and coached the freshman basketball team at Northridge.

A year later, he took a job coaching basketball at Notre Dame High. He stayed there for five seasons before returning to Northridge as an assistant coach in 1966. Five seasons later, he was promoted to head coach.

“And the rest is history. There, that’s the end of the interview,” Cassidy says, barely five minutes into his life story.

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Cassidy is clearly uncomfortable talking about himself, particularly in midseason. He’s more concerned with finding a way to milk victories out of a team lacking in size and talent than he is in reminiscing on one of the longest tenures in the nation.

Cassidy’s 25 seasons at the same school rank sixth among active Division I coaches. He trails only James Phelan of Mt. St. Mary’s in Maryland (42 seasons), Don Haskins of Texas El Paso (35), Dean Smith of North Carolina (35), Pete Carril of Princeton (29) and Norm Stewart of Missouri (29).

Cassidy says he never thought about coaching in the same place for so long, it just happened. He considered other jobs, but none worked out. As the years have passed, and his family has grown, his roots have grown deeper.

Cassidy also has grown entrenched in his style and coaching methods--to what extent depends on whom you ask.

“He says, ‘I’ve been doing it this way for 25 years, I can’t change now,’ ” Cross said. “But that’s just his style.”

As the years have passed, college basketball has clearly changed, and Cassidy is not sure all the changes have been for the better.

“There is a lot of individuality in the game going on today that certainly didn’t go on in the years past,” Cassidy says. “The one-on-one and individual moves and that type of thing makes it more difficult to coach a team game.”

It was just such a problem that Cassidy had with Damion Morbley last week. Morbley, the Matadors’ leading scorer, was doing his own thing on the floor, rather than sticking to the team’s offense, Cassidy says.

After the two had an argument on the floor during Wednesday night’s game, Morbley quit.

Cassidy wasn’t too broken up about it. There are a lot more important things than scoring, he says.

Cassidy frequently quotes John Wooden on such issues, saying things like, “Play your five best, not your best five,” or “There are better players today but not better teams.”

Hardly a day passes that Cassidy doesn’t spout another Woodenism. His adherence to the philosophies of the great UCLA coach are, to most people, seen as Cassidy’s strength.

“If we are talking about stressing fundamentals and having a good attitude and going to class and being responsible for yourself, then yes, I’ll be glad to say I’m still in John Wooden’s era,” Cassidy says.

“I don’t like flashiness and showboating. I don’t like taunting. I don’t like that type of thing. If that’s being [old fashioned], please Lord, keep me there.”

Cassidy’s defenders say he is not the grumpy old man he may appear from a distance. He is, they say, if anything, too nice to his players, too polite to really get their attention.

“He’s probably the nicest person I’ve ever known,” Johnson says. “He cares first and foremost for these kids. He will never beat a kid down.”

Though he was 2,500 miles away with his team at the time, Cassidy was among the first to send flowers in December 1994, when Northridge softball players Shelby Wilcox and Traci Gallian were badly hurt in a car accident.

When Cross was in high school, Cassidy spent six straight hours on the phone with Cross’ mother, trying to assure her that her son had made the right choice in picking Northridge.

“You can learn basketball from a lot of people,” McCollum says, “but there are few that care for you as well as Pete Cassidy.”

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Cassidy’s assistants reject the notion that he has not evolved in terms of X’s and O’s.

In 1990, Cassidy had Northridge run Paul Westhead’s frantic, shoot-every-seven-seconds offense. The experiment failed because the Matadors’ simply didn’t have the personnel.

“The thing that slows Coach down is not being able to get the big, athletic players that you can do a whole lot more with,” Johnson says. “When you get guys like we have gotten in the past, you have to be a lot more conservative.”

Bringing a recruit to see tiny, dilapidated Matador Gym is like picking up a blind date in a 1979 Plymouth station wagon with wood paneling on the side.

“It’s hard to attract Division I players,” says Bubb, the athletic director. “We don’t have some basic things like a team room and a weight room. These are things recruits see other places and expect to see.”

With only 10 scholarships--three fewer than most Division I teams--Cassidy doesn’t have much room for error in his recruiting.

He may get a break soon, though. Bubb’s plan, which hasn’t been approved yet, calls for the basketball team to get 12 scholarships next season.

Next season.

It’s been the catch phrase of Northridge basketball for quite a while now, but it seems to actually mean something these days.

Three of Northridge’s best players--Derrick Higgins, Keith Higgins and Kevin Taylor--sit at the end of the bench in street clothes. For various reasons, they won’t be able to play until next season.

Next season Northridge moves to the Big Sky Conference, which sends its champion to the NCAA tournament.

For Cassidy, the goal of achieving even a sliver of Division I success is what prompts him to wake up at 3 a.m. to call his office answering machine with another idea to beat a press.

“It would be nice to see a season turn around,” he says. “Just once.”