Brown Leaves the Court With Legacy of Success

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the girls’ basketball coach humbled by two angioplasty procedures and a quadruple bypass will finish his career with a team recognized less for its talent than for its heart.

At the conclusion of this season, Chuck Brown will step down at Thousand Oaks High, ending a basketball coaching career that began in Michigan in 1956. He will remain the Lancers’ freshman football and baseball coach.

Brown’s accomplishments in 16 seasons at Thousand Oaks are lengthy and border on legendary.

He enters the Southern Section playoffs with a 318-112 record with the Lancers. His teams won section titles in 1992 and 1993 and have captured at least a share of eight Marmonte League championships in the past 11 seasons.

Many of those accomplishments were achieved with the help of All-Southern Section standouts such as Michelle Palmisano, Marion Jones, Sasha Scardino and Jenn Detmer.

This season, the Lancers tied Royal for the Marmonte League championship, but no one on their roster will be confused with any past standouts.

“This is a team I am very proud of because they’ve accomplished so much without a dominant player,” said Brown, whose team is making its 13th consecutive postseason appearance.

As a player and later a coach at rival Royal, Paula Getty-Shearer has competed against Brown since 1981.

“Regardless of the players he has, Chuck is going to take them and win with them,” said Getty-Shearer, now the coach at Louisville High. “There are very few coaches who can do that.”

Brown, 63, begins his final playoff run tonight when the Lancers (17-6) host Valencia (18-7) in the first round of the Division I-A playoffs.

Heart attacks in 1989 and 1992 and 43 years of coaching have tempered Brown. Somewhat.

“I guess maybe I’ve calmed down a bit,” said Brown, who had his first angioplasty on a Monday in 1989. Three days later, he was back on the bench, coaching a playoff game.

“I still hit the chair once in a while,” he said. “I have to let out some frustration once in a while or I will pop.”

Some of Brown’s emotional eruptions will long be remembered.

Frustrated with his team’s play, Brown once hurled his keys at a wall, only to see them stick there. Thousand Oaks players bit their lips, trying not to burst out in hysterical laughter.

Another time, while coaching the men’s team at Missouri Baptist College, Brown heaved his whistle the length of the court, only to have a player retrieve it. So Brown chucked it again, not knowing an administrator was standing directly behind him, watching the entire episode.

The area in front of the Thousand Oaks bench has been nicknamed the “stomping grounds” in honor of Brown’s courtside manner. During a brief period when coaches were forbidden from standing up, Brown was given a chair with a seat belt.

With Brown preparing to step down, his players realize every time they take the court could be the last time they play for the veteran coach.

“It’s something in the backs of our minds, but he doesn’t want it to be a distraction,” senior forward Elena Salvador said.

The second half of the season has been a virtual farewell tour for Brown. Rival schools have staged pregame ceremonies. In December, many of his former players organized a retirement dinner in the school cafeteria, a humble setting that suited his unassuming style. More than 200 attended.

“I really don’t like the publicity and all the attention,” said Brown, the second-winningest girls’ basketball coach in Ventura County history. “I was really amazed that so many people would give up a Saturday night just to come for me.”

Brown is hoping that longtime junior varsity Coach Tom Strasburger will be his replacement. Whoever it is, however, Brown promises not to be a distraction.

“I firmly believe it is not good for an ex-coach to hang around,” Brown said. “It’s not fair for the coach taking over. If I get itchy to see a game, maybe I’ll sneak in the back door, hang out in the top row, then sneak out before anyone recognizes me.”

Jim O’Brien, Thousand Oaks’ athletic director since 1969, isn’t surprised by Brown’s aw-shucks attitude.

“I harken back to the old days, with the coach on the sidelines in a cap and overcoat,” O’Brien said. “That coach was concerned about the kids. That’s Chuck. He’s trying to make them athletic citizens of the world.”

Not a bad legacy to leave behind, Brown says.

“I would love to be remembered as a good role model and thought of as someone who had a positive effect on people,” he said.