He Tests Trojans’ Learning Power

The best basketball teacher in Los Angeles is smiling.

This is so unusual, you listen closely as he strolls past three of his players outside a winning postgame news conference.

“Did you hear all those nice things I said about you in there?” he asks them.

They look at each other, kick the floor, shrug.

“Hope you enjoyed it,” he says, walking away. “You never know when you’re going to hear it again.”

The best basketball teacher in Los Angeles coaches a struggling team, for a shadowed program, in a dowdy gym, in front of fans sometimes outnumbered by the band.

Yet Henry Bibby concedes nothing.

“This is my kind of place,” says USC’s coach. “It’s about building. It’s about teaching. It’s about growing.”

This winter, once again, it’s about Henry Bibby against the world, and what an interesting fight.

After consecutive 20-win seasons, it was supposed to be easier. But it has gotten harder. And Bibby has gotten tougher.

Coaching a team whose best players are precocious underclassmen, he has already sent a passel of them to the woodshed.

“You’d think these players would understand me by now,” he says, a twinkle in his eye.

His team playing a schedule that includes three difficult nonconference road games, he has already claimed that one road loss was fixed.

“How can I get in trouble for speaking the truth?” he asks.

Coaching at a school where the spotlight is on football, in a gym where lights sometimes flicker, in a town where he’s forever the other guy, he makes no excuses.

“We don’t talk about any of that stuff,” Bibby says. “We are who we are.”

What they are is a throwback program surviving in a town that doesn’t look or feel anything like them.

You’ve heard of Showtime? This year at USC, it’s Old-time.

Like many other coaches, Bibby had a Midnight Madness workout this fall to mark the official start of practice, an event traditionally highlighted by a Trojan streetball scrimmage.

Unlike others, though, Bibby suddenly stopped the running and gunning by calling a timeout.

Around 12:30 a.m.

The latest timeout in school history.

“These kids are crying out for discipline, can’t you see that?” says Bibby. “I try to give it to them. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I made.”

Like many, Bibby has a team that could be marked, “Handle With Care.” But unlike others, Bibby refuses to coddle, instead using playing time as parents once used the switch.

Brandon Brooks, Jerry Dupree, Errick Craven, Derrick Craven and Rory O’Neil have all missed time with punitive benchings or suspensions.

And the team has played only four games.

“It’s love, the way I look at it. Tough love.”

That quote isn’t from Bibby. It’s from Don Matlock.

He is the stepfather of the Craven twins. He had just driven to the Sports Arena through Notre Dame traffic last Saturday to watch his sons and their teammates play Morris Brown.

Yet one of them, Errick, the team’s leading returning scorer, sat on the bench the entire game because he’d violated a team rule.

And it wasn’t the first time.

In the season opener against UC Riverside, both Errick and Derrick missed much of the first half because they had arrived five minutes late for the pregame meeting.

Matlock and wife Sonya Craven couldn’t be happier.

“Coach Bibby is tough, but he’s fair, and he’s teaching them to be young men,” says Sonya. “This is why we are here.”

And after seven years’ worth of benchings and scoldings and sweat, this is why the Bibby way still works.

The kids may not like it, but the parents love it.

“Because once [the players] arrive here, I feel it is my duty to act as their parents,” says Bibby. “It’s about more than wins or losses. We’re trying to teach them to grow up here.”

With every suspension or benching, Bibby asks the player to call his parents and tell them.

“I want them to soften the blow,” he says.

Then, Bibby calls the parents and invites them to his office to deliver the news personally.

“We all sit around my desk, the parents and the student, and we talk about how we can fix the problem,” Bibby says. “The student knows that I’m not acting on my own, but on behalf of everyone.”

When there’s no time for a meeting, such as the middle of last year’s stunning loss to UNC-Wilmington in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Bibby goes with his NBA instincts.

In this case, it was to bench star David Bluthenthal for a long stretch, even though the move might have cost him the game.

You know, Henry, those of us who projected your team to reach the Final Four, we’re still wondering ... why?

“He was playing terrible, that’s why,” Bibby says. “He wasn’t playing defense. We even had one of our leaders come up to me, Brandon Granville, and beg me to take David out of the game until he got his head together.”

But did you have to put in football player Gregg Guenther?

“Gregg was playing harder at the time, more physical, and deserved the opportunity,” Bibby says. “That’s what my program is all about. If you work hard, you will get a chance. And if you don’t, you won’t.”

When USC plays 15th-ranked Missouri on Saturday at the Pond in the Wooden Classic, it could get ugly. But the Trojans will play defense, and they will play hard, or they will not play.

Bibby’s teams never make you regret the cost of your seat.

Or, as local beat reporters learned, he is always worth the price of a plane ticket.

None of them made the flight to Rhode Island for the team’s first road game, another sign that USC basketball still isn’t taken quite seriously.

They missed what will surely be one of college basketball’s craziest finishes of the year, with USC losing in overtime, despite having taken its final shot while cheerleaders and fans and bench players danced around them on the floor.

Bibby tried to protest the game, and later argued that the result shouldn’t count.

“It was wrong, everyone knows it was wrong, and I’m going to keep saying it was wrong,” Bibby says. “It was all set up for Rhode Island to win, and that’s what happened.”

But nobody east of the Harbor Freeway was listening. With home-conference referees working the first game in Rhode Island’s new home arena, he never had a chance.

“I know,” Bibby says. “So? Does that mean I shouldn’t speak up?”

Of course he should. Leave it to his colleagues to scheme and preen and stay politically correct. The best basketball teacher in Los Angeles teaches.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.