Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

This topic was broached on the post about Mike Helmer, South’s girls coach the past three years, getting the women’s job at Butler community College. I was curious myself about becoming a college coach (not for myself!), so this morning I called Pittsburg State coach Lane Lord, who built the program at Heights before moving on to Barton County juco and now to Pitt State, where he’s been for one season.

Here’s his thoughts: “The biggest difference is it’s all about recruiting, establishing those recruiting connections, not only in-state but out of the state.
In-state wise, I was fortunate to be in the (City League) for 11 years, so I was able to make a lot of good ties. Even people we played against, coaches you meet at clinics, all those kinds of things.

“æ.æ.æ. We always say 80 per-cent is recruiting and 20 per-cent is coaching. The fun thing about it is I like to recruit, I like meeting people and getting on the road. So if you enjoy those kinds of things, you know my personality (Chadwick note: If you don’t know Lane, he’s extremely personable, always the first to ask about family, even my parents.), I like to do those kinds of things.

“If it weren’t for relation-ships like a Don Racine (Bishop Carroll), Bill Shaw (Derby), people around the community — and not only through basketball but through football — it made a difference. They know you and they trust you and know that you’ll take care of the kids.
“æ.æ.æ. Even if I don’t know the basketball coach, you may know the football coach or the track coach.

“The out-of-state recruiting is making your connections. Like we had at Barton, two players from Latvia, a girl from Turkey, one from the Ivory Coast of Africa. Over-seas connections are made through the Division I type coaches that want to place kids with you. Those (Division I) connections are made by sending the players to the next level or going to the AAU tournaments and meeting and greeting. It’s a big networking thing.”

He touched on the differences between junior college and Division II, as well.

“I really think we have the best of both worlds at Division II because we can get junior college kids. There are so many rules to get into Di-vision I out of junior college — you have to graduate, have a certain GPA, if you stay there, you have to have 60 percent of your major done to be eligible for Division I. We can also get high school kids that might slip through the cracks or Division I transfers, who don’t have to sit out.”

Lord signed Heights three-point shooter Amanda Orloske — she’s currently re-habbing her knee after having surgery following an injury in sub-state and expects to be ready for the season — and Girard’s Marissa Poppe, too.

As for how this relates to Helmer, he’ll be fine. He’s like Lane in a lot of ways, especially personality. He’s so darn nice and he loves to talk and how can you not like him? That’s huge for recruiting. He also has a lot of connections, through boys and girls basketball, through his dad’s history as a coach. Will Butler win consistently? I don’t know. But as Lane said, the main part of the battle is recruiting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 9:29 a.m. and is filed under Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.