Anything for another day
Former managing sports
editor Kevin Santo
reminisces about his time
with The Daily.
» Page 2B
One of the girls
Former managing sports
editor Betelhem Ashame
reflects on the friendships
she found at The Daily.
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SPORTSMONDAY
The Michigan Daily | michigandaily.com | April 16, 2018
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Design by Jack Silberman
Katelyn Mulcahy / Daily
Just months after Michigan fired Tommy
Amaker and hired some coach from West Virginia
in April of 2007, the men’s basketball team opened
offseason workouts. It was a directionless program,
desperate for national relevance and one — just one
— NCAA Tournament berth.
It was day one of the John Beilein era. And, little
did anyone know, day one of perhaps the greatest
sustained period of success in Michigan basketball
history.
At the beginning of the workout, then-assistant
coach John Mahoney barged into the weight room,
hooting and hollering.
“We’re trying to win a motherf-ing national
championship,” he yelped. “And that’s why we’re
here.”
Guard Jevohn Shepherd gave his teammate
Anthony Wright a glance. Wright still recalls what
Shepherd said next.
“Man, this guy has to calm down.”
***
John Beilein was plenty calm.
He looked down, then at the clock, then back
up. He took five steps to his right and shook Jay
Wright’s hand with a smile, walking off the court
40 minutes short of immortality once again.
For the second time in six seasons, he and his
team had fallen one game shy of fulfilling that brash
weight room proclamation 10 years ago. Maybe it’ll
happen one day. Maybe not.
But there’s a pit that still lingers in fans’ stomachs,
a laundry list of “what-ifs” that will live forever. It’s
an emotion bred from a program-wide attitude
change, cultivated through day-to-day, incremental
improvement. There’s one guy responsible for that.
That same coach from West Virginia has now
qualified for the NCAA Tournament seven times
in the last eight seasons, made the Elite Eight three
times and the championship game twice. His
resume vaults him alongside the premier coaches
in college basketball; he directs a program that is
now a model of consistency.
It’s not a change that happened overnight or
without its fair share of trial and error.
But to fully understand the Beilein-led
transformation, take a dive into a desperate
timeout, a huddle at the Big Ten Tournament in
2009.
A glimpse into a fledgling program learning
what it really takes to win.
***
He had to call timeout to get something out in
the open. After all, a potential NCAA Tournament
bid for the first time in 10 years — and the entire
trajectory of the program — hung in the balance.
It was the second round of the Big Ten
Tournament, and Beilein’s squad trailed Illinois by
20 late in the second half. Beilein and his team had
all but conceded hope of a comeback.
If this team — sitting at .500 in conference play
— came short of the NCAA Tournament, murmurs
asking for his job would only amplify. It would’ve
been 11 years and counting without a tournament
bid, three under Beilein. In a candid moment, he
warned his team of what a blowout loss might
mean. For the team. For the school. For him.
“Beilein called timeout just to say, ‘Look the
committee is watching this game,’” Wright, a
Michigan forward from 2006-10, recalled. “‘If we
get blown out this could hurt us.’ He literally said
that during the timeout. He said, ‘We’ve got to get
this as close as possible.’ It wasn’t ‘win the game,’
just ‘keep it close.’”
The timeout was a blunt reality, a mark of
tempered expectations. That coveted leap to
prominence doesn’t come without putting one foot
in front of the other, taking one small step after
another.
Michigan trimmed its deficit, losing by a
respectable 10 points. It would later be selected as
a 10-seed in the NCAA Tournament, where it fell
to the Blake Griffin-led Oklahoma Sooners in the
second round. Still, there’s no way to see the 2008-
2009 season as anything other than an unmitigated
success.
In the first season free of scholarship limitations
due to the Ed Martin payment scandal, the
Wolverines made the NCAA Tournament for the
first time in 11 seasons.
Every tidal wave begins with a ripple. That
rag-tag group in 2009 laid the foundation for what
came next.
***
“Culture shift” is a phrase that gets thrown
around in sports, when change wants to be
sugarcoated with a smile. It can often be
meaningless and exaggerated in its tone. There are
countless examples of failed attempts at culture
shifts in sports because culture, as it turns out, is
hard to shift.
This isn’t one of those stories.
As with everything John Beilein does, this
change took time, and it was a process. But the
results have been on display for nine years now.
The national runner-up Wolverines are a shining
beacon of a college basketball program, and it’s easy
to forget it hasn’t always been that way.
“When he first started recruiting me in 2007,
the program … was obviously not in a good place,”
said center Jordan Morgan, a member of the
Wolverines from 2011-14. “At that point in my life,
Michigan going to Final Fours and winning Big Ten
Championships, it was a little bit hard to fathom at
the time just because of where Michigan was at.”
At the start of Beilein’s tenure, “where Michigan
was at” could only be classified as oblivion. It hadn’t
made the NCAA Tournament since 1998, and at a
school in the heart of the Lloyd Carr era in football,
the basketball team toiled with mediocrity more
than disaster.
Well removed from the Fab Five era, with the
1989 national title a faint memory, Michigan had
yet to turn a page on the court.
Final Fours? This team just wanted to make the
damn tournament.
It was stuck with the only thing worse than
failure: Irrelevance.
Hiring John Beilein, a little-known Jesuit coach
with a measured attitude and a sunny disposition,
did little to change that reputation overnight.
Internally, though, the overhaul began
immediately.
“I’m not sure I really knew what ‘rebuild
that program’ meant,” Morgan said. “But
from the minute that I met him, he used to
talk to me about rebuilding. Rebuilding
a program. Building something special.
Being a part of rebuilding that. And that
was what made me want to go to Michigan
in the first place.”
Before practices even began, Beilein
and his staff instituted a number of
tests — tests of skill and of athleticism —
that each player needed to accomplish
before he could even step on the
practice court.
They ranged from conditioning
requirements, like running a mile in
5:30 or less, to skill-based measures,
like making 50 threes in five
minutes.
Couldn’t do it? No practice. No
games. No exceptions.
Those tests still exist today,
though they’ve evolved with
more focus on skill than the mile
run, for example. The best of
the best can now peak at 70 or
even 80 threes in that same
timeframe.
“If you could do those
tests, it didn’t necessarily
mean you were gonna be a
better basketball player. It
was testing your mental
toughness, I think,”
said
guard
Zack
Novak, a Michigan
forward from 2008-
12. “He was coming in,
saying, ‘I’m going to get
you as tired as you can be,
and you’re not allowed to
practice until you show
me that you can get
through that and win
these drills.’ ”
And
once
you
made it into practice,
each drill had a
winner and a loser,
with
punishment
doled out to the
latter.
“You
have
to
learn how to win,”
Novak said. “That’s
a real thing. Just
the way that we
competed in practice,
every drill. … He just
had us learning how
to win, how to execute
when the pressure was on.”
But learning how to win doesn’t automatically
translate into winning.
The players struggled to grasp the complexity of
an offense that has since come to be accepted as one
of the most efficient in the country.
At the time, its genius was also its biggest flaw.
“There are so many plays, and there are always
plays within the plays,” Wright said. “And there are
always counters of the plays within the play that
can change just by someone doing an action.”
Confused?
You wouldn’t be alone. Bewildered players asked
questions that often took 30 minutes for Beilein to
explain before his team could execute it all.
MAX MARCOVITCH
Daily Sports Editor
John Beilein leads the way
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