Coach Fenerty Interview

By any statistical measure, GA’s Jim Fenerty is considered one of the best high school coaches on the East Coast, if not the nation. Four hundred plus wins, ten Inter-Ac titles, numerous national rankings, dozens of Division-1 scholarship players…the metrics all tell the story, right? Yet there is a side to the coach in his 19th season at GA that doesn’t come across on any résumé, that can’t be appreciated in any game recap. In a 45 minute, sit-down conversation, the true Jim Fenerty, a man of faith, of family, and of character, was revealed.

Below is the entire interview, from which we can learn that there is a lot more to basketball than simply the X’s and O’s. It’s a true lesson in life.

Favorite highlight at GA? Favorite team? Favorite guys?

I think each team is really special. This is the first time that I have ever, ever, ever coached Jimmy [his son, a junior guard] in anything. I think that has been pretty interesting. I have deliberately not coached him because I think I just wanted to be a father watching him play…

I like to go back to the very first teams which is kind of why I keep the pictures up here [referring to his office, where every team photo since his first in 1989-1990 still hangs]. It was Johnny O’Connor, who is now a big time coach down at Georgia Tech, Michael Hawkes who was a P.E. teacher here and was basically a football coach, and myself; basically the three of us coached all of the teams, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to coach a freshman team in the afternoon and then coach the varsity team that night. It was interesting.

It was fun building the program. I think what has changed over the years is the expectation level. When we first got here, I remember our first year here we played Penn Charter down at PC. We frankly weren’t a very good team, we were pretty young. We had Alvin [Williams] as a freshman, Dennis Kane as a freshman, and Blair Hicks as a freshman. We had Mark Nori as a sophomore; LT Talley was a junior. We went to Penn Charter and we lost the game in overtime, when a kid named Michael Downey threw in a shot from half court; we lost by one. We were down in that dungeon of a locker room, and there were GA people lining the steps to congratulate us. I thought to myself, “Where am I at? We lost this game,” but I guess we hadn’t really played well against Charter in basketball in a couple of years, and people were just excited about that. And the next year we beat them by 20. It was like Christmas day.

My truly favorite team is the next team I’m going to coach. I feel very fortunate to have been able to coach as long as I have and to coach as many really good people as I have. Some of them have been great players, but all of them have been great people in their own way, and that’s the way I like it.

How about the funnest team?

I thought coaching DJ [Johnston] and Kyle [Griffin] was a lot of fun last year. DJ just simply loved the game. My big saying - which I get busted on all the time by my team - is that I want people to play the game with a smile in their heart. And I think DJ and Kyle did just that, even when they were hurt. When the guys had every reason to pack it in, and just say “whatever” to the season, they didn’t, and I think that was a lot of fun.

It has been fun coaching the great teams, but it’s also been a lot of fun building. Some of our teams that didn’t win championships have, in my mind, been champion performers because they took basketball and made it more than just a game; they made it something that was a life lesson, and I feel like that is what we’re supposed to be about.

One of the things that really bothers me is this all-encompassing, you have to win, and it has to be a year-round thing, and you have to specialize attitude. I have never felt that is a good thing for a kid. But yet I seem to be the dinosaur. I am told by people, “Well, you really don’t know how things work.” Well, you know what, I’ve been coaching for a long time, and I know a ton of people in college basketball, and I’ve had my opportunities but I know how it works, I know how people work.

I really do think, and I tell my players this, that to really be a healthy human being, you need to do three things; three things my grandfather told me. Each day you need to smile - you need to find something to smile about each day. He used to say each day you need to cry - you need to find something in which your emotions are touched and you feel passionately about. And finally, each day you need to do something to stimulate your mind. He used to say, “You need to read something every day, you need to cry about something every day, and you need to laugh about something every day.” That’s been great advice. He’s been long gone, but it’s been good advice to me because if you do things with a passion, you may not always do it right, but you’re a better person for trying.

And if you just keep your sense of humor… My lord, at a place that is as high powered as GA, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t last real long.

How about a certain favorite moment that even after you retire, you will look back on and say that kind of defines my coaching career at GA?

I think it goes back to the day that Randy Ayers was fired as the coach of the 76ers. I got a phone call from Mrs. Ayers early in the morning and she told me what had happened. I was devastated because Randy Ayers is one of the really good people who should be around coaching. And she told me they were going to keep Ryan and Cam home, and I told her absolutely, whatever you need us to do, we’ll do. Later on that day, some media types called, some TV stations, and they wanted to come and film our practice. I said no because I wasn’t going to let Ryan go through that, even though he wasn’t in school. The media claimed I was standing in the way of the press and the “freedom to know,” and I said, “No I’m not, I’m protecting my player here. I am protecting a family that I care a great deal about.”

Ryan called later on in the day, and I was actually in Mr. Connor’s office [GA’s headmaster] when he called, so they transferred the call up there. Ryan just said “Coach, I know it’s against school policy and everything, but would it be okay if I came to practice? I think I just need to be around my teammates.” I looked at Mr. Connor, and he said, “Absolutely, let him come.”

For some reason that day we were practicing in the small gym. I said to Mr. Dolan and Mr. Stipa, the two security guys, “Look, I told these people no, they couldn’t come, but that doesn’t mean the press does everything you want them to.” And sure enough, one of the local TV stations showed up, right outside the door. I had told the security guys, “Nobody gets in here today. This is a family and one of our guys is hurting, and we just need to work.” The most special moment to me was when those TV guys showed up, despite our security guys saying no. Ryan’s teammates rallied around him and they said, “Coach, nobody comes in here to mess with him.” To me, I felt like, even though that team didn’t win a championship, that team was a family, and that team was close. To me, that was a moment that I will never forget…

[At this point got a little choked up].

Then there was last year with Jimmy, with the 400. The 400 wins were not important to me. But the event was… and it was great to see him do that.

How about outlook coming in from Egan and has it changed at all from your first year to your 19th season now?

I still think back to when they called me over here to talk about being a history teacher. It was about a middle school history position, and about being a basketball coach. When I walked through this place and they were telling me how their record wasn’t very good, but I just looked around and thought, “I don’t see why this place can’t be a great academic institution and have a great athletic program.” Now I look at it every day when I come in, 19 years later, and know that not only is GA a great academic institution, but we also have some incredible student-athletes.

I think GA has always had a tendency to undersell what it does. I think we have terrific people here; terrific kids, terrific coaches, terrific teachers. I think sometimes we almost feel like we have to apologize that we have such good people. I don’t see any reason to do that. I think we are lucky.

Because I’ve coached so long, I get asked to go and speak at a lot of different places. I see schools, and it’s just a shame what’s going on there. Kids are losing their dreams because they just don’t have an opportunity to chase that dream. At GA that just doesn’t happen. We ought to say we’ve got something good here. I look back, and my favorite players of all time are the ones who came to GA, and this place changed their life in a positive way. And I hope we continue to attract those kinds of kids. I think there are kids and you just look and say, “This kid is so much better off because he came to GA.” A lot of kids can get a good education anywhere, but this young man or this young woman came to GA, and this place changed their life. That’s what I look for.

How about the game? Has it changed really?

I don’t like the direction of the game right now. I honestly think this, and I hope my players realize it, that basketball is a game. It’s a game to be played, it’s a game to be enjoyed. What I’m afraid of nowadays is that kids are using basketball as a means to an end. To me, the end of basketball should be, you know, you go out there and you compete and you find out that maybe you can go further than you thought you could go, but you have a blast doing it and you have a lot of fun playing it. Unfortunately I’m starting to see more and more guys who use basketball as training ground to get that scholarship, or training ground to go to the NBA, or training ground to get their name in the paper. All of those things are just trivial and they’re not really that important. It’s just a game. You should play the game to enjoy it, and I don’t see that happening.

It’s become way too important in some people’s lives; players, parents, coaches - to the point where its importance has been blown so far out of context that it stops being fun for a lot of kids.
I really don’t like the trend. I honestly don’t. I know I’m a dinosaur, I know that there are people out there who think I shouldn’t be encouraging kids to have fun playing this game, telling me “You got to win it!” But you know, at the end of the day, we’re all going to be measured by what we brought to this life and what we did. If we can all say we made a positive difference in the life of just one person, then we’re a success. We’re not going to be judged on how many wins and losses we have…we’re not going to be judged on how much money we’ve made or anything like that. It’s going to be what did we do with the talents we had and did we make a positive difference?

In the meantime, we’ve go to look and see what’s really important. If a parent judges their child only by the number of points that they score, then that parent is missing out on a jewel. They are missing out on a great opportunity to grow with that young person and to guide that young person. If a coach just simply says, “Hey, I’m going to use this high school job because I want to get to the next level. I want to get a college job,” then that’s not fair to the kids that they’re coaching.

I’ve said the same thing to college coaches when they come in here and they want to talk about certain things. The first thing I ask them is, “How are you going to help my young student athlete fulfill the dream of getting an education, to get them to the point where they can be successful human beings?” They say, “What do you mean? Like, how many times we are going to be on television?” No! You can tell a family that you’re going to make sure that their child gets an education, but if you go out and practice 5 hours a day, you’re not helping them.

Where do you think it starts like, the game not being fun?

I think it starts when kids start playing. I’m seeing situations where parents in Lower and Middle School get their children a personal trainer.

When I was growing up we had this thing called the Father’s Club every Saturday. Everybody lined up according to height. Then they said, “How many kids we got today? Okay, we’re going to count them off and we’re going to divide them up according to height, and we’re going to play.” Somebody coached, and the coaching was just, you know, “Dribble with your left hand.” It wasn’t any of this screaming and yelling, no zones or any of that kind of stuff.

I just think everything is now measured by the score, and that’s not a good thing. I think basketball is meant to be one of those moments where, like my grandfather said, you smile. And you know what, in basketball games there have been times where you feel like you’re ready to cry, times that you feel like you’re ready to smile, and times where you should learn something. You should learn to deal with people and the dynamic of a group. You should learn how to deal with somebody saying that you can’t do something. Well hey, maybe you should prove to them that you can. You deal with victory, you deal with defeat. You deal with all things that are going to happen to you in your life, whether we want them to or not. You’re going to have good moments, and you’re going to have bad moments, and you should be able to use athletics to help you learn how to deal with that.

I’m afraid that we’re putting the cart before the horse. Because we’ve been so successful, people look to send their kids to GA, and one of the questions they ask me is, “How many kids have you gotten Division 1 scholarships?” The answer I always give them is none. And they look at me and say, “Well, that’s not true.” And I say, yeah, it is true. You asked, “How many kids have I gotten a Division 1 scholarship for,” and the answer is none. I’m hoping that I’ve given the kids an opportunity to go play a game that they love, and go play a game that they have fun with. And I’m hoping that maybe that has helped them somewhere along the way. But if a kid gets a scholarship, he got the scholarship. It’s not Jim Fenerty, it’s the kid! And you know what, I’m happy for them.

How about this team?

One of the difficult parts of coaching, especially in a sport like basketball, is trying to get all 13 guys on the same page. And I know this team’s going to get there, or I’m going to probably die trying. They’ve shown spurts.

One of the hardest things to do in today’s society is to willingly become part of something bigger than yourself. To have a successful season, everybody’s got to do that. And it can’t be 5 out of 13, or 10 out of 13. It’s got to be all 13. They’ve all got to buy into the idea and put their egos aside, and for this 2 hour period of practice, or game, or whatever it might be, be big enough men to subjugate their egos and become part of something greater. That’s a hard thing in this society for people to accept. And it’s a hard thing to teach.

I’ve seen us lose but play together, and I’ve seen us win but play separate. I don’t always measure wins and losses by what’s on the scoreboard. I’m looking to see what we can do.

I think we have great young men on this team. I think there are great role models among the seniors. I think Joe Hill plays as hard as anybody we’ve ever had. I think Tim McCarty has taken whatever God-given ability he has and has simply worked his tail off to be better. I see him doing the same thing in the classroom. I think Alan Tate has taken a really bad situation, I mean the kid has had no luck health-wise in basketball, and he’s handled the situation with a great deal of dignity. I think Nicky Gill might be one of my favorite players of all time. He just simply goes out there and he works every day. Nicky’s just a wonderful young man. And Vik Bala, I mean, if there’s a good story on this team…Vik Bala was here as a freshman and he made the third team. As a sophomore, he made the third team. A lot of guys would have packed it in and said, “Well, I’m going to go somewhere else.” At the end of his sophomore year he came to me and said, “I want to play basketball at GA. What do I need to do?” We told him, and what do you know, he did everything we told him to do. And then last year as a junior, he becomes one of the best guys on the JV team. And this year he’s just a delight to have on this varsity team. It’s the power of perseverance.

I think those 5 guys are terrific role models for any of the other kids in our program. If things work out right, at the end of this year they’re going to call themselves champions. But even if the record doesn’t turn out that way, I think they still have that championship mentality. I’m real proud of them.

Let me just say this. After every game I call my parents and I thank them for paying all of that money for tuition to let me get a Masters degree, and part of that Masters degree is in psychology. And I had no idea I was going to be a coach. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I did an internship in my junior year at LaSalle with a law firm and said, “No way in the world do I want to be a lawyer.” And the good Lord directed me in the right way to coaching and teaching. And I use that Masters degree in Human Services psychology every day. That’s part of being a coach. Anybody can pick up the X’s and O’s of the game. But trying to deal with people is the most important part of it.

Any advice for young coaches?

Yeah, there are a few things.

The first is, if you’re a young coach, understand that there are people out there who have done what you want to do. You need to swallow your pride and bleed them dry of all of their experience and information. One of the best things I ever did coaching-wise was when I just started at Egan. I was a young coach, and I ran into Pat Knapp; he had just left McDevitt to take an assistant job at Notre Dame for women. I was talking with him because we had been friends for a long time, and he said, “Why don’t you come out and work Notre Dame’s camp?” I did that for 10 summers, and I met some of the finest basketball coaches, but also some of the finest people, that I’m ever going to come across. Guys like Pete Gillen, who was the coach at Virginia. Guys like Jimmy Baron, who’s coaching up at Rhode Island. Guys like Digger Phelps. And I learned. I learned from every single one of them. You develop a sense of humility when you’re around really great coaches - I’ve always believed that.

The second thing is don’t take yourself so seriously. One of the things that bothers me the most is when a team performs well, I see these coaches suffer a dislocated shoulder because they are so enthusiastically patting themselves on the back. The kids won the game. Your job is to put them in situations where they can be successful. Then I see other situations where you lose a game, and all the coach does is blame his players. The bottom line is when you lose games, generally, it’s because the other team is better. But there are times where, as a coach, you just didn’t do a good enough job putting your kids in a situation to win.

Finally, always remember that when you are coaching young people, they all want to succeed, and they’re all trying to do the right thing out there. When they make a mistake, it’s not because they’re deliberately trying to make a mistake. It’s just simply because they made a mistake. My philosophy has always been - and I still say it today – that when you make a mistake, know what you did wrong, then move on to the next play. Coaches shouldn’t stand there embarrassing the kid by yelling and screaming. We all scream and yell at games, it’s just the emotion of the game. But don’t take the joy out of the game for a young man or a young woman. Just remember that it’s a game. When you lose your temper or you lose your emotion and you lose control of yourself, be big enough to, when you finally settle down, say “I’m sorry. That was really stupid.” Let the kids know that your primary interest is not the score. Your primary interests are the young people that you are coaching.

Clearly I feel very deeply about the philosophy of the game and the philosophy of coaching. I just think sometimes people don’t really know who I am.