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Hard Work and Hard Practices
Here, Bill Bayno talks about lessons he learned as a pro basketball coach, and he shares his thoughts about undergraduates leaving college early to go to the NBA. He was interviewed in May 2008 by Joseph Wakelee-Lynch, Vistas editor.
How is coaching in the NBA different than coaching at the college level?
I think being in the NBA is like having your Ph.D. in coaching. It’s all basketball. For example, when you take into account summer league and exhibition games along with the regular season, it involves over 100 games a year. In two years, it’s 200 games. That’s six and half college seasons.
On top of that, the majority of your day as coach is spent studying the game. In college, that’s hard to do, because you have so many other things going on. You might get a couple of hours in a day. In the NBA, you’re watching film in the hotel and when you travel in a plane. In two years in the NBA, I probably watched a minimum of 500 games on film.
You learn so much more in the pros. That’s why coaches like John Calipari and Rick Pitino, who have gone to the NBA and come back to college coaching, are way ahead of the game. Those coaches are pretty innovative, and their offensive strategies are above and beyond the college level. I’m eager to see how much of my pro coaching experience translates and how much of that the kids can pick up.
We’ve seen a few players at other colleges leave after one year to go to the NBA. Is that something that only top college teams will continue to deal with, or do mid-major institutions like LMU have to be concerned?
There are some mid-majors that will. Gonzaga is an example. As you develop and your program gets better, that’s going to be an obstacle that you might have to deal with.
I’ve had kids leave early. Shawn Marion left UNLV early to go to the NBA, and Marcus Camby left the University of Massachusetts to go to the NBA. It’s actually a positive to me, because it’s a sign that your program has gotten to a point where you have the best players in the world and they have choices like that to make. As coaches, our responsibility is to give them the best advice. I don’t think holding them back is necessarily always the right move. Sometimes it is the right advice, but a lot of times it isn’t, because to turn that type of money down risks injury or a bad college season. It’s not fair to tell that kid, “Don’t go pro.” You can always come back and get your degree.
Hopefully, we’ll get to a point where we’ll have kids who face those choices, because that means we’ll have great kids in the program, and, hopefully, that’s going to translate into program success.
We asked Bill Bayno to tell us the first thing that comes into his mind when hears the names of other renowned basketball coaches — but we promised him that we wouldn’t ask him rate any of his WCC peers. Here are his responses.
John Wooden, UCLA
“Excellence”
Mike Krzyzewski, Duke University
“He’s a good friend. He helped me get this job. Coach K is just so good in everything. He’s such soulful guy, too. Coach K is my idol.”
Bobby Knight, Texas Tech University
“Intensity”
Billy Donovan, University of Florida
“Energetic”
John Chaney, Temple University
“Tough”
John Thompson Sr., Georgetown University
“Pioneer”
Bill Bayno, LMU
“That’s hard. Talking about yourself is hard. I would hope people would say I cared about my kids.”