Web Exclusives

Bill Bayno on the Pro Experience

Bill Bayno, former assistant coach with the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers and former head coach of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was hired as head coach of the men's basketball team in April 2008. Here Bayno talks with Vistas Editor Joseph Wakelee-Lynch about coaching and about athletes leaving college early to play professionally.

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 say the first thing that comes into his mind when he hears the names of other renowned basketball coaches — but we promised him that we wouldn’t ask him to rate any of his WCC peers. Here are his responses.--JW-L

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.”

Covering War

The Risks of the Wartime Photojournalist

Howard S. Lavick, associate professor of film and television production at LMU’s School of Film and Television, was a photographer with the 25th Infantry Division and photojournalist with Pacific Stars and Stripes during the Vietnam War. Here he recalls the day-to-day travails of the wartime photographer.

When out in the field covering a story like the Vietnam War, a reporter often faces hardships that can make the hazards of the battlefield almost seem secondary. While I was covering the action near the Laotian border as an army combat photojournalist for Pacific Stars and Stripes in February 1971, the press corps had to contend with rain, cold, dust thick enough to cut with a knife, and a frustrating lack of transportation. Not to mention that we were unarmed and potential targets of the enemy.

I was with about a dozen other reporters and photographers at the Laotian border the night before the South Vietnamese Army crossed into Laos along Highway 9.

We had walked, hitchhiked and cursed our way through nearly seven miles of dusty, winding and rutted road between Lang Vei and the border. We scrounged rides on anything from helicopters to armored personnel carriers. One kindly, but unwitting jeep driver stopped to offer me a ride and soon found himself trying to drive with no less than seven reporters and their field gear hanging from every available inch of space.

We spent the night shivering inside a couple of unused culverts that were left outside the defense perimeter set up near the border by an American armored unit. This became painfully apparent when the Americans started shooting over our unprotected heads at who knows what in the middle of the night. For warmth, if not safety, I had one woolen blanket and two inches of dust to cover me.

We got up about 6 a.m. because the border crossing was scheduled for an hour later. Of course, we all knew the convoy would be late. Naturally, the South Vietnamese soldiers uncharacteristically started crossing right on schedule – while it was still too dark for pictures.

By hook or by crook, some of us managed to get back to the Quang Tri Press Center that afternoon to file our stories. Getting there was only half the fun. Trying to get a call through to Saigon was harder than making a collect call to North Vietnam’s Hanoi. And this was way before cell phones or the Internet, if you please.

Quang Tri had a unique phone system whereby it was necessary to both talk and listen only through the earpiece (don’t ask). Unfortunately, some of the reporters didn’t discover this idiosyncrasy until the second week.

Like many of the reporters, I would rotate out of the field after a week or two and return to Saigon for a bit of R&R spent almost entirely under a hot shower. War may be hell, but covering it ain’t exactly a day at the beach either.

—Howard S. Lavick