Brady Bred To Coach

This is a feature story on James Madison basketball coach Matt Brady, written before his first season at the helm.

 

HARRISONBURG – On the corner of Kings Highway and Third Avenue, tucked along the maple-lined streets and two-story houses in the upper-middle-class Philadelphia suburb of Haddon Heights, N.J., sits a modest outdoor basketball court in the fenced-off lot of a Catholic grammar school.

Far from regulation size, the court at St . Rose of Lima has a pebbled concrete surface with bumps, nooks and crannies that turn to puddles when it rains. The backboards on both hoops are about as small as possible while still being effective; one has a double rim and the other a single.

Rucker Park it is not.

But if James Madison’s latest coaching hire manages to resurrect its basketball program and end a string of eight consecutive losing seasons, the Dukes will owe it to this unassuming playground.

“That’s where I basically lived,” JMU first-year coach Matt Brady said. “I lived at St . Rose basketball court.”

Since he first started playing there in fourth grade, Brady ‘s universe has grown beyond that court, but admittedly not much beyond the game of basketball. What those courts spawned is an obsession, one that even Brady admits may have stunted his social growth.

But the 42-year-old has no desire to fight the addiction he acquired at St . Rose’s. It drove him to be a better player than anyone with his skinny body had a right to be. It kept him dreaming of being a head coach when his assistant’s salary was below the poverty level, and now, he hopes, it will push him to elevate a once-proud program out of nearly a decade of doldrums.

“In my life, growing up,” Brady said, “it’s the only thing that held my interest at all times.”

Brady ‘s family recognized the obsession early, from the time he ditched baseball to become a one-sport athlete at age 10. They saw him dribbling a basketball to school every day, bouncing it behind his back and between his legs as he walked along. And in the South Jersey winter, they saw him shovel snow off the St . Rose court so he could still play.

“He was consumed by it,” his older brother, Dennis, said. “He got the bug and that was it. We knew what he was going to do with his life from that point on.”

Brady got “the bug,” he said, because basketball was a sport he could play – and progress in – on his own.

He was always up for a game of five-on-five, of course, and he’d spend full days at St . Rose’s in pick-up games with older players. However, he said he got just as much accomplished alone, entertaining himself for hours at St . Rose’s by inventing drills.

“I would just do things from repetition,” he said. “I became a good player because of my rapt attention to just do it over and over and over again. I loved just meticulous, day-after-day-after-day dribbling and passing a basketball.”

Repetition got him on the seventh- and eighth-grade team at St . Rose’s when he was a fifth-grader and earned him the starting point guard job at Paul VI High School in Haddonfield, N.J., by his sophomore year. Brady was so polished that it didn’t much matter that he was 6-foot-1 and scrawny, or that he was noticeably low on speed and athleticism. With guile and grit, from all accounts, he led Paul VI to the state championship in his senior year, earning MVP honors in the title game.

“He didn’t have great natural ability, all that quickness and stuff,” then-coach Art DiPatri said, “but he could handle anything. He had the vision. He knew where all the players were, and his ballhandling skills were just out of this world.”

Just one Division I school – Siena – thought enough of him to offer a scholarship, but he made the Saints look like geniuses for taking the risk. He still ranks second at the school in career assists with 593, an average of 5.2 per game, and scored 1,106 points in his career.

“He was one of those guys who you could tell did every dribbling drill imaginable,” said Tim Capstraw, now a New Jersey Nets announcer who was an assistant at Siena then and later the head coach at Wagner, where he hired Brady as an assistant. “He maximized his ability as a player. Whatever God gave him as a player, he maxed out. You could not squeeze any more talent out of that body or that physique.”

Squeezing required sacrifice and he admits that the time he spent on the basketball court held him back in other areas.

His wife Mary- whom he might never have met if she hadn’t been brazen enough to approach him at a bar, get his number and later call to invite him to a wedding- describes Brady as “socially clumsy,” he said. She often has to direct him in basic endeavors, he said, like figuring out what to wear to social functions. He never experienced much of what others his age were doing while he was spending all day at St . Rose’s.

“Great Adventure in New Jersey? Never been to it,” Brady said, referring to an amusement park in his home state. “All of my friends at a very young age had been to Great Adventure. Or been to Hershey Park. I’ve never been. I don’t go to those places. Going to movies on a Saturday afternoon? I never did it. I just wasn’t interested. To me, on a Saturday afternoon, there’s a game to go play. Go find somewhere to play, and that’s what I did.”

You might expect to find a hint of regret in those words. A tinge of nagging wonder at what his life might have been like if he would have spent more time doing something other than playing basketball.

But there isn’t. If anything, Brady said, he wishes he would have spent even more time on the game. In coaching, he’s seen players physically similar to him get a chance at the NBA, and he’s always wondered whether more dedication would have done the same for him.

” Matt Maloney played for the Houston Rockets,” Brady said, referring to a long-time NBA guard who also used to play on the court at St . Rose’s. “I was a better player than Matt Maloney. But he kept believing when he got to college. He had tunnel vision, and I let that get away from me. … I took from Matt Maloney the fact that anyone could get to the highest level if you have tunnel vision.”

Brady would need that tunnel vision to get through life as a young coach.

When Brady graduated from Siena, Tom Penders had just left Fordham to coach at Rhode Island. Penders had been so impressed with Brady ‘s play at Siena that he hired him as a graduate assistant without an interview.

“He was a steal for me because he was a real student of the game,” Penders said. “He brought some toughness with him, a point guard’s toughness and confidence level. … He just was one of those guys who’s the first one at the office and the last one to leave.”

But it took a while for that work ethic to pay off.

After two years as a graduate assistant at Rhode Island, Brady left for Wagner for a similar position, but he said he was making just $6,000 a year and living in a campus dorm room. Brady then went to St . Joseph’s in Philadelphia to work for John Griffin, his coach at Siena for three years, in 1993, but that was for a restricted earnings position that paid only $12,000 per year.

This was cause for concern, especially after he got married in 1993 at age 27. The newlyweds had to spend a year apart because her job near her home in Tamaqua, Pa., had benefits and his didn’t. Brady knew he’d be happy coaching basketball even for free, but could he work for pennies and still support a family?

“I think he started questioning it,” Brady ‘s brother Mike said. “The whole thing had taken so long [his career], he was relocating, and he had to be away from his family. I think he just questioned himself and wondered what else he could do. I mean, when you’ve never done anything else your whole life, what else do you do?”

Luckily, Brady never had to find out.

After two years in the restricted earnings position, he got a chance to move up when Griffin left St . Joe’s and Phil Martelli was promoted to head coach. Brady had paid his dues, Martelli said, so it was only right to make him a full-time assistant.

The move paid dividends for Martelli, because everything Brady had learned about fundamentals and all of the drilling at St . Rose’s and every other court and gym he’d played in had made him a mastermind at teaching offensive skills, especially shooting.

“He presents the concept, he presents the correction, and there’s a conviction,” Martelli said of Brady ‘s coaching style. “And it’s not a cookie-cutter conviction. If this works for player A, it may not work for player B. He doesn’t look at it as ‘this will work for players A, B and C.’ He has a little tweak for A, a little tweak for B and a little tweak for C. The players appreciate when they do get individual instructions.”

Among Brady ‘s most prized pupils were St . Joe’s guards Jameer Nelson and Delonte West. His reconstruction of both of their shots helped fuel an undefeated regular season and an Elite Eight run for St . Joe’s in 2004, according to Martelli, and sent them both to the NBA.

After that run, Brady ‘s name hit the radar for head coaching jobs, and he landed at Marist. There he compiled a 73-50 record in four seasons, a Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference regular-season championship and an NIT berth. He never took the Red Foxes to the NCAA Tournament, but he developed an NBA draftee in point guard Jared Jordan.

“He didn’t come in saying we were going to rebuild for a while,” Jordan said. “He came in with the mindset that we were going to win now. That was how he won us over.”

That was also how he won over JMU’s administration, which hired him in March to replace Dean Keener, who resigned in February. Brady had signed a four-year extension at Marist in October 2007 – five months before taking the Madison job. Marist officials – from the president to the athletic director – have refused repeated interview requests about Brady ‘s departure.

Becoming a head coach has made Brady no less focused, though – with a family – his vision can’t be quite as tunneled. Brady lives with his wife and three children about 45 minutes from Harrisonburg, in Crozet, so his boys can go to a Catholic school in nearby Charlottesville. But when he isn’t there, he’s working.

“To me, it’s my family, and it’s my job,” he said. “I don’t really have any hobbies. I would love to have more time to read, but if I’m not with my family – and my wife kind of appreciates this – she knows where to find me. I’m not running around trying to create new friends. I’m really just trying to do a great job with the job I have.”

There are parts of the gig he doesn’t like, namely, the administrative things that “have no impact on winning and losing.” But he at least recognizes that he has to do them, and his colleagues expect that his team’s on-the-court performance will make up for any shortcomings elsewhere.

“I see him doing a superior job where he’s at now,” said Mike Deane, who coached Siena in Brady ‘s senior season and is now the coach at Wagner. “I don’t know much about the program in terms of what recruiting he’s done or where they stand in the league, but he’s going to do a solid job there, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t a higher move somewhere down the line for him.”

That would probably be fine with JMU fans, who haven’t sent a coach to greener pastures since Lou Campanelli left for California in 1985. If they can this time, they’ll have a Catholic school playground in South Jersey to thank.