Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 5: A Hero’s Unsuccessful Return

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This part is about the Sherman Dillard years and the program’s downfall.

 

HARRISONBURG – Put yourself behind former James Madison president Ronald E. Carrier’s desk in 1997 when Sherman Dillard came to interview for the school’s men’s basketball coaching job.

Dillard was intelligent, articulate, ambitious and dressed impeccably, exactly what an applicant for any job is supposed to be.

And his resume was strong. Although his record in three years at Indiana State was shaky (29-52), he inherited a program that was 4-24 the year before he arrived at Terre Haute, and the Sycamores improved every season during his tenure there.

He did apprenticeships in the major leagues, serving as an assistant under two big-name former JMU coaches – Lefty Driesell at Maryland and Lou Campanelli at California. He also worked for Bobby Cremins at Georgia Tech.

Beyond all of that, Dillard was an alumnus. Check that. In a lot of ways, he was the alum. He joined the program when Madison was still a Division II school and became its first 2,000-point scorer and first NBA draftee. Plus, he was an academic All-American who had lifted himself out of humble beginnings in Basset and vowed to strive for perfection in everything he did.

There were few people who had represented the basketball program better, and perhaps fewer who had a stronger desire to see it do well.

How could you possibly say no to this guy?

“He’s a very attractive individual,” Carrier said this summer, nine years after hiring Dillard. “He had great coaching credentials. He had coached with Lefty at Maryland and he coached with Lou Campanelli, and I guess he was at Indiana State then, but he had been at Georgia Tech with Bobby Cremins, and they all, of course, gave him glowing recommendations. I suspect, if he walked in here today, we would hire him again.

“Well, not having had the record.”

That record was not good: 93 wins, 106 losses. Four straight losing seasons, including a 7-21 death march to close out his tenure.

“He just never could, for some reason, get it going,” Carrier said.

So what went wrong? Dillard did not respond to a voice mail or an e-mail requesting an interview, but those around him during his seven seasons at Madison cited a combination of factors, some Dillard could control, some he couldn’t.

Under the first category, they said, were his sometimes remote relationships with players. Under the second were injuries and – if you believe the public statements of the assistants who left – heavy coaching turnover.

“I thought he was a very smart coach, but he had one drawback,” guard Jabbari Outtz said. “I don’t think he related to all of the players as well as he could have. I never had any problems with him. ….I don’t think he might have been as straightforward with each player as he needed to be. Players would play a lot one day or one day a week and not play much the next, and they didn’t know why. He didn’t really talk to them individually as to why he made this decision. Not that he has to, but that might have helped relating with those players.”

Two players, Ron Anderson and Jerian Younger, quit the squad because of personality conflicts with Dillard.

One player who had a particularly icy relationship with Dillard – and the only one contacted by the News-Record who was willing to discuss it on the record – was Kevan Johnson, a reserve forward who was a freshman in Driesell ‘s last season.

Johnson fit Outtz’s profile of a disgruntled player. He averaged 11 minutes per game, and started occasionally, but his minutes undulated greatly. He was a Driesell recruit and liked his old coach’s style. He said he wasn’t a fan of Dillard from the beginning,

“I don’t know what was up with Sherman and me,” Johnson said. “Off the floor, I could sit down and have a conversation with him, but when it came to playing basketball, he always had something unnecessary to say, but he was my coach.

“One time I was playing, and he said I wasn’t grunting enough. He was like, ‘You ain’t showing no expression. You ain’t showing no expression.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about? Tell me about the game.’ … His style was for some people. It just wasn’t for me.”

Players who had no problems with Dillard’s style noticed that it was affecting the ones who did.

“For some guys, it was kind of personal with Coach Dillard,” Fanning, the best player of the era, said. “It’s hard for people to work for someone you don’t like. It’s hard to play for a coach you had animosity towards. I learned a lot from him. We had our times as well, but he was still Coach to me. I either get along with him or we both lose.”

Another factor was injuries.

In swingmen Todd Moret and Ulrich Kossekpa, the Dukes had two promising recruits who barely ever saw the court because of major knee injuries sustained in their freshman years. Both eventually received medical hardship status, keeping their scholarships but not their roster spots. The list of other players who missed significant playing time because of various ailments is long: Tim Lyle, Ron Anderson, Mickey Dennis, Chris Williams, Charlie Hatter, Pat Mitchell and Daniel Freeman.

“There weren’t too many players who did not have a DNP (did not play) because of injury,” former assistant coach Ben D’Alessandro said. “We had all kind of knees and feet injuries.”

The Dukes also struggled to find their identity because of a constantly changing coaching staff. In Dillard’s seven seasons, 12 coaches slid in and out of JMU’s three assistant coaching positions.

In this case, Dillard might just have been snake-bitten. Each of the assistants’ moves appeared to be sensible.

“They all made logical moves in their lives,” said D’Alessandro, who left for Clemson after four years.

All three of Dillard’s full-time assistants in his first year as coach were gone after two years. Herb Krusen left the profession after one season to be closer to his daughter after going through a divorce. Chris Theobald also left coaching after two years to be closer with his family, and Bill Old left after two years to serve as an assistant with the Richmond Rhythm of the International Basketball League.

They were replaced, respectively, by Kenny Brooks, Dean Keener and D’Alessandro. Brooks stayed three seasons before leaving to join the JMU women’s program, and D’Alessandro stayed four years before bolting for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Keener left after a year for an assistant’s job at Georgia Tech under long-time friend Paul Hewitt. His replacement, Robert Lineburg, also was gone after a year, leaving for Southern Methodist. His replacement, Tom Sorboro, departed after a year to get married and move closer to home.

When Brooks left, he was replaced by former Radford head coach Ron Bradley, a respected veteran of the business who was hired to be Dillard’s x’s-and-o’s coach at a then-generous $80,000 per year. But he also left after one season to join long-time friend Oliver Purnell at Clemson, taking D’Alessandro with him. Kevin Baggett replaced Sorboro, Denny Hinson replaced Bradley and John Marion replaced D’Alessandro. Those were Dillard’s last three assistants, though Baggett was mysteriously fired the day before the CAA tournament in 2004, just before Dillard’s last game.

The turnover hurt player development, which was vital to Dillard’s program because he wasn’t able to recruit instant superstars.

Dillard’s recruiting wasn’t awful, but the program-changing sleepers who became a trademark of former coach Lou Campanelli’s program were no longer available because of changes in the recruiting landscape, and Dillard didn’t have the name recognition to maintain Driesell ‘s talent level. He rarely beat programs beyond the mid-major level for players, so for most of them, being CAA stars would require significant improvement.

Without continuity among assistant coaches, it was hard for the Dukes to get better individually. To fix a player’s weaknesses or improve his strengths, coaches first have to spend time figuring out which is which.

“That process probably takes a year,” D’Alessandro said. “It could take that long. You gotta build on the year before. If you’re looking at the year before and you weren’t there, all you’ve got to go on is film. That turnover can have a plateauing effect on progress.”

And in Madison’s case, it appears that it did. Few players seemed to make substantial progress from year to year under Dillard. Only three Dillard recruits ever earned All-CAA status. Outtz and Fanning each earned first-team status once and second-team status once. Guard Dwayne Broyles earned third-team status in 2003-04.

“You have that relationship after they spend a whole year helping you,” said guard Dwayne Braxton. “You get ready to come back and fine-tune. Then somebody else is doing that, trying to learn your playing style and you try to learn their coaching style. It’s hard with that transition.”

Of course, assistant coaches everywhere try to climb the professional ladder, but it may have been more of a problem for JMU because – according to his star player – Dillard did not create an overarching philosophy that would have made the turnover less disruptive. While the style of play at schools like Duke and Indiana stayed the same as assistants came and went, the Dukes didn’t appear to have a consistent philosophy.

“I don’t remember, from when I first got there, to when I left, one idea of how we played JMU basketball,” Fanning said. “That this one idea is how we play. I can’t tell you right now that I remember one. What I mean by that is, you know with a Bobby Knight team you’ve got a hardcore defensive team. You know how you play if you’re a Rick Pitino team.

“I can’t really say I knew what type of basketball we played. It tended to change.”

The instability led to losses – especially with the CAA rising quickly among mid-majors on its way to getting two NCAA Tournament bids and a Final Four team in 2005-06. Those losses led to stress for Dillard, something he already had far too much of.

After the 1999-2000 season, a 20-9 campaign that was by far Dillard’s best, his younger brother Ricky was diagnosed with cancer. He died within a year.

Colleagues say Dillard was close to his brother – who himself had played basketball at George Mason – and was constantly at Ricky’s bedside at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, sometimes spending all day there before driving back to Harrisonburg for practice, then returning to the hospital afterward.

Players and coaches said the burden didn’t keep Dillard from doing his job, but it was obvious that the mental strain of watching his brother wither away was getting to him.

“Sherman never shied away from his responsibility as a brother,” D’Allesandro said. “He was integral in that process. … I saw a man who was in the prime of his life, who went through a slow and painful death. Ricky and Sherman were very close friends. I believe Sherman took his role as the older brother very seriously, and losing your younger brother, that’s a heavy thing to deal with.”

His players saw it, too.

“He was down,” Fanning said. “He was down for quite some time. We could tell that [his brother] was weighing heavy on his heart. And also playing in his games and not being successful, that was another thing that added to the list. He was just totally stressed out with all that was going on.”

Said D’Alessandro: “You gotta keep in mind, here’s a man who was a star when he was here. A superstar, as bigger-than-life a star as he could be. He’s still the school’s second-leading scorer, only a handful of guys in JMU history have done what he’s done. So he comes in as a coach and he’s putting a lot of pressure on himself. Add to that pressure his younger brother dying. … . People were impatient, because here comes the prodigal son, and that affected his expectations. He’s coming back knowing he’s a well-known former alumnus and great player, and everybody else knows that too. He’s trying so hard that when things don’t go well, it’s a snowball effect.”

The snowball started rolling in 2000-01 when the Dukes went 12-17 after Outtz graduated along with the last of Driesell ‘s recruits, including guard Jamar Perry and forward Rob Strickland. After a 14-15 season in 2001-2002 and a 13-17 campaign in 2002-03, the JMU administration was ready to cut the cord on Dillard. They had granted him a five-year contract extension after the 1999-2000 season, however, in part because he was pegged as one or two finalists for the head coaching job at Tulane before withdrawing from consideration that offseason.

Unable to afford a buyout and showing deference to a respected alumnus, JMU gave Dillard one more season. The Dukes went 7-21 in 2003-04 and finished dead last in the CAA.

Dillard resigned shortly after the season ended, but by then the damage had already been done. JMU’s new coach would have a massive rebuilding job.