Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 6: Lots of Losses, But Still Hope

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 Dean Keener era, which was heading into its second year at the time. Keener would later resign, apparently under pressure, just before the end of his fourth season.

HARRISONBURG – He’s 11-45 and he’s never won more than three conference games in a season. He’s produced two of the three worst seasons in James Madison basketball history, and his teams have never come close to advancing past the first day of the Colonial Athletic Association tournament.

Yet, that hasn’t cost Dean Keener any points with the people who built JMU basketball or with those who oversee it now. He’s impressed the program’s storied coaches, Lou Campanelli and Lefty Driesell , as well as current and past administrators.

“Dean Keener is on the right track,” said former athletic director and basketball coach Dean Ehlers. “If he gets a couple of good recruiting classes, we’ll be fine. We’re going to be climbing up that ladder.”

JMU officials have made it clear that Keener’s job will not be jeopardy at the end of this season, regardless of his record. Of course, college administrators have been known to change their minds in a flash, so stay tuned.

Nevertheless, it’s an unusual degree of commitment, because in Keener’s first two seasons as coach, the Dukes have been worse than the year before and fans have stayed away in droves. The days of Driesell ‘s teams drawing more than 6,000 fans per game are a distant memory. The Dukes averaged just 3,819 fans in 2005-06 and just 3,223 at the 7,156-seat Convocation Center in 2004-05.

After Madison compiled a 7-21 record in Sherman Dillard’s final campaign, Keener’s team stumbled to a 6-22 finish in 2004-05 and a 5-23 record in 2005-06, tying John Thurston’s 1985-86 squad for the school’s worst ever.

Fans might grumble, but JMU officials are sanguine.

“He’s a guy that if you’re around him, you get this feeling that, ‘You know what? He can make anything happen that he wants to,'” said athletic director Jeff Bourne, who hired Keener. “He’s got great charisma. The kids respect him, and that’s an important component in this day and age.”

What, then, is taking the program so long to show improvement?

Part of the reason is that Keener isn’t a quick-fix coach, which is fine with Bourne.

Typically, coaches who turn around teams with lightning speed are established names. They often clean house, ridding the program of less talented players and bringing in their own recruits- often transfers. That was what Lefty Driesell did at Madison. It’s what Pat Kennedy is doing at Towson, and what Ron Everhart is trying to do at Duquesne.

When Dillard resigned under enormous pressure in 2004 after four consecutive losing seasons, Madison made plays for two “name” coaches, both of whom where damaged goods after unceremonious departures from their previous schools. Like Driesell 16 years earlier, they needed a halfway-house before perhaps seeking a return to the major leagues.

Madison was in talks with Larry Eustachy, who had won the Associated Press Coach of the Year Award in 2000 after leading Iowa State to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament. He resigned from Iowa State in 2003, however, after pictures surfaced of him drinking at a college party at the University of Missouri and he admitted to being an alcoholic. Before JMU had sorted through all of its candidates, however, Eustachy took the head coaching job at Southern Mississippi.

After that, the Dukes went after Matt Doherty, who had been National Coach of the Year in 2001 at North Carolina but was forced to resign after two disappointing seasons and a player mutiny. Madison offered Doherty big money for a CAA school – $260,000 per year – but he rejected the overture because of “other opportunities,” one of which was the chance to coach St. John’s in the Big East. He didn’t get that position, and ended up at no-name Florida Atlantic for a season before leaving for Southern Methodist. Through a spokesman there, he refused comment for this story.

When Doherty turned down the job, JMU officials were left with a pool of assistant coaches. They pegged Keener, a Georgia Tech assistant fresh off a Final Four appearance, as their No. 1 target. Then-North Carolina State assistant Larry Hunter was next on the list. Clemson assistant Ron Bradley also was among those seriously considered.

Keener had spent one season, 1999-2000, as a JMU assistant under Dillard.

“Dean’s advantage was that he had been here before,” Bourne said. “He had a sense for the institution. He had been at Virginia Tech and had been in the ACC. He’d established himself around the country in recruiting circles. He’d earned the respect of [Georgia Tech] coach Paul Hewitt. All of those were extremely positive factors that ultimately led to his being selected as head coach.”

Missing from his resume was head-coaching experience, but both Keener and Bourne said they do not believe the Dukes would be winning any quicker had JMU succeeded in landing a big-name coach.

“Given where our program was and the distance that we had to travel with regard to recruiting athletes and bringing our program around, I don’t think it would make any difference,” Bourne said.

In part, Bourne said, that was because of the university’s philosophy. JMU officials would have discouraged any coach – big name or not – from running players off the team and trying to win quickly with transfers.

“We didn’t want to infuse a lot of transfers into the program,” he said. “We looked at doing it with freshmen, and we were willing to see the program grow that way. Sometimes, with first-year head coaches, there’s more of an emphasis on getting the old players out and bringing in transfers to heal the program. That’s not what we wanted to see.”

In truth, Keener would have had a hard time dumping Dillard’s recruits. He inherited just nine scholarship players, four short of the NCAA maximum (one of them – swingman Ulrich Kossekpa – eventually left because of knee problems). Keener picked up two players in May – Argentine center Gabriel Chami and junior college point guard Jomo Belfor – but there simply weren’t enough bodies available at that point to start pressuring returners to transfer.

Besides, the sophomore class of Ray Barbosa, Chris Cathlin, Cavell Johnson, Eddie Greene-Long and Kossekpa was considered one of Dillard’s best recruiting hauls, and freshman Joe Posey was considered perhaps the former coach’s best-ever recruit. The upperclassmen – Daniel Freeman, David Cooper and John Naparlo – all appeared at least useful. Keener had a bare cupboard, in that he didn’t have a team that was good enough to compete in the CAA. Few of the players he had, however, were bad enough individually to run off.

“We wanted to give people an opportunity,” Keener said. “There’s a lot of ways to do things, but the idea of running guys off never crossed my mind.”

None of those players became what Keener hoped, though part of that was because of an injury bug that infected the Dukes before his first preseason and continued through the end of last season. All told, injuries and suspensions cost the Dukes 122 man games in two years.

“We’re always trying to plug one hole in the dam, then another,” Keener said. “Then someone else is hurt, then this and that and the other.”

Bourne has been impressed by Keener’s attitude through two long, cold winters. The losses have worn on the coach, but he never publicly admits it.

“That says a lot about him as an individual, not just as a coach,” Bourne said. “It’s easy to get down when things are very difficult, as they have been, but he’s always the guy that will pick up the phone if you call and check on him and say he’s doing well. He’s always focused on the positive.”

As ugly as things were, Keener seemed re-energized once the dust had settled after last season’s disaster, and he put together a recruiting class that was far better than even he was expecting, considering the record he was dragging on the recruiting trail.

Through mid-March, the Dukes had signed just two marginal recruits in forwards Matt Parker and Ben Thomas, and starters Johnson and Barbosa transferred, leaving the team seemingly destined for another downturn. However, the Dukes picked up promising guards Jaquan Bray and Pierre Curtis at the end of the month, and the two who transferred ended up being blessings in disguise because they opened up scholarships.

The Dukes signed forward Terrence Carter, who had starred at Southeastern Community College in Iowa, spurning NCAA Tournament teams – including Northern Iowa, Murray State and Wisconsin-Milwaukee – to get closer to his home in Largo, Md. Later that month, Curtis helped the Dukes get forward Dazzmond Thornton, a transfer from Texas Tech and one of Curtis’ high school teammates. Carter then helped them lure the jewel of the class, guard Abdulai Jalloh, who had earned All-Atlantic 10 second-team honors at St. Joseph’s before deciding he wanted a “change of scenery.” Carter and Jalloh were boyhood friends.

Jalloh’s scholarship opened up when Cathlin – at Keener’s urging, he said – applied for a medical hardship, even though he still had a redshirt year available to recuperate from surgery to repair a herniated disc in his back. Keener refused to say whether he asked Cathlin to leave.

Regardless, with two big-league transfers a year away from joining the team and a few promising recruits ready to step in, Keener is optimistic.

“I feel like we’re going into Year 1 of Phase 2,” Keener said. “It’s been frustrating, whether it’s been from the coaches or players or administrators or fans. No one enjoys the losing, but I do know – I don’t feel it, I know – we have made progress. It just hasn’t shown in wins and losses. Ultimately, that’s what you’re judged on as a coach, but I finally feel that this summer going into this year, I finally feel like we’re on solid ground.”

Solid ground. It’s something JMU hasn’t seen in a long time. Four seasons have passed since the Dukes last posted a record that was better than the previous year. Six seasons have gone by since JMU broke .500, and 12 postseasons have passed since the last time Madison was involved.

“You never know,” Campanelli said. “Just when it seems the darkest, you don’t know you’re that close to it being bright and sunny. You just can’t lose hope and you can’t lose heart. You can turn the corner and not even realize you’re doing it.”

So is that it? Has JMU’s dark age passed? Or is that perfect storm Keener spoke of still brewing? With the new season starting next Saturday at Wake Forest, those questions soon will be answered.