About Reggie

My Basketball Journey

After a farming accident, my dad transitioned from a baseball/softball player to one of the best fast-pitch softball umpires and a strategic slow-pitch softball coach while literally running our farm single-handedly (with a little help from my brother and I).  Thus, I grew up at softball tournaments every weekend from the middle of May into September and my love of sports just grew from there.  Unfortunately, I struggled to hit a baseball and was too skinny to play football, my first two loves.  In 7th grade, we got our first taste of basketball (and I scored 2 points that entire year).  I entered high school as a scrawny, uncoordinated 6-footer and graduated high school at just under 6'7" with my coordination finally coming around.  I don't think that I was quite a basketball junkie yet, but I do remember watching college games and drawing up plays the next day at lunch for my teammates.

In college at Marquette University, I gravitated toward the gym.  I started scheduling my whole day to get work done between classes so that I could play 2-3 hours of pick up each night.  I taught myself how to shoot correctly, handle the ball, and even developed some post moves, transitioning from a "get under the basket and rebound" big guy into a versatile scorer.  In the little Education Library, I also discovered Coach and Athletic Director magazine, which had frequent articles on basketball plays and drills at the time.  This got me interested in coaching and I volunteered as a sophomore boys' assistant coach at Marquette University High School during my senior of college, learning from Bob Jaskulski, a Wisconsin Hall of Fame coach who was coaching JV in the twilight of his career to stay involved in the game.  I knew from that point that basketball would stay in my life.

When I got my first high school teaching job after graduate school, there were no basketball coaching openings so I was just going to volunteer as a varsity assistant for the boys' program.  However, they had 33 freshman girls sign-up for tryouts, so they decided to form a Freshman B-Team rather than cut over half of them and asked me to coach.  Since I had volunteered as an assistant for the freshman volleyball team (we had over 20 freshmen on one team for volleyball as well) and was teaching mostly freshmen in my algebra classes, I decided to make the switch and have been on the girls'/women's side every since.

The next year I took a 1-year instructor position at Georgia Southern University and volunteered as an administrative assistant with the women's basketball team under head coach Rusty Cram.  I returned to teaching and coaching at the high school level in Wisconsin for the next 6 years, highlighted by 4 years coaching alongside Wisconsin Hall of Fame coach Tom Weinkauf at Newman Catholic HS, which included 3 trips to State with a State Championship and a State Runner-Up finish.

During these years, I spent the summers traveling the eastern half of the U.S. working basketball camps and reading.  The Harry Perretta basketball camps at Villanova University led to the opportunity to become an assistant coach at the University of the Sciences with Nate Ware (a 76ers draft pick from 1968 and a Philadelphia Small College Hall of Fame inductee as a coach).  In November of my first year I was elevated to Recruiting Coordinator as well.  We qualified for the CACC conference tournament every year and won the conference tournament to reach the NCAA D-II tournament in my first year.  Three of the 6 players that we signed during my time as recruiting coordinator earned all-state honors their senior year.  I coached 2 players who finished their careers as the all-time leading scorers at USciences, recruited and coached 2 more players that finished their careers in the Top 10 all-time scorers, and our starting post tandems were #1 and #2 in FG% all 3 years.  I also spent a year on staff at Chestnut Hill College, also in the CACC and just a few blocks from the independent school at which I was teaching during my years in Philadelphia, where despite being in just the 2nd year of NCAA D-II play, we signed another all-state player.  [At the time, All-State players were rarer than they are in many states now.  For example, last year over 200 players were named all-state in Michigan.]

Due to significant changes at the independent school at which I was teaching, I ended up returning to the Midwest and taking a job in academia.  Since my schedule was not conducive to coaching, even volunteering at a high school, I started up TheMRR to stay involved with basketball.  Originally, I figured that after a year or two I would get back into college coaching.  However, it is now over a decade and a half later, and I haven't even really looked.  I guess you could say that I am settled here in Mount Pleasant, where to quote African History professor Dr. Solomon Getahun, "There isn't much of a mountain, but it sure is pleasant."