BUILDING NEW TRADITIONS

College athletics is great for many reasons, but one of those reasons is the tradition we find in college sports. Dave Balza learned all about tradition early as a student at the University of Michigan, where the tradition of Michigan’s football team touching the “Go Blue” banner as they take the field is one of the best in sports. Now, as the first head basketball coach in the history of Florida Gulf Coast University, Balza gets to start his own traditions, “I am a history buff, an education major, and I love tradition.”

Florida Gulf Coast University is now in its eighth year of existence in Fort Meyers, Florida. Balza says the school is very much a high tech school being computer generated, with virtual and on-line classes. The concept of the school was to be completely virtual, entirely on-line. However, after 850 acres were donated to the school, the school decided to change it from one building to a traditional style campus located on the water with facilities being second to none. Florida rival head coach Cesar Odeo from Barry University says, “It is a Division II school dressed up like a Division 1 school.” The athletic department is in its fifth season, but the basketball program is in its third season. Balza has accumulated a 63-19 record in that time and his Eagles are currently 18-5 this season.

Although nobody in Florida is surprised by Florida Gulf Coast’s early success, Balza did not think much of the job when first seeing the advertisement in the NCAA News. He was happy coaching at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, where he turned the program around in his third year winning 18 games. He became intrigued when he read that Gulf Coast hired the commissioner of the Great Lakes Valley Conference, in which St. Joseph was a member, as the Athletic Director. Despite being intrigued by Florida Gulf Coast, he felt good about the team returning for his fourth season and did not expect to leave, but a trip to sunny Florida changed his mindset, “I really liked the team we had coming back, and didn’t prepare an awful lot (for the interview), and then came down here for the interview and saw it and thought to myself, boy did you mess up, because this place is awfully nice.

Despite not preparing, Balza has an unassuming presence that people are attracted to, and Balza felt he “struck a chord with the people on the committee” and was offered the job on the spot. Another person Balza struck a chord with was his first recruit, Bryan Crislip, who remembers his first meeting with the coach, “When Coach Balza first came to my house, he was definitely not the person I expected to see. He was 34 years old and just didn’t look like a head coach to me. But he was a great person.”

Although Balza might not have looked like a head coach he had proven himself to be successful in turning programs around. After five years as an assistant at Cleveland State, and two years as an assistant at Ashland University where they won 18 games in his second season, he was hired to take over a depleted St. Joseph’s team as a head coach. In his first season at St. Joseph’s College he won more conference games than the two previous years combined. Now he was getting the opportunity to start a program from scratch and he had a plan.


BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS

Before leaving Cleveland State he heeded words from Rollie Massimino that would be the blue print for his plan. “Nothing can be placed ahead of recruiting and scheduling. Those are the two things that will have the most impact on you winning games.” Gulf Coast hired Balza in May of 2001, but did not plan to start competing until the 2002-03 season. So when Balza accepted the job, all he had to start with was a stack of about 100 letters of potential players, most being those of non-players, including many who never even played high school basketball.

However, in that stack was a letter about a Division 1 kid looking to transfer that soon turned into his first two recruits. One was Ryan Hopkins, who scored his 1,000th point this year making him the first ever in school history, and the other was Bryan Crislip, who is 105 points from 1,000, and will hold the school record for assists averaging about 7 assists per game over the three years. Crislip and Hopkins were high school teammates from Fairmont, West Virginia receiving scholarships to two different Division 1 schools, Arkansas Little Rock and Eastern Michigan respectively. Crislip left school after a year thinking he would only play again if his friend came with him, and Hopkins planned on attending local college Fairmont State to hang out with his friends. However after the visit from Balza, Crislip convinced Hopkins that it was better to go somewhere together than on their own again.

“They are like peanut butter and jelly. They go real well together,” Balza says adding, “Those two guys legitimized our program in the first month, because they were two players I couldn’t have gotten at a couple of schools I had been to previously. I thought that showed we don’t even have an arena yet, we are working out of trailers, and here are two Division 1 transfers that are saying this is the place I want to be.”


OVERCOMING THE DIFFICULTIES

Balza’s dedication to recruiting was evident in his driving from Indiana to West Virginia and then to Florida, and he took advantage of the year off from actually coaching a team. “The fact we were going to go a year without playing, as a relatively new head coach, I was a little concerned with that. As it turned out, it was the best thing in the world for me, because it enabled me to see a lot of programs, and see the things they do and some things I want to incorporate. While at the same time it was needed for the preparation in terms of bringing in an entire class of recruits and putting together an entire schedule.”

However there were also difficulties to overcome in recruiting his first year. First, he had to overcome the lack of name recognition being a new school, which he overcame with his hard work, but being a new member to the NCAA, Gulf Coast was going to have to wait at least three years and possibly five years to be eligible for postseason play. So, his first recruiting class could not be sure that they could ever compete for the NCAA Championship.

Balza wanted players who were willing to take a chance and recruited players with something to prove, and who were appreciative of the opportunity. “No matter whether your playing tiddly winks or something, you are going to want to win no matter if it is for something or nothing, and that’s what drove us the first two years,” Crislip says, adding, “Now that we have something to look for now, we are just doing our best to get to that tournament and see where it goes from there.” Balza will tell you there is a special story to just about everyone on that first team, “You could write a book on each individual we recruited.”

Although recruiting has become easier now that Gulf Coast is recognized throughout Florida, has earned a 63-19 record in three years and are eligible for postseason play, scheduling has become more of a challenge. Gulf Coast had hoped to be invited into the prestigious Sunshine State Conference in Florida, but the conference comprised of private schools did not want conference competition from a public school like Gulf Coast. So, scheduling 27 or more games as an independent would not be easy, “It remains our number one challenge to this point. The first year wasn’t so bad. It was a little difficult getting games in January and February,” Balza says adding that most schools thought they could “whip us” being a first year program. However, 23 wins in his first year changed that dynamic and 22 wins in his second year has made scheduling difficult. Another daunting statistic for opponents is Gulf Coast’s 42-1 record at home in their short history.

Playing in Florida has certainly helped to schedule home games in November and December for cold-weather schools looking for a nice trip to a warm climate. However, scheduling in January and February during conference season forces Balza to play whomever will play, “If someone says they will play in January and February, I will play them. I don’t care if we play back-to-back nights against two top twenty teams in the country or we might be playing little sisters of the poor school.” This leads to difficult road stretches like five of six games being played on the road between January 19 and February 5.


PLAYING 94 FEET

Although Balza would not say his coaching style is part of his blueprint, he knows that Gulf Coast’s style of play is attractive to recruits and the players in his program. Balza’s teams play an up-tempo style and he loves to press and play the game 94 feet. “Trying to convince kids to come play for you is easier if you have a style of play that they enjoy playing,” but Balza warns that playing up-tempo does not work if the kids you recruit do not understand what it takes to play this style, “Every kid thinks they want to play transition basketball, but it is convincing them they have to actually run every time to play transition basketball.”

Balza had been part of high scoring teams at the University of Michigan and Cleveland State University, but his two years under Roger Lyons at Ashland University took transition basketball to another level and helped cement his basketball coaching philosophy of playing full-court offensive and defensive basketball, “I learned from Roger’s meticulous detail in practice. He was a great practice coach.” This coaching style has paid off on the floor as Gulf Coast averaged over 80 points a game in its first two seasons, and in recruiting, as Balza added three Division I transfers to his 22 win team last year.


HIGH EXPECTATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

This success put high expectations on Gulf Coast with a preseason top 25 ranking, but Crislip felt that the new additions and not the expectations made the early season adjustment difficult. “Even though we’re an old team now because we have seven seniors, four of them are new guys who never knew the system, and it takes time to jell together.” Gulf Coast started the season 6-3 but has won 12 of their last 14, and I asked Crislip if the pressure of making it to the postseason has affected the team, “We probably put a little pressure on ourselves, but now we are just saying to go out and have fun. Me and Hopkins have had a great career and we are just going to enjoy it.”

The future for Florida Gulf Coast’s basketball program is through the roof and there has been talk of becoming a Division I program in the future. Balza dismisses that talk as a future too far down the road for him to worry about, but for Division II coaches like Cesar Odeo it wouldn’t be any time too soon, “They have upped the ante because of how hard they’ve worked and the kind of players they brought in. I think it has made everyone in our league and around the state better because we are working harder because of them.”

For Balza it would be satisfying to make the tournament in its first year of postseason eligibility, but he will always have a special feeling for that first team. “I have been very tradition conscious in terms of everything I have done since I have gotten here. What we do now will impact what happens over the next fifty years.” He credits the players who took a chance on choosing his program and the school while telling them, “Someday, fifty years from now there is going to be this black and white photo on the wall like there is at every other school with that first team. Don’t you want to be on that first picture on the wall?”

Someday when Dave Balza catches his breath, I am sure he will feel equally as proud that he will be in that same first picture on the wall.
 

David Adelman spent 7 years as a Division I assistant and two years as a Division III assistant at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. After two years coaching minor league professional basketball, he is currently working as a consultant for the New Jersey Nets. EMAIL DAVID