Matta’s electricity energizes Buckeyes
His dynamic, positive approach gets best from players
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Bob Baptist
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
NEAL C . LAURON DISPATCH Coach Thad Matta, conferring with point guard Jamar Butler, isn’t one for berating his players after mistakes, preferring to stress the positive.
When he was athletics director and coach of whatever sport needed a coach at Hoopeston-East Lynn High School in Illinois, Jim Matta also ran a summer camp for girls basketball players.
His son Thad, fresh out of Butler University and starting his climb on the coaching ladder, dropped by camp one day. Jim handed him the eighth-grade girls and couldn’t help notice what happened next.
"He got them so excited," Jim recalled.
"When they left the court, they were high-fiving. This was a summer camp, but he had put something into them. I was like, ‘Daggone, I wish I could do that.’ "
The next day, Jim Matta said, the girls asked him, "Is he coming back?" Almost apologetically, he told them, "No, it’s me today."
So if you’ve marveled at how the Ohio State men’s team, picked to finish in the middle of the Big Ten pack, won the title outright . . . how, with seemingly little to gain and legs to lose, it willed itself to the conference tournament final last weekend . . . how, with no postseason to play for last year, it went 20-12 . . . know that it starts at the top.
Thad Matta has put something into these players, and they, in turn, have left it all on the court for him.
It’s a trait Dan Peters saw while he was an assistant at Cincinnati for the three years Matta was coach at Xavier. Peters joined Matta at Ohio State after OSU hired Matta in July 2004.
"Watching him, I thought the kids really enjoyed playing for him and they played hard for him," Peters said. "After working for him, that’s an accurate statement. They enjoy playing for him, being around him and coming to practice. He makes it fun yet they still work. All he asks them to do is work hard, and in return he does the same thing for them."
The Buckeyes’ run to an outright Big Ten championship, the conference tournament title game and a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament this week was all about hard work. Their glitzy three-point shooting touch for the most part left them in mid-February, yet they have won 11 of their past 13 games.
After they rallied from a sluggish first half to beat Penn State in their first Big Ten tournament game last week, forward Matt Sylvester attributed victory to the "competitive nature and the mental and physical toughness that reflects our leader. He doesn’t care one bit about getting rest for the NCAA Tournament. If this is a tournament and we’re in it, he wants to win it. He wants to win everything."
The players’ affinity for Matta is enhanced by his upbeat demeanor. One of the first problems he sensed at OSU was a crisis in confidence resulting not only from two mediocre seasons but also the regular tongue-lashings some players received from former coach Jim O’Brien. O’Brien sometimes yanked players off the court after a bad play and chewed them out in front of fans.
That isn’t Matta’s style.
"Thad doesn’t do that, even in private. He’s the same with them all the time," Peters said. "He understands everything isn’t going to be perfect.
He’s working with human beings; they have fallacies.
"In the two years I’ve worked for him, I’ve seen him upset two or three times, when he felt guys were not giving their best effort, and even then, his (anger) was directed not at an individual but more at the group."
That approach has helped produce remarkable late-season success for Matta’s teams at Butler, Xavier and Ohio State. They have won more than 80 percent of their games in the five or six weeks leading up to the NCAA Tournament, and every team but last year’s, which was banned, has made it to the tournament.
"One of the best things he does is talk about getting better every day," said assistant coach Alan Major, who has worked for Matta for five seasons. "A lot of times it’s hard to make vast improvement the later you get in the season, but you can always get a little bit better. He always tells them, ‘Don’t take getting a little bit better for granted, because that means something.’
"He does a great job of creating a vision of the type of team we want to have and taking steps every day in that direction. As you improve throughout the year, sometimes winning and playing well are the end results of that."
As they were this year.
Standing in a happy locker room after a heart-stopping, one-point win over Indiana in a Big Ten semifinal last Saturday, forward J.J. Sullinger glanced across the room at Matta and said, "He knows what it takes to win."
Asked what that was, Sullinger smiled and said, "I really don’t know. If I knew, I guess I’d be Thad Matta."
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[FONT=Verdana, San Serif, Helvetica]Yeah, we need to examine this OSU recruiting class with a grain of salt. If there was no age limit for NBA players, no one would even be talking about Oden. He would be gone. So, it'll be interesting to see the motivation level of the new players at OSU next year. And keep in mind. Three years probation means no more screw ups. Matta cannot make ONE mistake. Not one. He would not have that constraint if he went to IU. Not saying it would happen. Just telling it like it is.[/FONT]
