The sign is perched in the middle of Jimmy Collins’ desk in his office near Illinois-Chicago’s campus.
It faces the chairs opposite from where the UIC basketball coach sits, leaving visitors no choice but to survey the words again and again.
“Bad passes and bad shots lose more games than bad calls.”
The primary message, one that Collins hopes to drive home to his players, is simple: Don’t quarrel with the officials. The deeper message is to avoid pointing fingers, to take responsibility for your actions.
Early last season, with his team sputtering to a 1-8 start, Collins thought his players were selfish and undisciplined. They wanted to shoot first and pass second. They thought playing defense was the responsibility of the next guy.
So Collins got tough. He benched his star, sent one player packing and threatened to boot several others from the team.
The results were tangible. The Flames rallied to finish 15-14 last season and earn a place in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference’s championship game.
But this season, seemingly out of the blue, UIC has jumped several rungs. The Flames are 9-1, their best start in more than 40 years.
The success means coming up with a new label for Collins, who was long known as nothing more than a headhunter, a man who could lure Chicago Public League talent Downstate to the University of Illinois, where he was an assistant for 13 years.
“I think there was a question in the college basketball world,” said UIC Athletic Director Jim Schmidt. “Could he really coach?”
At one time, Collins even questioned himself. But he gained confidence as a bench coach last year during a game against Cleveland State. His Flames were struggling against Cleveland State’s press in the second half. UIC was committing turnover after turnover.
Then Collins drew up a plan that created three-point shots for guard Anthony Coomes. Coomes hit four three-pointers in the game, and UIC pulled out a 62-60 victory.
“That was the first time I could actually see it,” Collins said. “We could have panicked and fallen by the wayside. But we made adjustments, and they worked.”
Collins’ more substantial adjustments were made on the psyche of his players. From the time he was hired at UIC, on March 27, 1996, Collins preached to his players the hallmarks of winning basketball: tenacity on defense and unselfishness on offense.
But as last season progressed, with Collins sensing that his message was being ignored, the rookie coach played bad guy. First he told backup point guard Jevon Hobbs he wasn’t welcome on the team anymore.
Hobbs hadn’t missed practices or blown off history exams, but he refused to buy into Collins’ we-first philosophy. So the coach decided to make an example of him.
“You’ve got to get (your players) to understand what you want,” Collins said. “That’s the No. 1 thing you have to sell them on. `I’ve got to do it this way because the coaches want it done that way.’ And once they see that it actually works, they buy into it.”
UIC assistant coach Dick Nagy explains it this way: “As a coach, unless you’re willing to cut off your arm for certain principles, they won’t do what you want them to do. That may sound dramatic, but I really believe that.”
It’s clear that Collins’ decision had the desired effect.
“It showed us that he wasn’t playing around,” forward Bryant Lowe said. “We knew that if we didn’t straighten out our attitude, we might get kicked off too.”
Collins didn’t reserve all his frustration for Hobbs. He benched his team’s best player, guard Mark Miller, for the entire second half of an 82-20 victory over eventual conference champion Butler on Jan. 9. He asked senior Mike King, the team’s third-leading scorer, to quit the team. King wouldn’t.
Neither would guard Theandre Kimbrough. Collins suggested he quit several times last season–both in front of the team during practice and alone in Collins’ office. But Kimbrough vowed to earn his coach’s respect.
“I was frustrated. He was frustrated,” said Kimbrough, a junior who has developed into the team’s sixth man. “But it never crossed my mind to quit. And he didn’t want me to, either.”
“It reminded me of the scene from that movie `An Officer and a Gentleman,’ ” Collins said. “I’m saying, `You have to quit.’ And he says: `I can’t quit. I have nowhere else to go.’ “
As for the idea that Collins is some kind of tempestuous ogre, ready to dismiss a player at the drop of a bounce pass, Kimbrough says that perception is off.
“It’s not like he’s a Bobby Knight,” Kimbrough said. “And since we’ve been winning, we’ve been buddy-buddy.”
Buddy-buddy? Collins might have something to say about that. But there is no denying that the coach’s style is producing results. The Flames’ only loss this season was a 71-70 squeaker at Illinois.
Miller, a 6-foot-1-inch senior, has blossomed into a 20-points-a-game scorer whose silky stroke from three-point land (where he is shooting 46.8 percent) is overshadowed by his leaping ability. Earlier this year against Alabama State, Miller grabbed the rim so emphatically on an alley-oop dunk, the game had to be delayed several minutes while the backboard was readjusted.
UIC also has gotten major production from its two other senior starters, Coomes and Lowe. Coomes ranks ninth nationally in three-point shooting at 54.3 percent. Lowe, at only 6-5, somehow averages 8.8 rebounds a game, along with 14.5 points.
But what makes UIC tick is defense. Neither of its last two opponents, Valparaiso or Illinois State, shot better than 37 percent from the field.
“We’re just a ragamuffin group, not real attractive,” Nagy said. “But we have a bunch of kids who really like each other. Their chemistry is unusually good.”
And it has produced unusually good results.
