His coaching style is decidedly relaxed.
Jim Cleamons leans back in his chair, legs outstretched, for most of a Chicago Condors scrimmage game. Every once in a while he calls out instructions.
“Two hands on the ball, please,” he tells center Yolanda Griffith after she bobbles a rebound.
“You’ve got to get up on the ball, Ash,” Cleamons reminds guard Ashley Berggren, who almost lets an opposing guard get past her.
If Cleamons is feeling at all animated, he’ll casually stroll up the sideline. Even then he barely raises his voice, remaining calm as he tells his players what he wants them to do.
“He doesn’t have to yell,” forward Adrienne Goodson said. “When he says something, we understand. He’s getting his point across to us. Some people like to yell and some people speak firmly. That’s what he does: speak firmly. When he sees things, he lets us know about it.”
Cleamons has learned what works for him as a coach after a stint as an assistant on four Bulls championship teams, and what doesn’t work after a not-so successful term as head coach of the hapless Dallas Mavericks.
Now he’s running the show for the Condors, a women’s team beginning their inaugural season in the American Basketball League against the Nashville Noise Friday at UIC Pavilion.
Cleamons considers himself a teacher first and foremost. If his pupils listen, the results can be rewarding–he was instrumental in four of the Bulls’ six titles. If his pupils don’t listen, the results can be disastrous–as in a 28-70 record in a little more than one season with the Mavericks, who fired him last December.
Cleamons draws from both those experiences in his new job, which he knows will require patience.
“I’ve got to find out what the ladies can do,” he said. “There’s no sense in me getting upset. I want them to play and have some fun–I think that’s the most important thing. I want them to get comfortable with each other, learn how to play together and enjoy playing together.”
Does that sound familiar? Cleamons might well be talking about the Bulls, for whom he often ran practice as Phil Jackson’s top assistant. Those practices could be competitive and rough, and Clemens says they helped account for the Bulls’ winning ways come game time.
“The thing we talked about a lot is how fortunate we were to be in a situation where your best players come every day almost with the attitude that they have to make the team,” Cleamons said. “When you have players who think they have made it and they don’t need to work or improve, the team is going to struggle.”
That was the case in Dallas, where the Mavericks never moved forward. There was dissension among the players, which eventually resulted in the dismantling of the whole team after Don Nelson took over as general manager. Nelson wanted his own guy as coach and wound up taking the job himself, leaving Cleamons as the fall guy–98 games with a team in constant turmoil was hardly a fair chance.
“Sometimes things just don’t work out the way people led you to believe they were going to work out,” Cleamons said. “I understand. Sometimes situations do change. When they change, you pick up your belongings and you move on.”
After considering college opportunities, Cleamons, 49, wound up back in Chicago. Rather than wait to see what the NBA might have to offer, he signed on with the Condors, who named him coach in May.
“When you have women who are playing at a very high level, they need to have a leader in front of them who they can respect and who understands them,” said former Bulls guard Craig Hodges, whose wife Allison is the Condors’ general manager. “That’s the biggest thing Jim brings–the understanding of how to win. He can share those experiences.”
Hodges, who is helping his wife run the team, said Cleamons didn’t need to be convinced to take a chance on women’s basketball.
“He considered it a great opportunity at a good point in his life to use his teaching methods with a group of people who want to be taught,” Hodges said. “What happened in Dallas. . .It blows me away when people don’t want to put the onus on the players to want to accept coaching.”
The Condors are accepting it so far, down to the triangle offense Cleamons is trying to install after borrowing it from the Bulls.
“He gets intense sometimes, but he’s a teacher,” guard E.C. Hill said. “He’s a great coach and he has a lot of patience with us. We’re just trying to learn and do what he asks.”
That’s all Cleamons wants.
“It’s always nice to come back to familiar surroundings where you’ve had some success and continue to do the thing you enjoy doing,” he said. “I enjoy teaching and coaching. What I’m hoping to do is to bring it to the ladies’ side. If you have some success, you enjoy what you do and the ladies play hard. That’s one thing. Winning will take care of itself.”
