It is almost five hours before game time when the old coach comes in from the cold, stamps the snow off his feet and hurries down the hallway toward the teachers’ lounge.
He excuses himself as he flicks some dust off his dark blue fleece vest, the one emblazoned with the words: Lakeland Ladies Hoops.
“I fed the deer before I came out here, from a sack of corn,” he says as he settles into a chair. “I feed about 30 who walk across the lake to our cabin.
“It’s neat.”
Norm Ellenberger is a long way from the big-time basketball world that once defined him. He is far from “The Pit” in Albuquerque, far from Indiana’s Assembly Hall and far from the United Center, where just three years earlier he had been a Bulls assistant coach.
He now coaches the girls basketball team at Lakeland Union High School in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a land where snowmobiles cut across city streets and where lakes dot the hilly countryside like freckles on a 9-year-old’s cheeks. He lives just across the border in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in an area where he can, and often does, travel for miles by canoe, kayak or on foot without seeing another soul.
Ellenberger has boiled down his life to its utmost basics: coaching basketball and satisfying his passion for the outdoors. At 72, he is having the time of his life.
“I live in a dream world,” he says. “I do what I want to do when I want to do it.
“I live with a smile.”
Lakeland’s spacious, modern fieldhouse will hold only about 200 spectators this late January night when the Thunderbirds play host to the Phillips Loggers. About 200 miles south, Illinois’ top-ranked men’s team will meet Wisconsin in a nationally televised game at the sold-out Kohl Center.
That was the kind of stage on which Ellenberger had performed for 35 years. He now tutors athletes of much more modest skills and abilities, but he swears he doesn’t care.
The ball, after all, is still round. The baskets are still 10 feet above the floor.
“Basketball,” he says with conviction, “is basketball.”
Two days later, Ellenberger and his players will board a bus for a two-hour ride to Washburn, near the shores of Lake Superior.
It reminds Ellenberger of his coaching debut decades ago at an Indiana high school.
“I’ve made a complete circuit,” he says, laughing. “It has been a long and arduous path, but I’m back on the school bus.”
Rapid rise
Ellenberger grew up as an only child on a farm in New Haven, Ind., just outside Ft. Wayne. By the time he reached New Haven High School, where he competed in football, basketball, baseball and track, he knew what his future would hold.
“I can’t even remember wanting to do anything else but teach and coach,” he says. “It was pretty much my focus right from the beginning.”
He played football, basketball and baseball at Butler University. In 1957, after a brief stay in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ system, he began to teach and coach at his old high school.
In 1964 Ellenberger became basketball coach at Monmouth (Ill.) College. In 1967 he became an assistant to Bob King at New Mexico.
He succeeded King in 1972. In the following seven seasons, he had a 134-62 record, with two Western Athletic Conference titles and two NCAA tournament bids.
Ellenberger’s teams broke the school’s season attendance record four times in five years. His 1977-78 team, led by All-American Michael Cooper, averaged 97.5 points per game, was ranked as high as fourth in the country and finished 24-4.
He was one of the hottest coaches in the country, but in November 1979, the school was rocked by revelations several basketball players had received credit for courses they had not taken. Ellenberger and an assistant coach were fired the following month for altering transcripts to ensure players’ eligibility.
He faced federal and state charges, including mail fraud and filing false public vouchers. He was acquitted of the federal charges but was convicted on 21 state counts and sentenced to unsupervised probation.
“The question is how fair is it to incarcerate a man for doing what almost everyone in the community wanted him to do–namely, win basketball games at any cost,” Phillip Baiamonte, the presiding judge in the state trial, said at the time.
About 25 years later, Ellenberger declines to discuss the incident in detail.
“There isn’t anything to say other than some NCAA rules were broken, and when that happens the head coach gets fired,” he says.
After leaving New Mexico, Ellenberger got into the restaurant business in Albuquerque and coached briefly in the Continental Basketball Association and a women’s professional league.
His exile from college coaching ended in 1986 when Texas-El Paso coach Don Haskins, a close friend, hired him as a volunteer assistant. Ellenberger stayed four years, two as a paid assistant, then became an assistant at Indiana to Bob Knight, a pal since their days together on State Department coaching tours.
In August 2000, Ellenberger joined the staff of Bulls coach Tim Floyd, another coaching friend. He was excited to work in the NBA but became disenchanted with the Bulls’ on- and off-court futility.
“They couldn’t find a direction,” he says.
Floyd resigned on Christmas Eve 2001 with a 49-190 Bulls record. Ellenberger resigned the following April.
“I really wanted out,” he says.
Coaching’s coaching
Ellenberger and his wife, Cyndi, had visited Minocqua several times during his stay with the Bulls. They had fallen in love with the area and had bought a small cabin near Watersmeet, Mich., the winter of 2001-02.
Shortly after Ellenberger resigned, he and Cyndi moved north. Neither had a job lined up, but they decided to roll the dice and live the outdoor life they both cherish.
“I said, `Let’s just sell out and go north and live in that cabin,'” Ellenberger recalls, “and Cyndi said, `Let’s do it.’
“There had to be some school around that could use some help, but that was just a secondary thought. How many times in life do you wish you would have done that, and we just did it.
“The timing of the thing seemed perfect. Let’s just go.”
Cyndi, 33, who married Ellenberger in 2000, got a job as a teacher and girls basketball coach at the Conserve School, a small boarding school in Land O’ Lakes, Wis., that was just opening its doors. Norm, who had been married twice before, coached Conserve’s boys basketball team during the 2002-03 season.
In 2003 the Lakeland Union girls job opened up, and two friends from Minocqua urged Ellenberger to apply for it. The school, which has about 1,000 students, hired him, but his past at New Mexico, which had popped up in stories almost every time he changed jobs, surfaced again in a Lakeland Times article.
That caused a brief controversy, which Lakeland district administrator Michael Dailey says focused mostly on the fact Ellenberger’s violations had not come to light during the hiring process.
Ellenberger was not surprised his New Mexico demise again created news.
“There never has been a time they don’t reach down in the bottom desk drawer and pull out that paragraph,” he says of newspaper stories about him, “and the one they wrote the last 25 years says the same thing.
“But that’s the way things are.”
He says he no longer dwells on the past and doesn’t resent references to it. Friends agree.
“He doesn’t let that bother him anymore,” says Kirby Redman, a local optometrist and longtime friend of Ellenberger’s whose daughter, Amanda, plays for Lakeland. “You mess up, you got to pay your dues and you hope to get it behind you. But some things you never get behind you.”
Ellenberger’s new players rallied behind him, praising his hiring in a July 2003 letter to the Times.
“Whatever he did in the past does not take away from what he knows about basketball and what he could teach us,” says junior guard Amanda Gibson, Lakeland’s star player, in an interview. “We really wanted that opportunity.”
Still a teacher
Lakeland defeats Phillips 48-26. Ellenberger is low-key throughout the contest but watches his players with a sharp eye and an occasionally sharp tongue.
“That’s your job!” he barks at an offender after Lakeland allows a fast-break layup.
He clearly takes his basketball seriously, even if he no longer coaches it in the Big Ten or the NBA. He knows people wonder how he can go from the Bulls to girls high school basketball but insists he doesn’t care who he coaches as long as he coaches.
“It has nothing to do with where I’ve been,” says Ellenberger, whose coaching stipend is $4,000. “It’s where I am at this minute.
“The satisfaction and enjoyment has fulfilled me every bit as much as in previous years. All the glory stuff is OK, but what’s here is the fulfillment of what I’m all about, and that is coaching and teaching.
“Trying to give my kids the opportunity to see how good they can be is really important to me. So to me it’s not any different despite the level.
“The smoldering inside you still smolders.”
To keep those embers burning, Ellenberger drives 50 miles from his cabin to Minocqua on two-lane highways that can turn treacherous in winter.
“I’ve been in a ditch a couple of times,” he says.
He says he approaches coaching much as he has at past stops, even if his current players present new challenges.
“School is out at 3:30 p.m.,” he says with a bemused smile. “If I’m lucky, I might see the first girl at 3:45. The rest are out in the hall talking.
“But one thing you never have to worry about is the effort and the way they get after it. They love to play.”
High school players, in fact, have been a refreshing change from the attitudes Ellenberger encountered in pro ball.
“One of the things that ruined me on the NBA is the self-absorption of the players,” he says. “Most all of them are role players. Their role is themselves.”
Ellenberger still can be demanding, especially in practice, but his veteran players seem comfortable around him. “His bark is worse than his bite,” says senior guard Redman. “Once you get to know him, he has a great sense of humor.”
Lakeland’s players nonetheless appreciate their coach’s resume and regard him with a measure of awe.
So, apparently, do opponents. After the game, two Phillips players get Ellenberger’s autograph.
“He has brought excitement back to the program,” Gibson says.
The victory improves Lakeland’s record to 8-5. In Ellenberger’s first season, the Thunderbirds finished at 19-2–the third-best mark in Lakeland girls basketball history, but only one starter is back from that team.
He has revitalized his team’s summer program and worked to increase turnout, yet he may not reap the benefits of that labor.
“I told them I’d do it for three years for sure and see where we are after that,” he says of his initial discussions with school officials. Then he adds with a laugh, “Unless I wind up in the woods somewhere in a snowbank and can’t get out.”
Kidding aside, Ellenberger acknowledges that the 100-mile round trip to Minocqua eventually may force him to stop coaching there. He then might seek something closer to the cabin.
Last fall he helped out as a volunteer with the girls basketball team at Watersmeet High School, which received a measure of fame in a series of ESPN commercials playing off its nickname, the Nimrods. In Michigan girls basketball is a fall sport, though it may move to winter in the 2005-06 school year.
“I think he would do it forever,” Cyndi Ellenberger says of coaching. “It’s so much a part of who he is.”
The great outdoors
To find the other side of Norm Ellenberger, the flip side of the man they used to call “Stormin’ Norman,” you have to travel the back roads of the Upper Peninsula to the shores of Crooked Lake.
At home Ellenberger the coach gives way to Ellenberger the naturalist. Dressed in a Bulls sweatshirt, he shows a visitor around his property, pointing out the feeders with which he nourishes everything from chickadees to woodpeckers to flying squirrels.
He talks about the deer that come to dine and how he leaves part of his catch from ice fishing for eagles that circle overhead. Friendly and outgoing, he nonetheless seems comfortable spending hours alone near home.
The cabin, built in the 1930s, sits eight feet from the north bay of Crooked Lake and not much farther from the edge of the Sylvania Wilderness, an 18,000-acre protected wilderness area in the Ottawa National Forest that is so pristine that motorized or mechanized equipment is virtually banned.
From the two decks they installed behind the cabin, he and Cyndi, along with their brown Labrador retriever, Kiva, can see woods and water seemingly without end.
“It’s just so beautiful and peaceful and quiet,” he says.
Indoors, in a living room decorated with items from his days in the Southwest, he and Cyndi keep up with basketball via cable TV.
Ellenberger spends much of his time outdoors. He often chops and splits wood in preparation for winter. Temperatures sometimes drop well below zero, and the cabin’s small gas furnace needs help from the fireplace to provide a tolerable environment.
Because of lake-effect snow from Lake Superior, the area can get “a foot of snow in a heartbeat,” says Ellenberger, adding that he doesn’t let the elements deter him. “We canoe, kayak, snowshoe, camp–just take off and do what we want to do,” he says. “If you’re going to live up here and do this, you have to use it, enjoy it. Go attack that snow.”
Ellenberger has not worked outside a gym since moving to the cabin. Besides his outdoor pursuits, he has kept busy renovating the cabin and cooking, often preparing pike or bass he has pulled out of Crooked Lake.
“He refuses to admit he’s retired,” Cyndi says, laughing.
Ellenberger doesn’t seem the retiring type or someone who plans to slow down soon.
“I’m having too much fun now,” the old coach says. “As long as I’m dreaming and smiling, there’s certainly no need to do anything else.”
