The phone rang late at night just as I began my banana split. This better be good, I said.
“You’re not going to believe this,” a friend told me.
“What?” I said, watching my ice cream melt.
“Jerrance Howard is coming,” he said.
There was a pause, and then I laughed out loud.
“Sure he is,” I said. “And I heard Reese Witherspoon has left her husband. Maybe she is coming to see me too.”
I hung up, and went back to the important task of my banana split.
__________________
He was a hoops junkie at a young age, learning how to do his ABC’s while dribbling a basketball. There was no rim to be found, but on West Third Street in front of the Howard house, there was a telephone pole. And on that pole there was a nail that served as the basket. And when future NBA star Frank Williams would ride his bike over to Howard’s house, the two would go at it, kid to kid, grade schoolers battling in the street. They never kept score. When darkness hit, Williams rode his bike home.
“Man, it was all hoop,” Howard laughed.
It is a long way from the Pierson Hills neighborhood in Peoria to the sights that Howard has seen. High school star at Peoria Central, then onto a career at Illinois. At Champaign, incredibly, Howard played under Lon Kruger, Bill Self and Bruce Weber. He was the fifth guard in the Illini rotation. The other four were Frank Williams, Deron Williams, Dee Brown and Luther Head. Even more incredibly, they all had something in common.
They were first round draft picks in the NBA.
When the real world called, it came in the form of Billy Gillespie.
“Coach Gillespie was on the Illini staff, and he gets the job at Texas A&M,” Howard said. “I graduate, and he calls me and says if I can get to College Station in two days, he has something for me. I never even asked what it was, or what it paid. Now, I had never even been out of Illinois. The night before I leave, somebody breaks into my car and steals my radio. Car has no air conditioning. It breaks down somewhere in Oklahoma. But the ’98 Monte Carlo made it to Texas on time.”
Howard’s coaching career spans from Texas A&M to Kentucky to Illinois to SMU to Kansas to Texas. That would be Billy Gillespie to Bruce Weber to Larry Brown to Bill Self to Chris Beard.
He has recruited in 48 states.
“It’s cold in the Dakota’s in the winter,” he laughed.
But Jerrance Howard is more than a recruiter. He is a basketball coach. And now he is in Carbondale.
“How does this happen?” I asked. “You could have gone anywhere. Did they offer you the keys to the city? Free Quatro’s for life?”
“Everybody has been asking me that,” Howard said. “I took a year off to spend time with my family. My son Jerrance Junior is a teenager now. He might be a baller like the old man. I hope he can shoot better. I had agency opportunities that I looked at. It was nice sitting out and having time for family activities. But……..”
And I knew it was coming. We all suffer from it every March.
“Once March Madness came around, I knew it was time. I was born to coach.”
“Sure,” I pushed. “But why Southern?”
“There were a lot of reasons. My brother graduated from here. This is my home state. My wife is from Chicago. But it was more than that. It was the Mullins family. I never saw Bryan play in high school. But at Illinois, coach Weber raved about him, about how hard he played. I heard a lot of stories about him, and that was attractive to me. And then there were his parents, Mike and Gail. I am a big fan of theirs. I signed three kids that Mike coached at the Illini Wolves. The entire Mullins family is just good, incredible people. And you know who I called for advice when Bryan offered me the job? I called his father.”
I told Howard I wanted to talk about his specialty, recruiting. After all, we have a few openings.
“As soon as word got out that I was coming to Southern, coaches began reaching out to me. They want us to be successful. They know we have a great tradition here. They know what Bryan brings to the table.”
“Chicago?” I asked. “Can you get us into Chicago?”
“I will always recruit Chicago,” Howard said with emphasis. “To me, it is the mecca of basketball. It is a priority for me. I still have relationships there. We need to get those kids down here.”
Of course, I had to pause.
“Let’s get serious for a second,” I said. “Giordano’s, Gino’s or Lou’s?”
Another laugh from Howard. “I am a Giordano’s man.”
“So how do you get those kids down here?” I asked. “And how do you sell the high school star on coming to a place that specializes in defense? And then, how do you keep them?”
“First, you have to have a personal relationship with the kids,” Howard said. “The defense is not a hard sell. If you want to play at the next level you have to be able to guard. But you have to understand it is a different world now with the portal. I was at the bigger schools taking kids from the mid majors. Now I am on the side of trying to keep them. I haven’t dealt with this. For the high school kids, you have to recruit them and then develop them. You have to treat them well. But you can’t worry about it. It is what it is.”
I asked Howard if Southern would be more focused on high school players or the portal going forward.
“We are definitely going to need a balance, especially at the mid major. level. All things being equal, coaches are going to take a fifth-year senior over a high school guy because he is older and more mature. And we are already cooking. We have had an overwhelming response from people. They know what this program is about. We had a player on campus this past weekend. We expect a decision on him soon. (just read Saluki Insider to see who this was). We have more visits the next two weekends. I am going on the road tomorrow. First stop will be a NIKE tourney in Atlanta. I will also hit up the Juco’s there. Then it’s off to my old stomping grounds in Kansas City.”
We had another pause in the conversation, so I brought out the heavy material.
“Skittles or Lemonheads?”
And that brought a roar from Howard.
“Come on, man! How did you know!”
“Well, I am the Bobber!”
The man who is called “Snacks” knew he had to come clean, and fast.
“It’s skittles, man. It’s got to be skittles.”
“And if you had to pick one, which color?”
Howard was not quite prepared for such a hard hitting interview, but eventually he confessed.
“Give me the purple one.”
“Okay,” I said. “Back to the easy stuff. What are you looking for when you are recruiting a high school player?”
“I’m looking for how a kid treats his parents,” Howard said. “Because that is how he will treat his coach. And then there is social media. I have stopped recruiting kids because of their social media. If there are two kids of equal talent, I am taking the one that isn’t looking stupid.”
And Howard has learned that he is not just recruiting the player, but the family.
“There have been good players who I stopped recruiting because of how their parents act in the stands. We don’t have time for that. We can’t deal with that. Unless you are Lebron, nobody is dealing with that these days with 2,000 other kids in the portal.”
I told Howard that coaches are in the portal every year too, always have been. And I wondered why someone with his resume hadn’t landed a head coaching job yet.
“I applied for the Bradley job that went to Brian Wardle. It would have been a good fit with me being from Peoria. Someday, that opportunity might come, and I will be prepared. Coach Weber told me he applied for 20 jobs before he got hired here at Southern. “
It was time to go. Howard had recruiting calls to make, and I sure wasn’t going to mess that up. But before I said goodbye, there was one last question that I desperately needed answered.
“I need to ask you about a recruit you signed back in the day,” I asked.
“Who was that?” Howard asked.
“Joseph Bertand,” I said. “We had a source here on the message board that told us Bertand coming to Southern was a done deal. And then you signed him. What happened?”
Howard laughed again.
“Oh yeah. Southern was really in on Bertrand. Coach Lowery knew his high school coach at Sterling. And he was an Illini Wolves player with Mr. Mullins. We knew Southern was close. So whoever your message board guy was, he was close. Let’s just say he got that one wrong.”
And then I laughed. And laughed some more.
_____________________
So now it begins. I celebrated when the news about Howard was announced yesterday, news that had been plastered on Saluki Insider for the past week. Gave myself an extra scoop of ice cream on my banana split.