Buckeyes' Coach Stresses Little Things for Big Picture
By IRA BERKOW
Published: February 12, 2005
OLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 11 - Candace Dark, a 5-foot-9 junior guard for Ohio State, is a bright young woman, smart enough to have been named to the academic all-Big Ten team last season and twice selected as Ohio State's scholar-athlete, brainy enough to consider becoming a physician. Her coach, Jim Foster, knows all this. But Dark is capable of the occasional mental error on the court, not unlike every other basketball player. And the coach is aware of this, as well.
As he does with all his players, Foster lets Dark get away with nothing, like the time she failed to call out a switch to a teammate on defense in a recent game. "Candace, if you were a surgeon, you would have killed me," Foster said during a timeout he had quickly called. "A surgeon can't afford to have a bad day. If that's your goal, you have to be prepared. If you're in a crucial moment in surgery, and someone hands you the wrong instrument, do you stop everything and say, 'Uh, pardon me, but I think this scalpel won't do?' "
She listened. "No," he went on. "You have to be quicker than that. More emphatic. Same thing on the basketball court."
And so it goes for Foster, who is, as one of his players said, "all about perspective," who seeks to bring real-life situations and to draw universal themes into his basketball teachings. He learns about the players - who they are as people, what their aspirations are - and from there he works more or less inside out, from head and heart to the backdoor play.
Now in his 27th year as a women's basketball coach, his third at Ohio State, the 56-year-old Foster has succeeded on two fronts. He has guided the Buckeyes to the No. 2 ranking in the Associated Press poll, the highest the team has ever been. He has a career record of 570-247, and has guided his teams to 19 postseason appearances.
After walloping Michigan, 72-39, at home Thursday night for their 12th straight victory, the Buckeyes will take a 23-2 season record (a 10-1 mark in the Big Ten, good for first place) to Iowa City on Sunday afternoon, when they play the Hawkeyes, a top-25 team for much of the season.
The second standout point about Foster is that every woman he has recruited and coached has graduated. In an era when attention spans may seem short among young athletes, and pedestals for them seem to get higher and higher, Foster's achievement at St. Joseph's, Vanderbilt and now Ohio State has been astonishing.
Beth Howe, a 5-8 senior guard, was a sophomore when Foster became her coach at Ohio State. "It was after the fall quarter and our grades came out, and he called me into his office to discuss how I was doing in my classes," she said. "We were entering the heart of our season, but here he was taking time out for this. He had my report. And do you know what he said? He said, 'This is unacceptable.'
"One of the first talks we had when he came here was about my goals in life. I wanted to go to graduate school next in business-related subjects. He told me I'd never get into graduate school with grades like these. And so he put me on a strict study-hall routine. My grades are much better now. I apply to grad school in April."
Jessica Davenport, the star 6-4 sophomore center, said Foster's philosophy was that every part of one's life has an impact on the other.
"If you're doing poorly in the classroom, or something is amiss in your social life, the stress will have an effect on your basketball," Davenport said. "The same if you're not doing the right things in basketball. It's all a circle."
During the game against Michigan, Foster was his customarily understated self. He bans headbands and tattoos (patches are provided to cover players' tattoos at game time) because, he says, basketball is a team game and the players should not be calling attention to themselves. In his own appearance, he is Plain Jim. He wears a gray sweater and dark slacks, his gray hair is cut short and even his eyes, a light blue, look gray in the overall aspect. A pair of glasses hang by a chain around his neck. At Vanderbilt, he was called "The Professor," often derisively by coaches he beat.
His team plays unselfishly, but it also plays with flair. The Buckeyes move the ball, and they move without the ball; they play tough defense, and box out on the boards.
"They're a great team - they have a little bit of everything," Michigan Coach Cheryl Burnett said. "They've got great depth, great size, great experience. And they're lethal in the open floor."
Foster refuses to get caught up in his team's winning streak. "We don't talk about any of that stuff," he said. "It's silly to talk about. Your object should be to get better every day. If you get better every day, the rest of the stuff takes care of itself."
Besides his experience as a coach, Foster brings an intriguing background to Ohio State that contributes to his views on life and basketball.
He grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Abington, Pa., outside Philadelphia. "I didn't come up the traditional way," he said. He graduated from Temple when he was 31.
At various times he was a bartender ("It's the greatest job for learning how to listen"), was the head of a home for neglected boys ("You learn about abuse in the home, how some kids have to deal with parents in jail, or who committed suicide; or there's the girlfriend on the third-floor ledge and you have to get her down"), and he was in the Army in Vietnam beginning in 1967, serving as a specialist with the 604th Transportation Unit.
"Right after the Tet Offensive," he said, talking about action he saw in early 1968, "we start getting shelled with rockets and mortars. The idea that life is precious hits harder than ever before."
He brings these experiences to his coaching. "Sometimes they get down about things, and I tell them how good they have it," Foster said. "They're here in college, a beautiful setting, and playing basketball, something they love to do. And they have their cellphones. Pick up the newspapers, I tell them. See where your peers are, in Iraq, risking their lives. If you can't figure out how to be happy here - and can't concentrate on your studies and basketball - you have a serious problem."
The players take it all in. They call some of his sayings Fosterisms and repeat them to one another good-naturedly.
Dark, the potential surgeon, said: "Yes, there are moments when I'm an airhead on the court. And Coach is right. I have to be on my toes all the time. If I'm a surgeon, and show up for work a little off, well, my patient that day just might be out of luck."
