Comment on this story Looking for leaders At an early November afternoon practice session at UT’s Stokely Athletics Center, Buzz Peterson’s recent alterations to the Dean Smith Method of coaching are evident. Gone, for instance, are Smith’s precise windows of time, as the team arrives nearly 30 minutes later than scheduled to the practice floor, delayed by an extended film-watching session at Thompson Boling Arena. But also in evidence are Peterson’s renewed commitment to several core Smith precepts, including the need for better on-the-floor communication, and for better leadership from within the ranks of the athletes themselves. (Moreso than most coaches, Smith believed that senior leadership was crucial to any successful college basketball campaign.) With players darting madly around the half-court in a frenzy of squeaking shoes, Peterson abruptly halts the orange-on-white situational scrimmage and makes the orange squad run a line-to-line sprint, punitive redress for a defensive breakdown resulting from a lack of chatter. “I’m telling you guys, if you don’t talk to each other, you’re not going to play,” he bellows, his hoarse voice and thick southern drawl hanging stark in the gym’s still air. Communication was often a problem for UT in ‘03-’04, owing in part to the relatively unassuming demeanors of key players like Brandon Crump and point guard C.J. Watson (11.5 ppg, 4.6 apg last season). “C.J. doesn’t say a whole lot,” Peterson says. “He’s a great role model off the floor, but on it, he needs to talk. Our point guard has to talk. I’ve challenged him to work on verbalizing out there on the practice floor.” Just as Smith would make a special, personal plea to his seniors at the beginning of every new campaign, Peterson has challenged all three of this year’s captains—Watson, Crump, and swingman Scooter McFadgon—to take ownership of the ‘04-’05 squad. Skilled players and good citizens all, the trio were nonetheless perceived by their coach as lacking in leadership skills. Tellingly, all three players passed up a winning or tying shot in last season’s NIT loss to George Mason. “We’re doing some leadership training; I’m meeting with them once per week, looking at what it takes to be a leader,” Peterson says, adding that Watson also attended an NCAA leadership conference in the off-season. “I’ve got 15 guys, and I don’t know if any of them have any natural leadership skills. Some people have it, and some people don’t.” Of McFadgon, a hot shooter with a reputation for poor defensive play, Peterson says, “Scooter is definitely someone who can score for you (17.6 ppg), but he can also defend. You always heard ‘Scooter’s not a good defensive player’ last year. But I don’t believe that. Scooter is a good defender, and I want him to show people he can defend.” Crump, (14.8 ppg., 6.8 rpg), is another player with something to prove. “Brandon has to stay consistent in his efforts,” Peterson says. “He’s got to work hard every single time he’s out there. He’s less than 40 points away from becoming a thousand-point scorer. But he can do even more. Instead of getting 15 (points) and seven (rebounds) a game, we want to see Brandon dominate.” All three captains are pre-season All-SEC picks; throw in the likes of capable UCLA transfer Andre Patterson at forward, up-and-coming sophomore post player Major Wingate, seasoned sometime-starter Jemere Hendrix at forward, and freshman sharpshooter Chris Lofton (likely the earliest contributor among this year’s frosh), and you have a team that looks poised to outperform all of Peterson’s previous UT squads. Popular wisdom has the Vols finishing with 17 to 20 wins, and maybe earning Peterson’s first NCAA tournament appearance as a Volunteer. “Buzz has had lots of bad luck since he came here,” says athletics director Mike Hamilton. “Last year we had one of the youngest teams in the country. But now we’re looking at a season with three potential All-SEC performers. It should be an exciting year.” —M.G.

UT men’s basketball coach Buzz Peterson wants to run a program, not just coach a team.

by Mike Gibson

University of Tennessee head basketball coach Buzz Peterson lived a charmed life up until his first year in college, when he experienced the first in a recurring series of career-threatening adversities. Maybe it was inevitable, in that Peterson has always been basketball’s quintessential Nice Guy, and everyone knows that Nice Guys finish last.

Oft-told now is the story of how Peterson, a Parade and McDonald’s All-American as a senior at Asheville High School, was voted basketball player of the year and athlete of the year in North Carolina, taking both awards over second-place finisher Michael Jordan of Wilmington.

Then, at the beginning of his freshman campaign at the University of North Carolina under coaching legend Dean Smith, something happened: the charm wore off. Peterson suffered a stress fracture in his foot during practice. In the wake of that injury, it was the less-heralded Jordan—not Peterson—who worked his way into the starting lineup of that stellar North Carolina team. And it was Jordan who would later make the winning shot against Georgetown when UNC won the 1982 NCAA college basketball championship at the end of the season.

Things got worse Peterson’s sophomore year. During a game with the University of Virginia, a high-profile televised match-up on a cool night in Chapel Hill, Peterson was on the floor toward the end of the first half when he went down in agony, clutching his right leg. He had torn the medial collateral ligament in the knee, and would miss the rest of the season. Though his junior and senior seasons at UNC were respectable, Peterson’s game was never quite the same.

“Did I have the career I wanted (at UNC)?” Peterson says now, reflecting on his college years. “Probably not. But would I do it all again? Yes. Why? Because Coach Smith taught me a lot more important things than basketball. He taught me how to go out in the real world and make it on my own.”

Flash ahead through two decades or so: the ensuing years weren’t entirely bad to Peterson. He was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, although the NBA didn’t work out. He married a pretty girl named Jan Maney, and fathered three nice kids. And he broke into coaching—after receiving Smith’s blessing to do so—eventually showing considerable promise at his first head coaching jobs at Appalachian State and then the University of Tulsa.

And then came the Big Break, an opportunity to coach at the University of Tennessee, his dad’s alma mater and a program he had admired since he was a kid growing up in nearby Asheville. And with it came a new string of misfortunes, the likes of which might have convinced a weaker spirit to fold up his tent and head back over the mountains, home.

At the beginning of his first semester at UT, two starters were dismissed from the squad due to failed drug tests. In mid-season, star forward Ron Slay went down to a knee injury. Fellow frontcourt standout Marcus Haislip, an underclassman, unexpectedly turned pro before the start of year two. And later that second season, backcourt starter Jon Higgins, usually a good student, was declared ineligible for the post-season when he failed six hours of math classes.

Throw in a tough third season featuring a team with no seniors, and this year you have what looks suspiciously like a coach on the Bubble, a guy (a Nice Guy, granted) coming off three consecutive middling years (47-42 overall at UT) and a couple of early exits from the post-season National Invitational Tournament. Fans and observers like the Nashville Tennessean are calling 2004-05 a “pivotal year” for Peterson, a sportspeak euphemism for “put up or shut up time.”

But don’t get carried away with the speculative ranting of sportswriters, or the disgruntled murmurings of fairweather fans. The man who has most influenced the way Buzz Peterson coaches his basketball team is the aforementioned Smith (three-year record at UNC: 35-27), a man who built a dynasty on a foundation of discipline, academics and good citizenship; on the premise that if you do everything else right, the wins and losses will fall into place.

University of Kansas coach Roy Williams, a Smith disciple, once said that his former coach “taught (him) how to run a program, not just coach a team.” Peterson feels the same way.

“Yeah, I look at (Smith) as a model,” Peterson says. “He stands for discipline; he stands for 100 percent effort on the court and in the classroom... I may not always coach exactly the same way, but a lot of the things off the floor are the same as what I learned from Coach Smith.”

UT athletics director Mike Hamilton was a key figure in Peterson’s hiring in 2001, even though he was only the assistant AD to now-retired Doug Dickey at the time. “The Carolina ties—the idea of building that kind of program—had a significant amount to do with his selection,” Hamilton says.

And Hamilton seems to recognize that “that kind of program” is the kind that doesn’t build overnight. “I evaluate coaches based on five equal criteria—fiscal responsibility, graduating players, winning, abiding by NCAA rules, and the way they represent the program. You have to look at the total picture, and the total picture looks pretty good. I’m not looking at it in terms of ‘He needs so many wins.’ That wouldn’t be fair.”

Behind the scenes, Hamilton notes marked improvement in both academics and team discipline over Peterson’s three years, including, for instance, a heightened vigilance in tracking the players’ grades and class attendance. (It’s worth noting that Brandon Crump, a star player, has already earned his degree, and will be taking graduate level courses this season.) “He’s keyed in that we need someone having oversight over those things every day,” Hamilton says. “The coaches know what’s going on; they know when the players have a test or a paper coming up.”

Associate Sports Information Director Craig Pinkerton also allows that Peterson has noticeably strengthened the foundation of the program since taking over from previous head coach Jerry Green, who was widely viewed as a soft touch when it came to enforcing the rules. “It’s a lot more enjoyable working under Buzz,” Pinkerton says. “I like his personality, and I like the things he’s trying to do.

“I wouldn’t want to say that Jerry was undisciplined, but that perception was out there. With Buzz you know it’s there.” By way of example, he points to a recent incident wherein Andre Patterson lost his spot in the starting lineup for this year’s season opener with Tusculum College, for the seemingly minor infraction of arriving late to a warm-up.

But perhaps Hamilton is most convincing in his support of his scrappy but sometimes lucklorn skipper when he looks at Peterson’s brief tenure in light of the university’s promiscuous history with men’s basketball head coaches. “We’ve lacked consistency in management before,” Hamilton says. “You can’t expect solidity when you’ve had five coaches in 15 years. We need consistency in management. I think we have the right guy now.”

The 2003-04 season was not an easy one for Peterson and his Vols. Though the team finished a respectable 15-14, and made a post-season appearance in the NIT, their road record was a dismal 1-11. Many of those losses came as the result of egregious defensive breakdowns, the kind of breakdowns that fester poisonously in a coach who stresses basketball basics and team play.

As soon as the buzzer sounded in UT’s final game, a 58-55 NIT loss to George Mason, Peterson vowed to make changes. Before this season began, he told reporters at UT’s basketball media day that he would “get away from Coach Smith’s practice plan a little bit.

“We’re not going to put a time on so many things,” he continued, referring to Smith’s penchant for regimented, almost scripted practices. “When we’ve done what we feel we’ve needed to do, that’s when we’ll move on. It’s going to be different.”

But take such declarations with a grain of salt. While Peterson may be deviating from the exacting Smith Method in certain ways, those ways are largely technical, cosmetic. To paraphrase Roy Williams, Peterson may be finding his own way of coaching a team, but he’s still running a program like Dean Smith.

“Whenever our discussions get really deep, the topics of Coach Smith and Coach Knight come out,” says University of Iowa head coach Steve Alford, Peterson’s best friend and himself a product of Bobby Knight’s system at Indiana. “Anytime things get tense, you go back to those basics.

“We’ve both had tough breaks in coaching. Do you change who you are when that happens, or do you stay the course? The great thing about Buzz is he’s never wavered. Whether he’s had tough times or success, he’s stayed true to his principles.”

That Carolina still looms large in Peterson’s coaching consciousness is abundantly clear. With only a little prodding, he will hold forth in earnest on his days as a wide-eyed 6’6” freshman in Chapel Hill. “The two biggest decisions I made in my life were where I went to college, and the lady I married,” Peterson says. “Sometimes I look back and ask myself, ‘Why North Carolina?’ And always, a lot comes back to Dean Smith. I wanted a chance to play for that program, for this man I had heard so much about.”

Later, it was Smith to whom Peterson turned when he sought counsel on whether to enter coaching. “When I said I wanted to coach, his first question was, ‘Would you accept the last assistant’s position at the University of... Montana?’ He just threw a name out there, because he knew that if I wanted to get in, I was going to do whatever it takes. I said, ‘Coach, I’d take it.’ And he said, ‘Well, then maybe you ought to try.’”

And a few new wrinkles in the practice schedule notwithstanding, the 2004 off-season has been marked by a reverent devotion to the team-building principles Peterson learned under Smith’s tutelage.

“Even in May, June, July, I like to have the players’ cell phone numbers, so I can call, or maybe email or text message, just to stay in touch,” Peterson says. Such cues are taken directly from Smith, who is renowned for keeping in touch with former players and coaches even long after they’ve left the nest. (“We all get together in North Carolina once a year in the fall,” Peterson says. “But even during the rest of the year, he calls on you, or you have to call him. He has to keep up to date. It’s pretty special to have your college coach take that kind of interest.”)

And Peterson’s penchant for mobilizing his players in non-basketball group activities—softball games, hospital visits, (voluntary) church attendance—is becoming a minor tradition. Having drawn considerable media notice during Peterson’s initial season at UT, those gestures have only grown more regular; they’re clearly more than a new coach’s conspicuous efforts at courting public favor.

“When we first did those things, my first year, there was a lot of hemming and hawing,” Peterson says. “But it’s gotten a lot better. I have players come to me about doing those sorts of things now.”

But what does any of that have to do with rebounding from a disappointing season in 2004-05? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Peterson seems to interpret the struggles of 2003-04 as a sign that the Smith Method has yet to take hold; it has yet to create the kind of organically functioning team-as-family-unit synergy that helps win games even under the most difficult circumstances.

“We try to do things together because we’re a family,” Peterson says. “I want our guys to know that when it gets tough out there on the court, we’re together, not divided. We’re fighting for one common reason, to win the game.”

But there are drawbacks to building a Dean Smith-style program in the 21st century, problems the Legend himself never had to face. With the NBA drafting younger and younger players (Cleveland Cavaliers phenom Lebron James reportedly considered foregoing his senior year to enter the league—his senior year in high school, that is) and the ascendance of pro leagues overseas, the college experience has diminished in importance for talented players looking to hone their skills for professional ball.

This was pointedly evident when UT lost what would have been this year’s top signee (more of that Peterson luck) Jackie Butler, the nation’s top high school post player, when he decided that, commitments be damned, he wanted to jump straight to the NBA. Butler wasn’t even drafted, but it didn’t matter; he is forever lost to the University of Tennessee. He is currently working to make the roster of the Minnesota Timberwolves as an undrafted free agent.

“The NBA drafts on potential now,” Peterson says. “That’s why you see these young kids going early. You had a kid who signed with Indiana last year who decided, ‘Heck, I’m just going to go overseas for a year or two, make some money there, and then I’ll get to the NBA.’

“It’s tough for a college coach when you’re sitting here trying to sell a kid on experience in college, and you’re also telling them they have to go to English class, that they have to go to math class. And they’re thinking, ‘Why would I want to do that?’”

But if building a program the “right way” is more difficult in the modern era, Peterson also feels it’s also more important than ever before, insomuch as strong teams can no longer depend on transient mercenaries who view college—at best—as a hasty pit stop on the road to professional basketball.

“What we have to look at is how a player will fit into our program, what kind of character he has, what role he would play,” Peterson says. “You’d like to see someone who’s going to be with you for four years, so you try to build a relationship.

“The administration here from Doug Dickey to Mike Hamilton and Dr. Peterson have had the understanding that we’re going to do this the right way. We’re going to build these young men into good solid citizens, and along the way we’re going to win a lot of basketball games. But it’s a process that can’t happen overnight.”

For now, at least, it looks as if Peterson has earned from the men in charge of athletics at UT the patience and reserve of good will he needs to build a basketball program whose fortunes don’t hinge on the whims of a few fickle recruits. Maybe this time, the Nice Guy won’t finish last.

November 18, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 47 © 2004 Metro Pulse