The Baseline Interviews #1 - Mike Stevens - Head Coach of Female Prep at Edge School Calgary.

B -  With a lot of this highschool, college, recruiting, there’s no information for kids. Not every coach has their player’s best interests at heart. They would take care and advertise their best players, but what about those small, fundamental point guards that fly under the radar? How do you get those guys to the next level, through club, through prep schools? You’ve been with both men’s and women’s programs at Edge, what does Edge do for players? 

M- In basketball in general, there is so much misinformation out there. To me, the biggest issue is somehow trying to streamline it so that people understand who you’re talking to and what the source of the information is, because information comes from a reliable source but as you backtrack it and realize how it got misconstrued, it goes all the way back to club.

I think when club started, everyone had the same goals. ‘Hey we have the summertime with nobody doing anything, let’s get some players and let’s get better!’. From our day, club was only a specialized group, you know, 12 guys get to play club and the rest of us are at the park. But then people’s ultimate goals got in the way, like let’s get more involvement. So more clubs started to pop up. It was still genuine in that ‘We’re just trying to improve kids’. As in any industry, someone started looking at that and saw dollar signs. So more clubs popped up, and people didn’t care, ‘As long as you’re willing to pay, I’m good.’ With that, how do you separate yourself? It never became an investment thing, where ‘I’m gonna take you and turn you into this’, it turned into ‘Well I can beat you’. That’s where development went out the window. Now it's about ‘come to my club, because my club can beat your club’. It's more ‘If I can develop you, great!, but if I can’t, well at least I got your money and we beat that club’.

People are starting to realize that as we develop more basketball players, the opportunities are getting smaller and smaller, we really need to figure out what I’m doing and where I’m going. That’s where, in some cases, people are starting to misrepresent themselves. ‘I will do this for you if you come to me’, when they have no way to guarantee that. So when you look at us now, at Edge, I’m not saying “come here and we can make you a D1 player”, that has nothing to do with it. This is an opportunity for you to get a private school education, and a chance to be more on-court than you would at a normal highschool. What you choose to do with that or how you use it is largely dependent on you. At the end of the day, I’m not going to go around parading that we’re so much better coaches than anybody else, but I’m pretty sure that if I have 6 hours with a player versus the 2 that they would get at their highschool, I’m probably going to be able to get more out of you.

Canada Basketball in general, I think we need to be more forward thinking. A lot of the headlines from prep, came from wonky academics, you know ‘I went to this prep school, applied to college and they didn’t recognize my grades from prep school’. Then that’s a headline. As I’m talking to families, a lot don’t necessarily understand ‘what is prep’? So I’m glad with [Edge] we have the brick building, you can see that you come to school here, then we add athletics from there. 

B- I’ve avoided club for as long as I can, we only started because my oldest son got to grade 11, and we thought if we’re going to keep up, we have to make your name known. But when we started, I started to see exactly what you said, ‘This team is gonna beat you’. You’re going to beat me because you have 12 athletes and are pressing the crap out of us, But the basketball and development comes second to winning. I get mad when we play teams like that, or teams that just sit in a zone. If any of these guys are going to get to college, they have to know how to play man defense, and you’re robbing them of that opportunity to learn. 

M - It’s true and that’s just it. But to go deeper, it’s like that because someone is just trying to make a buck. As a player and parent you have to take a step back, nobody is coming out just to help you. What’s the intent here? You just have to be careful like when you’re invited to do something, what are they getting out of it? It’s the same thing here at the club level, the prep level, there is that recruiting piece. There is always an angle to it, ‘I’m going to give you something that they can’t’. What’s in it for you? ‘I gained their best athlete, so now I can beat you, now I can promote that my club is better’. As far as the spring goes though, the landscape has changed, you can’t not play club. By the time you’re probably in grade 10, you need the spring season. There is a lot of recruiting that happens in the spring season, then they just follow you through your school season. 

B- Obviously you’re not coaching at the college anymore, but when you were there, how much did you recruit club versus highschool? How do you promote yourself as a player trying to get to the next level, because now kids are relying on ‘I went to this club and they said they were going to get me to college’. 

M - That’s where you have to have trust that people are going to do what they say they’re going to do. And ultimately club is an easier place to recruit because I have more access to be able to talk to you, and get to know you a little bit. As a coach, I go to a highschool game and you have 4 coaches looking at a player, I don’t get a lot of time to meet you, I get a 30 second pitch, and depending on your preconceived notions of my school or who I am, I don’t get a chance to have a real conversation and make myself known to you. To go back to the question, the kid that’s not being recruited, what do you do? You have to send out emails, put yourself out there as much as possible. You have to try to generate that conversation, because the spots are so few, coaches are less likely to recruit unless you reach out. If not, I’m on to the next guy. Because there are so few spots, there is somebody else out there that is active in their conversations. You hear it all the time now, ‘I stopped recruiting that guy, I sent him a message, he didn’t respond’. You wouldn’t believe the amount of players that just don’t respond to a message. If I’m going to invest this money in you to give you a scholarship and you can’t even be bothered to respond to this message, okay, next. 

B - As a player, you definitely need to be more in the driver's seat, as there’s less demand than supply for sure. 

M- And things are even changing to the fact that so many people put so much stock in skills trainers and that ‘What am I doing to make myself better skill wise’, when at the end of the day, for me as a coach, we have egos. I can make you better. What I don’t need is a guy who needs the ball for 30 seconds every possession and won’t do anything else when the ball isn’t in his hands. [A guy who] has all these great crossovers - that means nothing to me, I can teach you how to do that. I need kids that are willing to be good teammates, that are going to work hard, that are going to show up everyday. That’s my number one advice to athletes when they ask me. 

B - How do you see it from [a coaches] side talking about the consistency piece?

M- The way I see it is- by showing up every day even when others don’t especially during the offseason, That’s me chipping away. And at some point, I truly believe, you’re going to pass, where they’re looking like ‘wait a minute, what happened here’? And when it gets to that level, that’s how a program changes. Because now you’re the guy that can preach ‘you wanna do what I did?, you gotta get in every day’. I remember when I was at [the college level], I had an international where in the first year it was a gongshow. But he went away and he understood that, and in the second year did all the things. So when we added a couple more internationals, they got their butt kicked by this first guy. They saw what it takes, and now they start dragging other people up with them. That’s how the program changes. If you think about a coach, I don’t care what position you think you are on the depth chart, I just need to know that when I call on you, I know what I’m going to get. If I know I’m going to get this, I can work all the other parts to make it work. If when I call on you I don’t know if I’m going to get this or that, it makes it really hard for me to find a consistent spot for you in the lineup. I’m not willing to do that for my job. 

B- You get paid at the college level to win, but [at Edge] you get paid more for developing players. When it comes to interacting with the parents with these two different goals in mind, which level do you find it harder to interact with parents?

M- At the college level, I am judge, jury and executioner. So you may not agree with me, but that’s tough on you. I can be as approachable as I want to be, but at the end of the day when I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough. I can keep you at arms length. [at Edge] its kind of the same, but you’re paying to be here, you’re a customer, so I have to talk to you a bit more and hopefully come to some kind of resolution that way. It can be a little bit more trying at times, but you just have to set boundaries. You want me to play your kid because why? Everybody here gets a chance, obviously, but if they are not getting as much of a chance as you think they should, there is a reason for that. Let’s have the honest conversation about what that is. And when I’m honest and talk to you as a parent, you’re often saying ‘oh, that’s not the story I’m getting from my son, let me go and have a conversation with him’. You would be surprised how often the next day I get that conversation of ‘Hey coach, when can we get in the gym and shoot’? I have to have more of an open line for parents, but that’s partly setting boundaries for who you are and what you will and won’t accept. 

B- Obviously there are a lot more people going the prep school route now, but what do you think about those guys who go to prep for a year instead of just going to college right out of highschool if they were able to? 

M- We kind of say “The level you should be at is the level you’re being recruited to”. Much like I was saying earlier, it’s not you come here and I turn you from a U-sport player to a division 1 player, but there are a few things that happen here that wouldn't happen anywhere else. One is the private school education, and how much you value that because it can boost your marks. So if you need help for marks and that’s the door holding you back, you can potentially open that here. Some kids are just not ready out of grade 12, so you come here, you hit the weights, you play at a high level that is similar to that college level and you’re actually playing, not just riding the bench. You gain that experience so that when you get to your first year, you’re actually active and part of the rotation. Sometimes it can be a tool for athletes to open up a few more schools. If you come here and you’re only being recruited by one school, maybe by the end of the year here, you’ll have four or five schools to choose from, and you can make your choice from there.

Some athletes, there still is that dream of Division 1, so you spend a year here focussing on basketball, not using any eligibility, where you’re still playing at a high level and you chase that Division 1 dream, we’ve had a couple athletes where that has worked out. The bigger question for some of those kids, ‘If at the end of this year, you’re still here, was that a waste of a year for you’? If that answer is yes, then this isn’t the place for you. If you say no, you’d be happy but you want to see what's possible, now we have an avenue. I can’t make you anything that you’re not. I can give you a few more opportunities, see what else is there, maybe push you past your cap a little bit, but this isn’t a Division 1 factory. I'm not turning you from a player that isn’t playing college to a U-Sport player. I know I can boast that our women's program has a 100% offer rate. Every girl that comes through here gets an offer. Whether you take it or not, it's up to you, but everyone. The comment that bristles me a little bit is that “well why did you go to Edge, you could have gone there out of highschool”. Like okay, but there's also somebody trying to check to see if there are more possibilities for them. I think another part is the kid that’s going there to redshirt, if he comes here, probably not redshirting anymore, or the kid that was 7th might move up to start his first year.