$12,000 a year and loving it
I think…
Here I was in San Francisco with a job, but no money. I needed to find a paying job FAST to enable me to focus on my real job…Volunteer Assistant Basketball Coach @ San Francisco State University. At the time, that was the greatest job title I could ever want.
It was August 1982 and I was lucky enough to land an Athletic Director’s job at a small private high school, Bridgemont High, in downtown San Francisco. With an enrollment of only 60+ students I was offered $12,000 a year which included double duty as the Physical Education teacher. My teaching job was a joke because the school was located in the old Cogswell College building with NO facilities for P.E.
By now, I had already spent a few weeks with my “new dad”, Coach Wilson. His ingenuity and creativity had started to rub off on me, so I came up with the idea of holding PE class in the streets of San Francisco. (Yeah I know, but I was creative 😎) “Brilliant” I thought. I could send the students off each period running amongst traffic, hookers and pimps and I could spend the hour working on my career as a college basketball coach. I put the plan into action and my bosses at Bridgemont “loved my assertiveness and drive”. (Wonder what they’d have thought if they knew I spent the day in my studio apartment down the street, making recruiting calls and writing letters to recruits all over the city while Johnny, Bobby and Stan were being educated by Miss Pussy Galore and company in alleys all over San Francisco.)
I WAS SET! I had the perfect paying job to fund my real job…which was to learn EVERYTHING I could from Coach Wilson. AND I DID!
Coach Wilson was different. He looked at everything from a different angle than most people. I learned that and grasped onto it from day one. It was like I had “found home”. HE made sense and so did EVERY crazy idea he had. I wasn’t about to suggest things or new ideas for his program, but I sure as hell did as Athletic Director at BHS. And as it turned out, the ideas I got from him and used as Athletic Director got me recognized in the city and helped my career as a coach over the next 5 years.
The basketball program at BHS was pathetic. NO, I MEAN REALLY PATHETIC! So, once again, I decided to channel Coach Wilson’s energy and creative thinking to turn BHS into a power! At least it would appear that way from the outside looking in. I went down to Macy’s at Union Square and finagled a manager to give me a male mannequin for Bridgemont Athletics. I walked it up a number of steep hills in San Francisco to BHS. (All the while explaining to police I didn’t steal it). I got a basketball uniform, went out to the front of Cogswell College, put that damn uniform on the mannequin with a huge banner I had my students make that read, “Bridgemont Basketball, We Float Like a Butterfly and Sting Like a Bee!” Not real original, but it got the job done. A sports reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle drove by it one day and stopped. He interviewed me and ended up writing a two page spread on me and our “big time program”. An eight inch picture of my ugly mug ended up on Page 3 of the sports section. That article would be instrumental in me landing my first full time gig as an assistant basketball coach in the near future.
I learned many things the day that article came out. First and foremost, Coach Wilson was a genius and I would soak up every last detail of what he was willing to teach me. (It was his idea to use the mannequin to put in front of the gymnasium at SFSU to promote our home games) and second, creating a facade when building a program is #1. It is the exact concept I used when I landed at Westwind Prep. IT WORKED!
My time at Bridgemont High would last only one year as my coaching career got a huge kick start in the spring of 1983. But more on that later…….
By the way, I only lost one student my entire year at Bridgemont. We never did find him!
