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Monday, June 4, 2007 1:09 AM CDT
Mattoon's new head man working 'night and day'
BY Brian Nielsen Sports Editor
bnielsen@jg-tc.com
Brooks Inman’s first workouts with his Mattoon High School boys’ basketball team are this week, giving the new coach a break from his homework.
“I’ve really been working on developing a handbook for the whole program,” Inman said. “It’s night and day, a binder for every coach. I’m going to keep working on it.”
When his eyes get tired of drawing plays, writing philosophies or whatever else goes into that handbook on a summer day when others might prefer golf or a cookout, Inman probably looks up at a reminder to keep working.
He came home from one conversation and wrote down some comments to use as his pep talk.
Some friends or detractors are saying it to his face and other times he hears second hand that last month he took a dead end job at age 23, that he will never be able to win at basketball in Mattoon, which went 0-22 the past season and has not had a winning record since 1991-92.
“I have an article framed,” Inman said. “I’m not going to say which one but you can probably figure it out. All that stuff is motivation for me. Everyone has an opinion and I accept that. I’m just going to work my butt off to be successful.”
Not all the comments have been discouraging.
Inman said he had a good time in a Thursday reception with the public at Rural King.
Some of the questions were similar to the barber shop scene in the movie “Hoosiers” when someone asked new Hickory coach Norman Dale whether he planned to play man-to-man or zone defense and the rest of the shop went silent looking for his answer.
Unlike in the movie, Mattoon’s new coach gives an answer.
“Zone,” Inman said. “We’re going to play zone. It’s something to where you say in the Big 12, what can make us successful.
“Every team in the Big 12 plays man to man. Why not change up? When they come to play us, they’ll have to do something different. We’ll be more used to playing it than teams will be playing against it.”
So from sixth grade through varsity, Inman is looking to install a zone defense that might be an equalizer against more athletic players the Wave will likely face by high school.
That is likely to be some of the emphasis in this week’s high school team camp.
“It’s basically a week of practice,” Inman said. “With the 25 contact days we can do that and we’ll use them all.”
The new coach also plans to take his high school players to a Greenville College team camp and shootout tournaments at Jerseyville and Illinois College with other events perhaps to be scheduled.
The trick, of course, is getting his basketball prospects into basketball gyms in the summer when Mattoon is used to emphasizing baseball and football.
Inman is trying to accommodate multi-sport athletes.
His camp times are scheduled around a soccer camp run by Ryan Ghere, Mattoon’s head soccer coach as well as a basketball assistant.
He has a time for non-football players to come to the gym and shoot and then another time for football players after their weightlifting workout.
He said maybe his biggest challenge was finding times to work in basketball for guys playing legion baseball and a show of hands recently indicated that several of his players had those conflicts.
So what kind of off-season commitments are Inman receiving from these basketball players who also play another sport or two?
“I’m going to find out next week,” he said Friday.
Whether this attempt at reviving Mattoon basketball works or not is still to be determined with no answer to be revealed soon.
But if a coach’s enthusiasm can make the difference, that should not be lacking.
“I started to give a little speech at Rural King and didn’t know if I was going to take a charge or dive for a loose ball,” Inman said. “That’s how I get when I start talking basketball.”
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Why Not wrote on Jun 4, 2007 5:02 PM: