Posted on | April 2, 2013 | Comments
New Cal Baptist men’s basketball coach Rick Croy. (Staff photo: Stan Lim)
One of the proudest guys in the room stood at the very back Tuesday afternoon, when Cal Baptist introduced Rick Croy as the 12th men’s basketball coach in the school’s history.
John Masi was beaming, and why not? He has reason to be proud. Croy’s coaching odyssey began with Masi 14 seasons ago, when the then-UC Riverside coach brought in the former San Francisco State forward as a graduate assistant coach.
Croy spent two years at UCR as a grad assistant and, after a year at Irvine Concordia, three years as Masi’s lead assistant. He has since added to a diverse resume with five seasons and a state championship at Citrus JC, and three seasons at Saint Mary’s in a program that has become a March Madness regular.
But when Croy returned to Riverside, it should be no surprise that one of his first calls went to his first boss. Nor should it be a surprise that Masi (left) is now going to find himself back in the business, as a member of Croy’s first Cal Baptist staff.
“Mary (his wife) said, ‘Am I going to be a basketball wife again?’ ” Masi said. “I said, ‘No, not totally. But we’re going to be back involved, yes we are.”
They do have grandkids to fuss over, after all, so this won’t be a full immersion back into the college hoops life. But Masi will do a good amount of on-floor coaching.
“His lead role is grandparent, and he’s made that very clear, so he won’t be the lead assistant,” Croy said. “But he’s going to be with us in practice every day, and that’s the commitment he’s given me. He’s in a different place, so I don’t want to inundate him with recruiting and things like that. I want him to help shape our team.”
And he’ll be a wise old head that Croy can bounce things off of. A Yoda, in other words.
“Yeah, he’s our Yoda,” Croy said. “He’s our Jedi Master.”
Masi actually was one of four mentors that Croy saluted in his first appearance as Cal Baptist’s coach. He also mentioned Frank Allocco, who was his coach at Walnut Creek Northgate High School and who notched his 600th career victory this past season while coaching Concord De La Salle. And he mentioned Ken Ammann, the coach at Concordia, and his most recent boss, Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett.
Allocco was a father figure, Croy said, coming into his life at a time when his dad had passed away. “He’s probably the reason I wanted to get into coaching,” he said.
Ammann, he said, helped him reconnect with his Christian faith. And from Bennett, for whom Croy worked the last three years, he said he learned about not only building a successful program but establishing a connection between the team and community as well as creating the belief in what Croy called “unlimited potential.”
Masi, he said, “was the first coach to say, ‘Hey, Rick, I believe in you as a college coach.’ He brought me down as a graduate assistant to UC Riverside, and I fell in love with the city. His friends, our boosters, our alumni and players embraced me as a young coach, and I’ll never forget that.
” … He gave me a lot of freedom, but I was also able to watch and learn from him, from the way he leads. If you just hang with him you may not know it, but in between the lines or in the gym he’s an intense competitor, and I love that about Coach Masi. We’re similar as competitors, and it gave me confidence to lead that way.
“The other thing I appreciated about Coach when I worked for him was that it didn’t dominate his life. Everyone in our program knew what kind of competitor he was, but we also knew he was a runner, he was a golfer, he was a dad. That wasn’t lost on any of us.”
Croy, who turns 36 in July, has grown considerably as a coach thanks to five seasons of running a program at Citrus and three seasons of experience trying to topple Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference.
“All new experiences, especially when they’re positive ones, help you grow — all of them,” Masi said. “I told Randy (Bennett), he’s a complete coach. He’s not just an on-the-floor guy, not just a recruiter, not just a guy who gets along with the guys. He can do it all. And now he’s enhanced by the success he had at Saint Mary’s. He’s going to take all of those experiences and fit them into what’s going on here at Cal Baptist.”
There is also this: There are no longer hard feelings between Masi and his people and UC Riverside, though I suspect it will still be a long time before Stan Morrison gets a Christmas card from any of them. Yet when Croy talked about energizing the community and getting people involved … well, even though we’re talking Division II and Division I programs, Cal Baptist and UCR could find themselves competing for many of those same uncommitted basketball fans.
“The reality of it is that to get people excited, you have to win,” Croy said. “Our first focus will be on recruiting guys who really want to be here, and then I think once the program displays a winning culture, people will jump in.”
This should be fun.
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http://blog.pe.com/jim-alexander/2013/04/02/cal-baptist-croys-hiring-lures-ex-ucr-coach-masi-back/
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