Character Counts

CHARACTER COUNTS with Michael Josephson:
Cinderella Story: Basketball Coach Proves That Character Counts 665.3
You’ve got to love the Butler University story, the Cinderella team that fell only a few inches short of winning the 2010 NCAA national basketball championship against Duke, a perennial high achiever during March Madness. Maybe David and Goliath is a better metaphor.
Butler’s coach Brad Stevens, 33, was only 3 years old when Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski began his coaching career. Hardly anyone knew Brad Stevens’s name before the tournament while Krzyzewski has been famous for decades. Stevens makes $350,000 per year (still more than the university’s president), but that’s only a fourth of what Coach K earns.
What I really love is that his success is based on intelligence, determination, and good character. Without any credentials to speak of, he left an early corporate job to start a career as a coach.
The son of a physician and a college professor, he was a solid but unspectacular player at DePauw University where he was a three-time Academic All-American nominee. Like Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke team, his players have a graduation rate in excess of 90 percent.
This is significant in lieu of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s recent lambasting of the NCAA for the fact that 25 percent of teams in the 2009 tournament graduated fewer than 40 percent of their players. “If you can’t graduate two out of five of your players,” he declared at the annual NCAA convention, “what are they doing at your university?”
Stevens’s calm, positive coaching style reminds many of another Indiana-born coach, John Wooden.
This season was no flash in the pan, though. In fact, Stevens has begun to accumulate one of the most successful coaching records in college basketball, winning 86 percent of the 104 games he’s coached at Butler.
Kudos to Coach Stevens for proving that character counts. And kudos to the whole Butler team for a great game and a great season.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.