What happened and what has to happen

The adage that hindsight is 20/20, like most asphorisms, isn't always true. However, it's still important to try and determine at least of some of the aspects that went wrong under the previous San Jose State University coaching regime.

No, not to try and pillage past individuals, this undertaking is meant to be a constructive exercise, an attempt at learning if you will, so that a witnessing to undesirable history does not repeat itself.

That's because we all need to learn what works, refute what doesn't, support the implementation of best practices and raise Cain when witnessing a falling back into previous backpedaling.

What spurred this post are two articles written by Jason Belzer of Forbes. He wrote one, Why Butler Basketball Holds The Key To Organizational Success, back on February 7. His most recent sports related piece, Boise State Football And The Blueprint For Organizational Greatness, appeared on the fourth of this month.

An excerpt from the former:

"...Watch any Butler game and something becomes immediately clear – many of the players on the court are of the type that don’t score often, grab many rebounds or do anything else particularly well and whose statistics are, at best, average. Certainly they have had talented players on their roster, but none have been highly rated coming out of high school. Yet the Bulldogs time and again are able to match their athletically superior opponents shot for shot. It is the ultimate manifestation of system in which the whole far outweighs the sum of its parts..."

From the latter comes Head Coach Chris Petersen speaking:

“If you fall in love with talent, you’re making a big mistake. You have to fall in love with the person first and foremost because you can only change someone so much. We have to be mindful of falling into the trappings of looking for great [football] talent and instead go recruit an OKG [Our Kinda Guy] and make him a football player.”

Do read both articles now and then return as any attempt at summarizing them will fall incomplete.

Beyond saboteurs and that certainly doesn't apply here, nobody starts out with an intention to fail. It's all smiles and well wishes and a "let's get something going" mood. With the hiring of Coach Nessman, a sense of momentum was in the air.

The SJSU basketball program desperately needed a new and better culture and an honest and earnest attempt was made to achieve just that. Little by little, the team's APR, which at the beginning was moving southbound at the speed of Usain Bolt, did an about face. Basketball student-athletes started fulfilling both the roles of the former and the latter and ultimately that became the biggest achievement of the Nessman coaching staff.

A fresh start allowed the opportunity to call upon prospects and sell the opportunity of getting in on the ground floor. "Become part of the group that transformed Spartan basketball" was the selling point.

The best example: Ripon High talent Justin Graham bought in and climbed on to what was hopefully to become a bandwagon destined north.

But Graham excepted, what proved to be too many gambles, both in the areas of talent and willingness to become a we-not-I guy, were also taken.

And that proved deadly as the budding culture stagnated and eventually reverted.

Plus, there's no need to name names or recite chapter-and-verse but far too many Spartan recruits departed with or very close to the skills sets they entered Washington Square with and no program can succeed with that as its testimony.

Additionally, key talents never achieved -- if attempts were made in the first place -- the role of making their teammates more effective.

It was too much "me, me, me" as individual visions, some might say fantasies, of a play-for-pay future corrupted the collective present.

When the wins didn't arrive in the numbers necessary to add impetus alongside the momentum of newness, the program became stuck, containing nothing attractive and distinctive to offer to prospects. Enough of the right guys weren't interested in casting their respective lots in Silicon Valley so risky long shots became the signee norm and the situation became a familiar return to bringing in so-called mercenaries whose allegiance was primarily guided by their passion for Narcissus.

So now a new opportunity awaits SJSU basketball, one with Dave Wojcik as the leader.

Can he, where so many others haven failed, create a veritable band of brothers who can and will proudly display first and foremost their allegiance to one another?

A hopefully telling point is that Chris Petersen was an individual Coach Wojcik talked with prior to his acceptance of the position.

Time will tell as moving forward as one will be necessary because Spartan hoops cannot be successful without that critical element.

It's never going to be a matter of landing four and five star blue chippers here. Instead, it will be courting and landing those talented enough or with the promise of such who will buy into acting together, as a team, with a unified goal.

Creating such an atmosphere and then riding this 1+1=3 synergy to success is the sole route open and available for the San Jose State University program to travel.