As he departs Lebanon Valley, Brad McAlester savors victories great & small

By the end of his first collegiate semester, Dan Hogan had had enough.

He was doing OK academically at Lebanon Valley College – maybe not as well as he had back at West Scranton High School, but good enough. Otherwise he was floundering – wracked by homesickness, struggling to fit in on campus and unable to find his footing as a newcomer to the men’s basketball team. 

So he made up his mind to transfer. Maybe, he figured, he would give up the game completely – just go to Penn State or Temple or someplace and concentrate on the books.

But as far as the young forward was concerned, he was out the door. Annville was just not the place for him.

He met with coach Brad McAlester and laid it all out for him. How unhappy he was. How he was better off walking away.

And by Hogan’s recollection, McAlester said the following: “No, I’m not letting you do that.”

The younger man, taken aback, reminded his coach that it was really not his choice.

“It was a bit of an argument,” Hogan said in a recent phone interview.

McAlester then cut to the heart of the matter, telling Hogan that it just wouldn’t be right for him to turn tail – that this was a moment in his young life “that’s going to determine who you want to be.”

“Do you want to fold when it gets tough,” McAlester asked him, “or do you want to figure it out?”

Hogan stayed, and became a fixture on a team that topped out at 20-7 his junior year. He graduated in 2006 as the ninth all-time leading rebounder in program history, and remains among the top 15 in that category. Now 42, he just finished his 19th year as a middle-school history teacher in the North Pocono School District. He also served as head girls’ basketball coach for a time.

He’s convinced that that long-ago pow-wow with McAlester changed his life. Without it, he said, “I don’t think I’d be the type of person I am today.”

And looking back, the impact was immediate.

“That was, I think, a really pivotal part in my journey in college,” Hogan said, “and I think that was a pivotal part in my relationship with Coach. That’s a big part of why I still have so much respect for him.”

32 years, 438 wins at LVC

McAlester, who recently retired after 32 years at LVC, remembers little about his meeting with Hogan. 

“I had those conversations with a lot of guys,” he said, “because I push guys, and he’s the kind of guy I can push.”

Suffice it to say, though, that this is the essence of coaching. Getting the best out of each and every guy. Molding them into the best versions of themselves. The wins and losses are what they are, and McAlester, 73, went 438-388 during his time in Annville, making him the winningest coach in program history, as well as the longest-tenured. There is also a certain symmetry to his career, in that the Dutchmen finished .500 or better 16 times on his watch, and below the break-even mark on an equal number of occasions.

But on a micro level, the victories were harder to track. The idea was always to find a way to push a guy’s buttons, to help each player reach his potential. And well, that’s a pass-fail proposition, a test that’s tough to ace.

“I tell my guys all the time, your parents and your friends tell you what you want to know,” he said. “I tell you what you need to know. Don’t take it personally.”

Brad Karli, an assistant under McAlester the last nine years, drew a parallel between him and retired Elizabethtown College coach Bob Schlosser, under whom Karli also served as an assistant for nine years, earlier in his career. (Karli, a Cedar Crest graduate, played point guard for Schlosser as well.)

Both, Karli said, have “old-school, hardnosed, say-it-how-it-is personalities.”

“But also sympathetic, right?” Karli added quickly. “Coach McAlester had a huge heart for these kids. He always has.”

Following a national championship team

McAlester arrived in Annville in 1994, after 13 years as an assistant coach, the last 12 at Division I. At LVC, he was presented with a good-news, bad-news situation – good, because he still had All-American guard Mike Rhoades and some other key guys back from a team that won a national championship under Pat Flannery the year before, and yet bad, because it was a tough act to follow.

But as he would tell Hogan years later, you don’t back down from a challenge. And he fully embraced that one.

“I might have pushed them too much in the beginning – preseason and all that stuff,” McAlester said. “I said, ‘I’ve got to make sure you guys want to win. You won the national championship. Now what are you going to do?’”

There was an accent on conditioning work early on – ‘’crazy conditioning,” Rhoades, now the coach at Penn State, said in a recent phone interview. McAlester ran his guys on the track, ran them uphill and through the cemetery that abuts campus, ran them just about everywhere. Some of them bristled – they just wanted to get in the gym and hoop, same as always – but he wasn’t about to back off.

“I always felt like we sorta felt each other out early on,” Rhoades said.

In time the veterans came to realize that their new coach really wasn’t all that different from them – that he was just as competitive, just as driven. Rhoades believes things really fell into place after Christmas, and the Dutchmen would win the MAC and again qualify for the NCAA Tournament. That they fell to hot-shooting Goucher in the first round, leaving them 23-5, hardly dampened the mood. It had been a good year, a satisfying year.

“A coaching change is not easy for anybody – the coach, the players,” said Rhoades, who has held four head-coaching jobs over 22 years. “It’s not always a smooth transition, but what I do remember is that over time you drop your guard, and we all had the same purpose: We wanted to get better, and we wanted to put the team together that was going to go win. And we did that.”

Not just a stepping stone

What needs to be understood about McAlester at that point in his career is that he wasn’t wedded to the idea of staying in Annville. As mentioned he had been in the big time, rising from an assistant’s job at Division III SUNY-Oneonta to similar posts at Division I Manhattan, Monmouth, Iona, and Siena. He had also been a finalist for the head-coaching jobs at two other D1 schools, Hofstra and West Point, only to see those positions go to Jay Wright and Dino Gaudio, respectively.

So at first he viewed Lebanon Valley as a stepping stone, nothing more.

“I figured I’ll stay here three, four, five years,” he said, “and like all guys, I’m going to bump up and conquer the world.”

Yeah, well, funny thing about that – he and his wife AnneMarie settled in Hummelstown, had two sons and before they knew it, three decades had passed.

“I think the area really sold us, too,” Brad said. “When there were some Division I jobs opening, it’s like, ‘Do I want to move to Buffalo? Do I want to move to Toledo?’ … Great places to visit. I don’t know if I want to live there.”

It didn’t take much prodding during a recent sit-down interview to get him to reflect on the totality of his journey. About how he played every sport growing up in Hyde Park, New York (think FDR); even rowed crew on the Hudson. Then he hooped at Long Island University-Southampton, a school that no longer exists. The team advanced to the Division II Elite Eight his freshman year, where it ran into a Tennessee State squad featuring future NBA players Truck Robinson and Lloyd Neal; so much for that. And McAlester’s senior year (1974-75), he was team MVP.

He worked for UPS out of college, while living with four other guys in a converted barn near King of Prussia. Basketball remained in the back of his mind, though; he became a regular at Big Five games. And when the 1981 Final Four was staged in the old Spectrum in Philadelphia, he scalped a ticket and sat up in the nosebleed seats.

It just so happened that SUNY-Oneonta coach Don Flewelling had a seat nearby. They got to talking, and McAlester told him he was interested in coaching. Flewelling happened to have an opening for an assistant. Only paid $1,000 a year, though.

McAlester took it anyway. He slept in an extra bedroom at Flewelling’s house, worked odd jobs, worked summer camps. And after spending the 1981-82 season there, he moved on to Manhattan for four years … then Monmouth for one … Iona for two … and Siena for five.

Five jobs in 13 years. He could have continued as an assistant at Marquette, after Siena coach Mike Deane took the job there, but opted to strike out on his own. Which is how he landed in Annville. And against all odds he never left.

2018 title at Albright stands among highlights

He’s proud of his longevity, and relishes the high points. One that he mentioned was winning the 2018 MAC championship at Albright on a last-second 3-pointer by Ricky Bugg – how his guys executed a play to get star guard Sam Light a triple, only to see Light miss. But Caleb Barwin snagged the offensive rebound – “I always tell him, probably the first of your career,” McAlester joked – and teed up Bugg.

Afterward Barwin asked McAlester if they were going to cut down the nets at both ends of the floor.

“We’re at Albright,” McAlester told him. “If they put the side hoops down, we’re cutting the nets down on those. We’re not leaving until they tell us we’ve got to go. It’s Albright. They would feel the same way about us.”

By the end of his tenure, he knew it was time to go. He had some health issues, not the least of which was a bone-on-bone situation in his left knee that resulted in replacement surgery a month or two ago. The hassles of the job became harder to ignore, and the losses (of which there were many in recent years) continued to sting.

So he walked away. Nobody could blame him. Nobody could say he was turning tail, as he told Dan Hogan, all those years ago. It was just time. He leaves behind a promising young core for new coach Matt Miller, and all the little day-to-day pleasures – the smell of the gym, the squeak of sneakers, etc.

He also leaves behind all those little victories. The ones only a precious few know about. The ones that were hardest to come by, and in the end meant the most.