They form an uncommon, unacknowledged fraternity on ACC sidelines

Sons of prominent coaches, each remembers a childhood steeped in basketball, serving for years as a ballboy at an arena where his father worked. Each speaks fondly of evenings spent shagging rebounds during warmups for great players whose names readily roll off the tongue, names like Jordan and Bias and Sampson, or of haunting team functions and visitors’ benches to soak in what they could.

“I’ve been in the gym since I could walk,” says Chris Collins, 33, in his eighth season as an assistant coach at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski. “I’ve loved it, too. It wasn’t forced on me.” The 1986 Duke grad was seven when Doug Collins finished playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. He grew up watching his father coach in the NBA at Detroit and Chicago.

The trio of limelight-savvy ACC assistant coaches each recall vividly the thrill of approaching the arena on game day at their fathers’ sides, reveling in the intensity and challenge of what was to come.

“I was very fortunate to be in that type of environment, to have the access,” says Chuck Driesell, 45, in his second year as Gary Williams’ assistant at Maryland. Driesell had the additional opportunity of playing at College Park for his father, Lefty Driesell, from 1982-85.

Known as “Chuckie” in his playing days, the younger Driesell is best remembered for a last-gasp play in January 1983 at UNC’s Carmichael Auditorium. “I still remember the huddle, and coach telling us what to do,” he says of his dad, forced out at Maryland after Len Bias’ death in 1986.

The play was designed to free guard Adrian Branch, the Terrapins’ leading scorer at 18.7 points per game. Driesell was the fourth option as the Terps inbounded the ball.

Suddenly, what seemed an unobstructed path to the basket yawned before Driesell as the Tar Heel defense concentrated elsewhere. But, in an instant, as the shooting guard drove for the winning basket, here came Michael Jordan and Sam Perkins to block Driesell’s shot. The ball drifted out of bounds and time expired on a 72-71 North Carolina victory.

“Coach Smith knew the play, apparently,” Driesell said an hour before the Terps upset this year’s Tar Heels at the Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center.

Collins, by contrast, loved talking basketball with his dad, but avoided his tutelage. “Because of the father-son relationship, it was always hard for me to accept coaching from him because I was so sensitive about it,” he says.

Oddly, for all their professed love of the game, all the exposure in their formative years, the ACC’s chips-off-the-old-block insist they had no intention of following in their fathers’ footsteps.

“In fact, it was probably the opposite,” says Ryan Odom, 33, in his fifth season on Seth Greenberg’s staff at Virginia Tech. “I was pretty adamant I wasn’t going to do it. Coaching is a hard profession – a lot of travel, a lot of time being away from your family. Not seeing your dad a lot was tough. It would have been nice to see him around a little bit more.”

Odom’s formative years are calibrated according to his father’s coaching stops. He was born in Durham in 1974 while G. David Odom was head coach at Durham High School. Then it was on to Wake Forest, where Dave Odom assisted Carl Tacy for three seasons (1977-79). His younger son recalls “neighborhood things more than basketball” from that brief stay in Winston-Salem.

His father moved on to an unsuccessful, 3-year stint as head coach at East Carolina (1980-82), and a 7-season tenure as a UVa assistant under Terry Holland that steeped sons Lane and Ryan in Cavalier basketball. “We were lucky,” Ryan Odom says. “ACC basketball, Ralph Sampson all the way to Bryant Stith and John Crotty and those guys, people in between.”

Finally, at age 47, Dave Odom got an ACC head coaching job, returning to Wake for a dozen seasons. Ryan Odom soon went off to college at Hampden-Sydney, then drifted into coaching under various of his father’s friends and former associates.

Nowadays, few college coaches start their careers as Dave Odom did -- teaching high school classes, taking care of players, seeing that uniforms get cleaned and floors lined and polished. “When I was coaching high school, half the guys didn’t eat if I didn’t take them home with me,” Maryland’s Williams recalls of his time at Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, New Jersey.

Younger assistants such as Collins, Odom, and half the other denizens of ACC staffs, go directly from playing careers into college or pro coaching. “I think you miss something,” Williams says. “I might be old-school. When you’re a high school coach, you really get a chance to coach your team.”

Williams has lasted longer at Maryland than most – of 50 men who became head coaches since the ACC was founded, including those currently on league benches, he is among 14 with tenures lasting at least a decade. So are Odom and Driesell. Williams is in his 19th year at his alma mater. Krzyzewski has been at Duke for 28 seasons.

But long tenures may also be a thing of the past. With more riding on victory, fans, monied boosters, media members, and athletics administrators are increasingly impatient.

The elder Odom was eased out at Wake Forest and landed at South Carolina, formerly an ACC outpost. His Gamecocks earned at least 20 wins in four of his first five seasons, won two NIT titles, and reached the NCAAs in 2004. But last year produced a losing record, and the current squad has struggled.

Faced with speculation about his job status, dwindling crowds at home games in Columbia, boos and chants of “Go, Dave, go!”, Odom announced on Jan. 18 he would retire at season’s end. He concludes a 43-year coaching career with two seasons left on his contract, more than 400 major-college victories, and a passel of friends.

Odom, 65, denied critics had forced his hand. Yet he conceded, “Take me out of the equation, the voices of dissent can now use their energy in total support of our basketball team.”

Ryan Odom says evenly that the unhappy ending “is what it is nowadays. It’s just how it goes.” His father had been thinking of retirement “a little bit,” but only decided earlier this month that the time had come.

“It’s sad and cool at the same time,” Ryan Odom notes. “He’s put a lot into basketball and given us a good life.” Now his father can spend more time with family and friends, playing tennis, visiting the beach.

Don’t be surprised if Dave Odom, an inveterate talker and astute observer, surfaces as a TV analyst, a college version of the NBA's Doug Collins.

Watching your father’s very public rejection is unfortunately another unifying experience amongst members of the ACC’s uncommon assistant coaching fraternity.

Odom’s situation reminds Chris Collins of the summer day in 1989 when, riding a bicycle home from his high school gym, he saw news trucks and “tons of people at my house.” That gathering, and the barrage of questions launched his way, was how the ninth-grader learned his father had been fired by the Chicago Bulls, a team he’d built from losers into a nascent NBA dynasty with Michael Jordan, Horace Grant, and Scottie Pippen.

“People don’t realize it’s always hardest on the families, because it’s such a public thing,” Collins says of a coach’s firing. “It really hardened me. You get more thick-skinned when you go through it. Especially me now as a coach.”