City of Basketball Love

Zach Drapkin (@ZachDrapkin)
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John Giannini was supposed to be a sports psychologist.

The man now in his 13th year as La Salle’s head coach had already earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at North Central College and was working towards a master’s in physical education with a specialization in sports psychology at the University of North Texas.

His career was all laid out.

“I wanted to be a great sports psychologist. I had no idea that I’d ever want to be a coach.” Giannini said. “But I just couldn’t imagine life without basketball.”

So, the Chicago, Ill. native decided to meet with Tommy Newman, then North Texas’s head coach, and was offered a job as a graduate assistant, which he accepted.

After completing his master’s, Giannini of course couldn’t go without a third degree, so he decided to work toward a doctorate in kinesiology with a specialization in sports psychology at the University of Illinois.

“Illinois at the time had the best sports psychology program in the world, so that was where you really wanted to be,” he said. “So I got accepted there, and then I recruited for Coach [Lou] Henson a few years and that worked out.”

While Giannini was a graduate assistant under Henson in 1989, the Illini went 31-5 in regular season play and made the Final Four. The next year, Giannini took his first head coaching job at Division III Rowan.

“At that time, Division III coaches taught and coached, and that’s what I thought I’d do for 40 years,” Giannini said. “It went too well. We ended up going to Final Fours and winning national championships, and the plan got screwed up.”

Giannini amassed a 168-38 record with Rowan, reaching two Final Fours before winning a D-III National Championship in 1996.

Leaving the program with the highest winning percentage of all active NCAA coaches, Giannini accepted the head coaching position at D-I Maine. After eight years with the Black Bears, he was hired by La Salle, where he is now one of only two active Division I coaches with a doctorate.

On Wednesday night, Giannini’s Explorers went head-to-head against Lehigh, whose coach happens to be the other of the two doctorate-holding coaches, Brett Reed.

Reed, now in his 10th year as Lehigh’s head coach, received his Ph.D. in instructional technology with a cognate in sports administration from Wayne State University in 2003 after earning a bachelor’s in literature from Eckerd College and a master’s from Wayne State.

By that time, Reed, a native of Waterford, Mich., had already been an assistant coach at High Point, UNC-Greensboro, and Oakland Community College, and was in his second year as an assistant coach for the Mountain Hawks.

He was named Lehigh’s head coach in 2007, and has accumulated two Patriot League championships since. As a head coach, he’s developed talents like Portland Trail Blazers superstar C.J. McCollum and current two-time defending Patriot League Player of the Year Tim Kempton.

Reed believes that part of his success can be attributed to the tools he acquired through continuing his education.

“I apply some of those things that I had learned by studying how people learn, the best way to instruct, the best way to teach, the best way to improve performance,” Reed said. “To some degree, we’ve seen some application of that while being a coach at Lehigh University, and hopefully our student-athletes have benefitted from it.”

Both coaches have substantial talent on hand this season and made for a great matchup. La Salle took the ‘W’ at home, 89-81, after leading by double-digits for the majority of the second half, but Reed’s side did give Giannini and the Explorers a scare near the end, cutting the deficit to four with 15 seconds left on the clock.

“Ultimately, when it’s all said and done, Jordan Price and Tim Kempton–all those guys–they were the ones who were making the plays,” Reed said. “I’m sure both myself and John were trying to put our players in the best position possible for them to play to their strengths.”

Giannini and Reed agreed after the game that pitting doctor versus doctor did not make it any more of a chess match. Simply said, basketball is a lot less complicated than earning a doctorate.

“We both now went from him worrying about computer science and me worrying about human behavior to making more baskets than someone else,” Giannini said.

“We’ve dumbed down a lot.”