City of Basketball Love

Kevin Cooney (@KevinCooney)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2021-22 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 9. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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There were times last season when you could forgive Aaron McKie if he looked up and wondered if the sky was falling. And yet, when he was asked about the stop-and-start nature of five different COVID pauses and several heartbreaking defeats, the third-year Temple head coach was reflective on the bigger situation involved with the lives of his players.

“During adverse times, it’s a negative situation,” McKie said. “But you can learn and you can grow from it. And the main thing I learned was keeping the guys together — keeping them together mentally and understanding life. You aren’t always dealt the best hand, but if you are dealt a bad hand — play it out and let’s see what happens. That’s what I explained to my guys all summer and through the season — we’re going to play every day as if. As if could mean we are playing, we aren’t playing, but let’s stay mentally there. We were teaching those guys how to pivot and move.”
At that point, McKie wasn’t reciting chalk talk and basketball logic. He has a bigger concern than anything on the court with the Owls.

“What I’m afraid of — and not just with my program, but regular students — if something like the pandemic happened again, how would they handle it? You look around and you see there’s a lot of mental health issues in our society. It’s serious business. It’s one of the main issues and you have to keep taking the pulse on it.”

When you closed your eyes and heard McKie’s words, you could almost hear the sage advice that his mentor John Chaney would have handed down. In that sense, McKie’s the best man who could lead the Temple program through the most uncertain waters that it has gone through since Chaney’s arrival in 1982.

This year, Temple was picked to finish eighth in the AAC’s preseason poll. Khalif Battle returns after his solid freshman season, but there’s a lot of Owls that need to grow up if they are going to be a factor in any post-season conversation. But McKie is one who is going to stress the positives — and that’s about where the Owls are at this point, looking for hope.

“We had two freshmen and played a lot of young guys last year,” McKie said. “I take the positive out of that is they got a little experience — traveling with us, seeing college arenas even if they did or didn’t have fans. There was a sense of normalcy, but they were able to get the feeling of pace or physicality. And that’s something we can build with.”

For Temple, these have not been easy days. After making the NCAA Tournament 23 times in 30 seasons from 1983-84 to 2012-13 — all of that time while in the Atlantic Ten — the Owls have two NCAA berths since joining the American Athletic Conference in 2013-14. The American — for all of its flaws and potential recruiting pitfalls for a program like Temple — certainly isn’t a slouch, either. Houston went to the Final Four to become the second American team behind UConn’s 2014 title run to crash the party. Memphis could also make some serious noise this season out of the American.

“Our conference is a grown man’s conference,” McKie said. “You get experienced teams with great coaches, experienced coaches. You have transfers and guys who have been around basketball for a long time and they have chips on their shoulders. That’s what you run into in our conference. We were young last year and we had a lot of young and inexperienced guys. Hopefully, that experience helps us this year.”

Perhaps the biggest person who could experience growth in this year is McKie himself. The pandemic certainly had its own challenges and a number of veteran coaches seemed to flounder with it. (Hell, Kentucky and Duke both missed the tournament with Hall of Fame coaches.) But for McKie – who has still to be considered learning as a head coach to this point- it is a bigger challenge.

“It has been fractured seasons every year for me,” McKie said. “The first year, we go to the conference championship tournament and it gets cancelled because of COVID-19 (in March 2020.) Obviously, everything we went through last year. But you want to keep getting better as a coach. There’s always room for growth and I keep studying myself as a mentor. Hopefully, that’s the case.”