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Family gives Legler lens into AAU world

05/27/2014, 6:30pm EDT
By Garrett Miley & Josh Verlin

Garrett Miley (@GWMiley) &
Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)

For Tim Legler, merely coaching an AAU team isn’t enough to fuel his competitive spirit.

Not for the self-described “biggest gym rat ever.” Not for the kid from Richmond who, despite going undrafted out of La Salle, still managed to carve out a 10-year NBA career thanks to hard work, determination–oh yeah, and a sweet jump shot.

So at the end of each South Jersey Jazz practice, Legler divides his group of 14-and 15-year-old ninth graders into two teams. Then the 47-year-old retired ballplayer and television personality slips on a pinnie of his own, running right alongside his players as they put into practice the different skills they’ve worked on over the last hour.

One particular Wednesday afternoon, things started off rough for Legler, who actually airballed his first shot attempt of the evening. But then the 3-point specialist started knocking down shots, though he only shot when left open and spent most of his time on the court giving instructions, praise and critique alike.

It’s just like the rest of the Jazz’s practice, where Legler is not just running drills but getting involved in them as well. He’ll take shots alongside his players, body them up in the post, throw passes their way–whatever it takes to make them better basketball players.

“It’s really competitive, it’s fun, he understands the game a lot better than most coaches that I’ve ever played with,” said Joe O’Brien, a Roman Catholic forward who joined the program this spring.

Under Legler’s leadership, the South Jersey Jazz have become one of the more successful 15U teams around in the first few spring tournaments. They made it into the quarterfinals of both the Spring Jam Fest and Pitt Jam Fest–where they lost to the eventual champions, MCB Elite, a Miami-based team consisting of players that Legler said were “freshmen somewhere in Miami, but they were 6-8 and 6-9 on the front line with guards as big as me.”

The other three tournaments that the Jazz have played in they’ve won, including the New Jersey Jam Fest’s 15U title on May 18.

“You definitely get your competitive fix now through this,” Legler said.

Of course, there are much better rewards than just going out on the practice court and running alongside his group of 15-year-olds.

It might not be quite the same as winning an NBA game or the league’s 3-point shooting contest like Legler did back in 1996, but guiding his team to tournament win after tournament win is certainly under the umbrella of success.

And just because it’s different doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel as good.

“Really, what it’s about for me is going to these tournaments, beating teams, moving on to stay in the winner’s bracket,” he said, “because you know what that ultimately means–you’re going to play better teams, you’re going to play teams that coaches are going to be coming to see kids on those teams too, and then my kids benefit.”

~~~

The purpose of AAU basketball at an early age is to keep young players in the game year-round and continue developing skills, and while they kids are young there is a much smaller gap between the skill level of most players. It isn’t until the later years, like the 15U level if not a year or two before, where players truly begin to gain significant size and separate their games from other players.

Legler’s South Jersey Jazz team is finally at the level where individual players will begin to attract attention from colleges, making the stage they play on that much more important. Playing in major tournaments against prestigious teams with high profile talent is great for exposure, but often the style of play suffers because of a lot of one-on-one play.

However, Legler’s focus with the team is still on making his players learn the game and run well orchestrated plays on both end.

“It’s 100 percent about trying to help these kids become the best high school player they can be first, and then hopefully beyond that,” he said. “But first, let’s see if we can turn you into a really good high school player and do the things that you need to work on to get better. And we do it by playing together–running sets, sharing the ball, paying for each other and we are an outstanding half-court, man-to-man team because we coach it the right way.”

At practice, Legler sections off the left side of the court into a five foot wide lane and challenges his guards to bring the ball up the floor against the press in the tight window. Darien McKay, one of the players Legler has coached since they were nine, picks the pocket of another player in the lane around mid-court.

The half-court man that Legler instills in his team gives them a huge edge against other teams in the AAU circuit, but more importantly translates well at the next level.

Because competition at the high school level is growing ever more intense, players and their parents do nearly everything in their power to give themselves a competitive advantage.

Re-classifying, the repeating of one grade and then taking a year of prep school before college, has become extremely popular and can give teams unfair advantages, especially at ages where players are just beginning to grow and mature. It’s not a strategy Legler is fond of, though he understands there are positives and negatives to the scene.

“The fact that coaches can now sit in the gym and watch a couple hundred kids in a weekend, the opportunity is phenomenal, and that’s the great things about it,” Legler said. “I get disheartened sometimes with the reclassifications and older kids playing, they’re a year and a half, two years older than kids that are in the same grade and they’re playing as if they’re in the grade, yeah that bothers me a little bit.”

~~~

While he’s at the practice gym at Gloucester County Institute of Technology, Legler is not just both coach and player simultaneously, but there’s a third role he’s playing as well.

The whole reason that he’s coaching this group is because of his son, Ryan Legler, the younger of his two children and a shooting guard on the team.

“I started it just for [my son] because he loved the game and was really good at that age and there’s no competition down at the shore,” he said. “That’s really why I started it. I said ‘I’ve got to get you against better players if you’re going to ever really develop. You can’t just play against these kids year-round down here.’ So, that’s how I really thought about it.”

It’s because of Ryan that Legler splits his time between ESPN’s Bristol, Conn. studios and his southern New Jersey home, giving him a travel schedule that would give most college coaches on the recruiting trail a run for their money.

“My wife will be the first to tell you how brutal it is for me this time of year because being an NBA analyst, this is the busiest time of the year, the most high-profile time of the season for us because we’re now into the conference finals,” he said. “The finals are coming up in a couple weeks, the draft is right after that.

“So in addition to my three-to-four day a week duties at ESPN, pretty much as soon as I come home, I fly back and land at the airport–a lot of nights, whatever night I come home I’m headed literally straight to the gym in my suit that I was just on TV with three hours earlier and I’m changing in the locker room and putting on my practice clothes on, and I’m going out there and I’m coaching a couple practices a week. And then weekends, obviously, we are traveling all over the place playing tournaments.”

Legler gave his employer a lot of credit for helping him manage his busy schedule, calling the network “phenomenal” in terms of understanding how important it was for him to have the flexibility to be not just a basketball expert but a family man as well.

Of course, with a coach who’s on national television multiple times per day–as the lead analyst on the biggest sports network for the top basketball league in the world–the Jazz sometimes have more to deal with than just their coach’s hectic schedule.

“I think one of the toughest things is sometimes when I walk in the gym and I’ve gotten pretty bad heckling from the other bench, referees, there’s no question I’ve run into officials that are going to try to prove something to me, it’s unfair to my kids,” Legler said. “That kind of stuff, I get that 3-4 times per year and that bothers me a lot, obviously, because I’m so competitive, and you’re not even giving us a chance right now. Yeah, I get that sometimes for the most part though, I think people really respect our team when they see us play, and they see what we can do and then that stuff goes away.”

Legler’s reputation has had a positive effect on his ability to recruit players to his team, however. He’s got a very solid group together that’s going to compete against (and has already beaten some of) the Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas-backed programs that generally dominate the AAU circuits nowadays.

He’s got a few good, potential Division I prospects like scoring guards Myles Cale (2017/Appoquinimink) and Walter Harvey (2017/St. Augustine Prep), productive big men in O’Brien (2017/Roman Catholic) and Paul Brown (2018/Salesianum) and a few solid role players like 3-point specialist Nick Amechi (2017/St. Augustine) and athletic forward Eric DiCrescenzo (2017/Haddonfield).

While 15U teams rarely receive much attention from Division I coaches at the live period events, save for maybe the semifinals and finals–often due to differing locations as much as the coaches focusing on the older age groups–soon enough Legler is going to start hearing from collegiate coaches who are interested in his players.

It’s quite a change from when Legler first got into the AAU world. And he might be setting himself up for another big change a few years from now.

~~~

If you had asked Legler six years ago when he was coaching a group of nine year olds if he would be winning AAU tournaments with the South Jersey Jazz, and have a group of potential Division I prospects on his roster he couldn’t have fathomed it.

“I was thinking one year and let’s see how this goes,” he said.

After never playing AAU himself, Legler wasn’t too well acquainted with the culture of the summer tournaments, camps and clinics that AAU now provides for kids. It was his daughter Lauren, who will be playing basketball next year at Division III McDaniel (Md.), who gave the former NBA player his first glimpse of what AAU is before he jumped into coaching his son’s team.

Legler began coaching his son’s team after fourth grade, originally under the Hoops Factory program, and though he had only planned to see coaching through for one year, the former La Salle star was pleased with the progress of his players and the progress he was making as a coach.

He returned year after year with the same core group of players, but it wasn’t until when he entered a tournament with his 12U team–then it its first year under the South Jersey Jazz banner after they joined the 15-year-old organization run by Jim Gulla–that things changed in Legler’s eyes.

“When they turned 12 we went down to nationals at Boo Williams and we did very well down there. We played DC Assault in our first game down at Boo Williams and I knew they had a huge reputation, they had big, athletic kids. They weren’t the greatest coached team and I kind of felt good that we would be able to run our stuff,” he said, “and we beat them.”

Fast forward to 2014, and Legler is leading a formidable 15U Jazz team that has victories over a handful of top-20 opponents. He has added and dropped players year after year, building a competitive yet cohesive group of basketball players. Currently, Legler has three players from his original Hoops Factory team on the South Jersey Jazz–a trio of guards including his son Ryan, Harvey and Clearview (N.J.) point guard Darien McKay.

Legler has dedicated a large portion of his life coaching his son and the rest of his group on the Jazz, but you have to think it’s a matter of when and not if the former NBA guard moves into the college coaching fraternity.

[Legler (right) gets involved i all aspects of the Jazz's practice, from post drills with Joe O'Brien (above) to taking shots during warmups. (Photo: Josh Verlin)]

Legler (right) gets involved i all aspects of the Jazz’s practice, from post drills with Joe O’Brien (above) to taking shots during warmups. (Photo: Josh Verlin)

“I have had opportunities to coach at the D-I level since I retired from the league, and wasn’t ready because when I first retired, I got divorced, my kids were five and two, I knew what that would entail, taking a coaching job–that’s really the biggest reason why I took the ESPN job, was the freedom of schedule, honestly, spending time with my kids and being there for them when they grew up,” he said. “It’s paid off in a big way, I have a great relationship with my children so I don’t regret it.

“I’m obviously going to see this through, this year and the next two, and then absolutely I would be very open and receptive to looking into coaching.”

The former La Salle guard would love to coach in the Big 5, and how could he not? He fully understands the rich history of basketball in Philadelphia, and the family man in him wants to stay in the mid-Atlantic area where he can be close to his daughter at McDaniel.

But for now, Legler is seeing the South Jersey Jazz through.

“My son is finishing his freshman year at Wildwood Catholic, so I don’t want to just go take a job at Texas El-Paso and not see my kids all year, that would be tough,” he said. “Obviously this year and the next two, so basically through my daughter’s sophomore year, I’ll still be doing this, I know for a fact. But when I do make the leap, yeah, I’ve been an East Coast guy my whole life except for playing in Dallas and Golden State, I’m an East Coast-based person, so it would be very difficult for me to just up and go.

“Not saying I wouldn’t, go to Miami or something, Phoenix, it wouldn’t be bad,” he added with a laugh.

We’ve seen many father-son coach-player relationships in college basketball over the years, with Doug McDermott and Ray McCallum Jr. joining their father’s programs at Creighton and Detroit, respectively, so it might not be out of the question to see a Legler legacy started at a college program a few years down the line.

It’s clear that Ryan and the rest of the South Jersey Jazz have already ignited Tim about his passion for coaching, wherever that leads down the line.

“It reaffirmed in my mind what I thought, was I think I can do this and now I’m convinced I could do it either D-I level–or who knows, maybe one day looking at an NBA opportunity,” he said. “But right now I’m way more interested in coaching college kids than I am coaching pros.”

~~~

Of course, first things first for both Tim and Ryan Legler. There are still three more high school seasons to get through, not to mention two seasons of AAU basketball–the two biggest summers of Ryan’s basketball career thus far, and certainly two big ones for his dad.

So while the AAU system might have its faults, there’s no doubt that on the whole, it’s been a positive experience for both generations of Leglers. It’s brought a father and son closer together, helped Tim discover his affinity for coaching and helped Ryan get enough extra court time to make his father jealous.

“I tell my son all the time, do you have any idea how lucky you are, you get to play an extra 50 to 60 games a year against really good players? Four games in a weekend?” Tim Legler asked. “That would have been my dream.”

Instead, Legler–a competitor, yes, but a father first–is living a dream of a different kind.


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