They have a sale going on right now for $1/mon for the next 6 months, so I pulled the trigger. Can't imagine it's worth $8/mon after that, and they have multiple offers out right now - $1/week when I looked it up on mobile - so that seems pretty shady. Regardless, here's the article for anyone else interested:
My First Year: Texas State’s Terrence Johnson — from sixth-grade teacher to Sun Belt coach of the year
First-year players and first-year head coaches may think they’re ready for everything college basketball and a new program will throw at them. Then reality hits.
So again this offseason, The Athletic will check in with select freshmen and head coaches about their first year — the things they learned in Year 1 that will shape Year 2 and beyond. Next up: Texas State’s Terrence “T.J.” Johnson, who was promoted to interim head coach in September when Danny Kaspar resigned after being accused of making racially insensitive remarks. Johnson guided the Bobcats to the Sun Belt regular-season title and won league coach of the year honors before being having the interim tag removed on March 11. It has been a meteoric rise for a guy who just six years ago was a middle school teacher and a grassroots coach.
I understand that you were officially made full-time head coach the same day you received your Sun Belt coach of the year award. What was that day like?
Yep, that’s right. It was a pretty good day. As the kids say, top five.
Let’s go back to September. Kaspar resigns, there’s a lot of controversy and hurt feelings, and suddenly you find yourself as a first-time head coach in this situation and in the middle of a pandemic. How much of a whirlwind was that?
That was definitely a whirlwind. I think that’s the exact term I’d use to describe it. I’ve always said that God has always blessed me with everything that I’ve ever wanted. The only problem with that is that many times it didn’t seem that way to me, because there were times where I wasn’t ready to receive it. So what I wanted to do was put myself in the position where I could be ready to receive some of the blessings that I felt like were being bestowed upon me. So I just needed to get my affairs in order. I needed to put myself in a position where I could have tunnel vision, put myself in a position where I didn’t have to live with regrets. I needed to be purposeful and intentional about my actions, and I needed to just find some kind of way to have enough trust and belief in myself that I could do whatever it is that I needed to do to be successful.
I understand that for your first three days, you brought in a psychologist to talk to the players. Can you tell me about that?
I actually went across campus and asked one of our school’s social workers and a psychologist, Dr. Hillary Jones, to come over here. She wanted initially to do it over Zoom. And I said, with all due respect, and I know it’s a pandemic, but we’ll do all we can to be properly spaced. Our guys will have on their masks, and we’re all being tested. We’ll find a large enough space. We actually used the (basketball) floor. That’s where it all starts and ends. She put our guys in a large circle, and she provided a safe and supportive environment for them to express themselves, and to be heard and to hear.
What did you feel like your guys needed at that time?
They needed a safe and supportive environment, because young men don’t like to speak about their fears. All of them had fears, but they felt no one was listening to their fears. So, for instance, anybody that I recruited, they felt like, hey, now I’m going to have my chance to be the player that I always thought I could be. Because they probably felt like the former head coach held them back. And then the guys that were not recruited by me probably felt like, oh, so what’s going to happen now? And then you had some other guys who said, well what if T.J. doesn’t win enough games and they get rid of him next year? I’ll be on my third coach in three years. So it was just a lot of emotions. We went from being a team that was primed to win a championship, off a 21-win season, to being a fragmented group.
From a basketball standpoint, you get the job about two months before the season starts. So do you try to put your own staple on the style of play, or do you try to keep things fairly similar to what they were?
That’s a great question. In 2019, the New York Knicks had an interim head coach named Mike Miller. Well, he was the former coach at Texas State. And he just called me out of the blue one day. I don’t even know how he got my number. He said, I just want to congratulate you and if I could offer you any advice, I’ve been in this position before. And he says, I told our guys that some things are going to change because I’m not the former head coach. Some things are going to stay the same. But at the end of the day, you know, this is basketball and we’re here to do the best that we can with what we have.
I basically took what he said and ran with it. I sometimes speak in parables. So when I first met with the guys, I said this is like NASCAR. Danny built a hell of a car. Listen, we have some really nice drivers in here. I’m not trying to change the drivers, and I’m not trying to rebuild the car. It’s a pit stop. I’m trying to recharge you guys and refuel you, and I’m trying to change these tires so we can stay on track.
If you think that everything should change, then I question where you’ve been the last couple of years. If you think that everything should stay the same, then I question where you want to go in the next couple of years. So that’s how it went.
A common theme in this series is that first-time head coaches are surprised by just how many things are now on their plates compared to being an assistant. Was that the case for you?
Oh, yeah, my plate has been full since September. I have to stop spending so much time in the office. Sometimes I’m here too late, trying to get things off my plate. It’s tough to do, because when you’re in the office, you just have random people stopping by and interrupting things. So you’re almost looking for somewhere to hide. But yeah, it’s a lot. You can clearly see why you need an operations manager and why you need a very good staff. You need self-starters, you need honest people, you need loyal people that are competent and pay close attention to detail. If I had to do it all over again, I know what I need more than I did the last time I hired. As I get older and I get a little bit more acclimated, I’ll have a better feel of what fits me.
You guys improved from 253rd in the country in 3-point shooting the previous season to sixth, despite having a lot of the same players. How did you do that?
I think the first thing that needs to happen for people to get better is the belief that work matters. And I don’t really think a team can get better without an individual getting better. So we focus a little bit more on player development, working on some of these guys’ shots. We tweaked them just a little bit, but also gave them the freedom to shoot it and then gave them the confidence to shoot it. Then the second thing we focused on in the preseason was, one more pass. Just make one more pass, pass up a good shot for a great shot, just not settling. We were also a little bit more intentional about film, and because we played weekend back-to-back games (in conference), I refused to practice on Saturday mornings. We slept in, and then we watched film on Saturday morning. I told them, don’t let film catch you not being a good teammate. Don’t let film catch you not being in good shape. Don’t let film catch you not being a good decision-maker. So they knew that for an hour on Saturday morning, we were going to be watching what happened last night. And I think they wanted to play the right way.
You get to the last week of the season with a conference title on the line, and then you test positive for COVID-19 and can’t be with the team. How did you navigate that?
I have the ultimate amount of respect for (associate head) coach Bennie Seltzer. He’s a friend of mine. I think he’s a heck of a coach, and I know the pedigree he has from playing for and coaching with Kelvin Sampson. So I was not worried that our guys were not going to be prepared. I was just worried that our guys were not going to be confident. Because Bennie was still learning them. And I speak life into our guys. I make them believe that they can do all things if they stick together.
So my biggest fear was that we were going to get in a situation where they were going to look at that sideline and just not see me. It’s not what I do; it’s what I get them to believe that they’re capable of doing. What I needed to do was get my staff on board with being as detailed-oriented as I am so that we raised our level of practice. I had my staff send me our practice film every single day. I still typed up practice. I still watched practice, and after that we’d Zoom and watch practice together, and I’d evaluate my staff and my players. And then after about two practices, I let it go. Because I knew I would nit-pick and nit-pick and we wouldn’t get anywhere. But at least my staff and my players knew that they were still being held accountable.
There were times when this virus was winning. It was beating me up a little bit. I had a different symptom almost every day. I also have a low white blood cell count, so it was a little bit of a fight. But I exercised every day. My guys were like, you took your medicine today right, Coach? What time are you going walking? They knew my routine.
It was exciting to see them celebrate the win at Arkansas State. That was a key victory. Then once they got that monkey off their back, I knew there was no way that we were going to lose our final two games at home.
When the team clinched the conference title, you drove up in your car with the windows up and they celebrated around you. That clip made the rounds on social media. What was that moment like?
That was probably the most emotional day. First of all, that was the toughest day I had with COVID. I didn’t have a fever, but I had nausea that day, and that was the worst symptom I had. (Guard) Mason Harrell calls me and says he wants me to cut the nets down with him, so I said take me up there. So he has me on video, and while he’s doing that, I said, why I am here (at home)? I need to be somewhere around that arena. So when he handed the phone back to Bennie, I said, yo, I’m pulling up. He said, really? You know you can’t get out of your car. I said, I’m not going to get out, but you’ve got to find a way to bring the guys out here. I need to see them. I need to be able to share this moment with them, some kind of way. So he was like, just pull up in the loading dock.
It was very spontaneous. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But man, that was unreal. It sent chills through my body.
What’s one thing you tried this year that you thought would work but didn’t?
The funniest thing is this. The last three years in working for Kaspar, he put in this ball-screen motion offense that we call 41. And he’d scrap it every year, right around conference time. I mean, just scraps it. This year I was hell bent on running 41. I was always like, DK doesn’t give it a chance. I’m going to show them how to run it. So we’re repping it and repping it, and I mean, we know it like the back of our hands. And I don’t know if we had one possession of 41 in conference play. (Laughs.) At the end of the season, I told our staff, I know one thing: You can take 41 out of the playbook. We are not even wasting time running that any more. Now I know why DK didn’t run it.
What’s one thing you tried that you thought was successful?
Just listening. What I mean by that is, I probably practiced these guys a little bit too long, because I was trying to compensate for inexperience with preparation. But you know what? Preparation takes time. And there’s only so much time in the day. We were practicing too long. So what I started doing is just believing that our guys were going to instinctively be able to do some things, because we had repped them for so long. Like some of the stuff, we had been doing since June. You don’t have to do it in every practice. You can come back to it every two weeks or so. And so one of the things that I think worked out is, I started listening to my players a little bit about their bodies and practice times, and I started trusting them a little bit more in the huddle to give input. And because I trusted them, they wanted to prove themselves as trustworthy. So they did things on the floor that fit what I envisioned for our program and our team.
What’s one thing you hope to do now that you’ll have a full and more normal offseason?
We didn’t get up and down a lot (Texas State ranked 354th in adjusted tempo, per KenPom.com). I felt like I overcoached a little bit, as far as controlling things too much. Our execution on ATOs was high. We controlled the tempo, we executed it well in the half-court. So those things are good. But at the same time, I want our guys to trust themselves and their ability a little bit. So we’re going to get up and down and compete a little bit more. And then we’re probably going to extend our defense a little bit more. But we’re only going to do that if we can successfully teach rotations. Danny was never a big fan of extending the defense. So I want to be able to teach rotations, because that’s essentially what you’re going to do, is put yourself in rotations.
Your path to this point is unusual. You didn’t play college basketball. You thought you might be a dentist after graduation. You taught high school and middle school and worked for FEMA after Hurricane Katrina. Do you ever stop and think about how amazing this all is?
Yeah, it’s definitely amazing. I don’t know if there’s a better word to describe it than amazing. But I will say this: Sometimes you’ve just got to do what you enjoy. Coming from generations and generations of poverty and not understanding how to make certain decisions along the way that could change your life in an instant. My parents always implored us to go to school, to make good grades, to go to college. At the same time, sometimes you go to college and still don’t know what you’re going for. After college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I just started teaching. But what made teaching fun was just the interactions with young people and getting them to believe in themselves.
The basketball piece became therapy for me. When I was at St. Bernard High School (outside of New Orleans), the teaching stuff was challenging, but it was always rewarding because I got the keys to the gym. And then I just said, you know what, I can teach, and I can teach the game of basketball. So I started teaching the game of basketball like I taught in the classroom.
I did have a very different route. At the end of the day, it just makes for a good story. A very unique story.
You were really teaching sixth grade six years ago?
Yeah, in 2015, I was teaching at Caleb Middle School (outside of Houston), and I was coaching Texas Pro AAU. It doesn’t seem that long ago.
And now you’re the Sun Belt coach of the year.
Isn’t that something?
