Goodbye to a Good Guy

Originally, this post was going to be “Words to Live By, Part I,” and its inspiration was a John Wooden quote familiar to any student who has sat in my classroom in the last five years.

But when I read last night of Coach Jeff Bussey’s retirement, I realized that Coach Wooden would have to wait.

This past season was the first since 1995 that I wasn’t involved in the NCHS basketball program, but I was able to work with Jeff from the beginning of his tenure here; in fact, I was on the committee, with outgoing coach Frank Henderson and AD Vin Iovino, that hired Jeff in 2000. Hiring Jeff was a no-brainer. He knew the players, he had a plan for taking advantage of their skills for the following season, and he had a long-term plan for building the program as well.

I was always impressed by Jeff’s ability to simplify the game. The flaw for so many coaches is that they over-coach; they have ten options where two suffice, or they install multiple offenses that players can’t run effectively. Jeff knows that players win or lose games, and that the coach’s job is to put them in a position to get defensive rebounds and open shots.

Unless you’re on the inside, it’s hard to see how much goes into keeping things simple. When Jeff came here, he possessed a wealth of basketball knowledge thirty years in the making. Combine that with a relentless approach to scouting, and you end up winning FCIAC coach of the year twice in one decade.

How relentless was his scouting? Starting in December, Jeff and Joel Geriak, as well as freshman coaches Duncan Della Volpe and Kevin Faughnan, would start crisscrossing the state to scout teams that we might play in March during states. On Mondays and Thursdays during the season, practice would be dedicated to telling the players exactly how the next day’s opponent would punch, and how they would counterpunch. 

And if you ever wondered why the Rams’ timeouts or halftime sessions were so brief, it was because Coach Bussey was making a simple adjustment that had already been practiced.

But the thing I liked most about working with Jeff had nothing to do with scouting or strategy. I respected Jeff’s approach to the kids to whom he, in his words, “taught basketball.” In the ten seasons I worked with Jeff, he never made a decision that wasn’t focused on putting the team in the best position to win games, and never said a disrespectful word, even in private, about a player. A lot of people in the world of sports have a personal agenda, but not Jeff.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Just take a look at the number of players who come back every December to practice with the team, at the number of basketball alumni who fill the stands when colleges are out of session. Players who were stars come back, and so do players who didn’t play a whole lot, players from winning teams and players from teams whose records didn’t get to .500.

There are some excellent young players at NCHS who will be guided by a different voice in the gym next winter; I hope they don’t forget what they learned from the man whose vast knowledge of how to play the game allowed him to keep it simple.