A highly detailed journey for Tech's Gregory

Back in western Ohio, some snarky Dayton students hung a message in the cold breeze concerning their view of Gregory’s potential. Spray painted in gold on a bed sheet was “Atlanta Weather: Sunny With A Chance Of NIT.”

Certainly, there are uncomfortable truths around the hire. Like the fact that over the past eight years, Tech’s new basketball coach has made the NCAA tournament half as often (twice) as the coach the school just jettisoned. Or that Gregory springboards into this job off an eighth-place finish in the Atlantic 10 Conference, a season so unfulfilling that, at its conclusion, two of his top freshmen announced they were leaving the program.

OK, there, all that’s up front. Now, know this much: When the day comes — and it will, as it does with all coaches — that you have a quibble with Gregory over his half-court offense or his whirlwind substitution pattern or the progress of his players, you better come prepared. Because Gregory will be.

An attention to detail

There were times when J.D. Grigsby had questions. He’s the uncle of Dayton’s leading scorer and rebounder, senior Chris Wright.

“I felt I was close enough to B.G. to ask him things,” said Grigsby, referring to the coach in the informal way that everyone around the Dayton program did. Things like why wasn’t a certain player getting more playing time, or why another wasn’t starting or why wasn’t his nephew on the court every minute?

“And B.G. always said, ‘No problem, you can ask me that.’ Then he took out his books and he ate me alive,” Grigsby said with a chuckle.

Those “books” were files on each player, at least six inches thick, Grigsby said, filled with every percentage, every tendency, every game and practice movement of the young man in question.

Meticulous is one of the real go-to adjectives applied to the new guy on The Flats.

“I’m a detail guy because I believe it’s the smaller details that play such a big part in not only a team’s success but also an individual’s success,” he said last week. “There are no random, haphazard decisions being made.” As a way of spreading his devotion to detail, he challenges his players to keep their own logs on their progress, too.

Gregory immediately gave the impression of a guy who couldn’t be outworked or outflanked. “One of the smartest assistants I ever had, his native intelligence was way up the charts,” said former Michigan State coach Jud Heathcote, who initially brought Gregory aboard in 1990 as a graduate assistant.

When Gregory was being considered for the Dayton job in 2003, another of his former bosses, Kevin O’Neill (now at USC), told the Flyers’ athletic director, “If you interview him, it’s over. You’ll hire him.” O’Neill knew that, by the time the interview came, Gregory would have researched the Dayton program down to the number of basketballs it had in storage.

Once he was entrenched at Dayton, a standing joke began circulating about Gregory’s prep work before meetings with the administration. The Flyers’ former athletic director, Ted Kissell, now retired, routinely ribbed him that “If he ever put me in position where I needed to discipline him, I’d take away his magic markers.”

Gregory would show up with several pages of printed notes, highlighted in different colors according to topic and priority. His wife, Yvette, still teases him about how he keeps his precious color pens lined up so neatly at the ready.

This sort of obsessive organization bleeds into his life outside the gym. Gregory blames it, in part, on the one season he spent at the U.S. Naval Academy (1985, playing with David Robinson). He still rolls up his socks in a precise military manner and folds his clothes as if an inspection were imminent.

The odd thing about the Naval Academy experience was that, rather than build on his initial desire to join the strict world of the Marines, it made him burn to become a coach. And that was going to become considerably more difficult once the military commitment kicked in. After one year, Navy coach Paul Evans, seeing how sincere Gregory’s affection for basketball was, helped him transfer to Oakland (Mich.) University.

“I loved the military aspect of things; I thought I had a chance to be a very good officer,” Gregory said. “But sometimes, when even you’re doing something you love, there is something else out there you really have a passion for. I gained so much respect and excitement watching Paul Evans and the way he was able to mold a team within a bigger team.”

He likely would have made a fine Marine, for another oft-repeated adjective tossed his way is intense.

Height doesn’t matter

Intense is the way that small guys can be, especially those who make their living in a world of giants. Because of his boy’s size, Jerry Gregory always tried to steer his son toward baseball, but the kid couldn’t be turned.

You gotta be tough to hang as a short guy in this venue. His size — 5 feet 8 — made Gregory an easy target when Dayton played at its fiercest rival, Xavier. Rowdy fans would blow up photos of the little character in the Austin Powers movies, Mini-Me, and superimpose Gregory’s face. They’d produce a height chart, marked just south of 6 feet, with the admonition, “You Must Be At Least This Tall To Win Here.”

Even his own players could get in on the act. Before a home game with Xavier two years ago, looking to inspire his players, Gregory burst into the locker room wearing boxing gear, throwing air punches to the accompaniment of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” Something to loosen up his team. It worked; the Flyers beat on Xavier like a dusty rug. Asked afterward how his coach looked in the getup, Wright joked, “like a midget with a hood on.”

After all that, you figure he should be able to handle anything that Duke’s Cameron Crazies throw at him. “Is anybody ready for that? If anybody is, yeah, I am,” Gregory said.

While there was nothing he could do about his stature — “I’m the tallest Gregory in the family tree; that tells you that height was not in the genes” — he could play every game at 90 mph. And then, as he fleshed out a coaching style, he could outwork every other Type A sonofagun out there.

Also, the confidence he developed in himself came in handy with Yvette. He was a Michigan State grad assistant, making $4,000 a year, when he went back home in Chicago on spring break. She was a Wisconsin undergraduate, also back home for the weekend. At the end of their first date, Gregory informed her that she was the woman he would marry.

“The next day, she was heading back to go to school. I stopped by her house to see her and make sure she knew that [marriage] was going to happen,” Gregory said.

“And five years later it did.”

Overcoming difficulties

The Tech job presents Gregory with a new frontier. He is obliged to learn the recruiting pathways of the Southeast as well as to shore up a fan base that eroded in the final years of Paul Hewitt. Tech administrators heard enough stories about Gregory’s drive and his attention to detail that they felt he could tackle those challenges. They also liked this stat: Every senior who played for Gregory at Dayton — 23 total — got his degree.

Yellow Jackets athletic director Dan Radakovich particularly liked the story about Gregory beginning each season by going to the homes of a few randomly selected fans to hand-deliver their season tickets.

Here’s another one from Pete Luongo, a member of the University of Dayton’s board of trustees. When he asked Gregory to serve as a spokesman for a United Way campaign, the coach said his schedule probably would allow him to do five events. “He wound up doing about 15,” Luongo said. “Every time we asked him to do another, he’d say, ‘Are you serious?’ And then said, ‘OK then.’”

“He’s going to connect with our people because he’s genuine,” Radakovich said. “That’s who he is. It’s not a chore for him or Yvette to do that.”

And, despite the loudest of his Dayton critics, Gregory is not without on-court credentials. Though his teams made the NCAA tournament only once in the past four years, the Flyers have won 20 or more games in each of those seasons. Dayton beat North Carolina for the NIT title a year ago and has a 13-4 record against BCS-level teams the past four years. In Gregory’s best season at Dayton, 2007-08, he beat No. 6 Pitt and No. 11 Louisville and advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament.

This past season was difficult, the chemistry problems on the team bubbling over when freshmen guards Juwan Staten and Brandon Spearman, two of Gregory’s prized recruits, decided to take their talents elsewhere.

“Probably a lot of coaches out there that would take a 22-win difficult season,” Gregory said. “You’ve got to put things in perspective a little bit.”

Perspective is difficult to come by in his world. And opinions on Gregory’s performance at Dayton are all over the lot.

“His offense was horrible, and he didn’t develop players. A lot of people were sad to see him go, but I’m not one of them,” said Dayton season-ticket holder Peter Zierolf, described in the Dayton Daily News as one the coach’s biggest critics.

“He put great kids on the floor, and we played our butts off,” Luongo said. “Did we win as many games this year as we wanted? No. But guess what? Sometimes the chemistry is just not there.

“I think Brian is going to do really well at Tech. He is going to recruit a better athlete. With his offense and his defense, the way he coaches, I think it is really going to bode well for those guys.”

Speaking as someone who didn’t always agree with Gregory’s handling of the team and his nephew, Grigsby said he maintains a great deal of respect for the man. His last communication with the coach was through a text message. In it, as Grigsby remembers, Gregory said how sorry he was that he couldn’t get Wright to the NCAAs in his final year.

“That was huge,” Grigsby said. “At the end, he was saying he was truly sorry, that he felt he had let us down. That text took me to another level on how I feel about him.”

The intense, meticulous coach is tough enough to show a vulnerable side, too.