For more than 2 1/2 years, Mike Rice had receded into the shadows after Rutgers fired him because of a scandal that wrecked his coaching career and turned him into a pariah.
Last Wednesday, in an empty gymnasium 5 miles from the arena Rice once called home, there was plenty of evidence of how far he had fallen — and of how he was trying to build himself up. In his first head-coaching job since his firing at Rutgers, Rice walked the sideline as the interim basketball coach at the Patrick School, a parochial high school powerhouse in New Jersey.
Gray sweatpants and a striped green overshirt replaced his sharp black suits. The only cameras present were two hand-held devices operated by onlookers from the sidelines. The question, though, was not whether Rice’s surroundings had changed, but whether he had. On the sideline at St. Joseph High School in Metuchen during a preseason scrimmage, Rice looked much the same. He was vocal and lively, and his perpetually hoarse voice carried beyond the closed doors of the gym. For an hour he paced back and forth, screaming instructions and his occasional displeasures — but no profanities.
The only subject of controversy was the setting of the scrimmage. The game was closed to the public at the direction of the Patrick School. The dozen or so people who had come to watch were left looking through a sliver of a window on each door locking the entrance. Jim Carr, a Rhode Island assistant coach, had to sprint to an open door before it closed. Jerry Smith, the St. Joseph athletic director, said it was the first time he could remember such a thing in a dozen years.
Rice declined to talk after the scrimmage, passing on the opportunity until the start of the school’s schedule this month.
“I’m going to do interviews when we start games,” he said. “We’re going to kind of focus on us now.
“We’d love to, but right now I’m going to focus on our guys.”
For Rice, 46, it was an admission of the scrutiny that follows him as he tries to revive his career. In his third year at Rutgers, video became public that showed him hurling basketballs at his players during practice and shouting profanities and homophobic slurs. The university fired him shortly afterward.
In the intervening years, he has tried to restore himself and his image. As part of his rehabilitation he worked with John Lucas, a former NBA star who now runs a counseling center. Rice joined the Hoop Group, a popular basketball camp and clinic, as an instructor and embedded himself in the high school basketball ecosystem. He ran drills and workouts for Bob Hurley, the renowned coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, at Hurley’s basketball camp last summer. Rice also became a trainer for young players across the state.
His success in that last role was partly responsible for persuading Chris Chavannes to bring him on at the Patrick School. Chavannes is the school’s basketball coach and its principal, and he approached Rice about the opportunity. Chavannes had talked with college coaches about Rice, and he noted that there had been no incidents in his work as a trainer. Hurley endorsed his return. The parents of a student at the school had hired Rice to work with one of their other children, Chavannes said.
Last weekend he named Rice the interim coach for the month, allowing Chavannes to focus on other projects as the principal. He will keep Rice on the staff as an assistant after the school term.
“He’s a phenomenal mind,” Chavannes said. Noting the chances that Rice had been given recently by players and their parents, Chavannes added, “I didn’t see why we couldn’t give him the opportunity.”
At the first practice, in the school’s student center, Rice talked to the players about his past, Chavannes said. Rice detailed what had happened at Rutgers, as well as the treatment he was going through. Chavannes said that no parents had pushed back against Rice’s hiring and that he had seen nothing questionable in practice so far.
In the empty gym, Rice was not quite the manic figure he had cut at Rutgers Athletic Center, but he was still vigorous. At one point, he walked from the team’s bench to the basket and, as the teams played on, stood under it to prove a point of an error made on the previous possession. At another point, he grabbed a player on the bench by the wrist and directed him to the scorer’s table.
But on the way out, after the scrimmage had ended and he was walking back to his car, Rice stopped to laugh at himself as a photographer snapped pictures.
“You’re not going to get me smiling, guys,” he said. “It’s better to get me yelling.”
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