Legendary Springfield Basketball Coach Charlie Brock joins GoPlay Sports
GoPlay Sports are proud to announce that revered basketball coach and coach educator Charlie Brock has agreed to join us.
Brock, who retired from coaching in May 2022, will take up the position of Basketball Director and will be responsible for GoPlay’s ever-increasing basketball offering.
A giant of the game, Brock coached for 45 years and said it to was “a blessing to have had a job that for so many years felt like I never had to go to work”.
Brock coached for 24 years at Springfield College, the Birthplace of Basketball. He is the longest tenured and winningest men's basketball coach in program history. He is also one of just 14 coaches to coach at the famous college.
Among his many achievements, he has clocked up 586 career victories and took an unfancied Springfield to the NCAA Division III Championship Final Four in 2018.
For that feat he won the Glenn Robinson Award, which is presented to the top Division III coach in the nation.
‘Springfield College had icons’
In between house hunting in Florida, we caught up with Charlie and asked him about his career, retirement and new role with GoPlay.
And we started by asking Charlie about the honor of spending the majority of his career at the Home of Basketball.
“When I arrived, everyone knew more about basketball than me!” joked Brock.
“The President, the Vice-President, the finance guy, the guy that did the grounds, they all knew more about basketball than I did.
“It came with something different to just being a basketball coach. The way I try and assimilate that is, if you look back at the coaches they have had at Springfield they are icons.
“Presidents of the NABC - that was me, secretary editor of the rules, we had two of them, the person who put the three-point line and shot clock into the rules was a Springfield College Athletic Director.
“And when I took the job I tried best to follow in the footsteps of those that had come before me.
“There is a legacy in the Springfield Basketball family.”
As far as career highlights go, Brock has numerous, but his run to the NCAA final four just four years ago was high on his list.
“Going to the final four in 2018 was without doubt the highlight on my career and in the process you get the chance to cut down the net. And it’s one of the things in basketball like no other,” said Brock.
International travel
“And from an international standpoint I took my team to Japan to compete. That was an unbelievable trip that was organized by the Japanese YMCA. It was to celebrate 100 years of YMCA in Japan and Springfield College is very engrained in that.
“We played three games and it was an unbelievable experience for the kids.
“We took a trip to Costa Rica with you guys and we had a blast. The basketball was fun, we had one good game and one bad game, but it was a career highlight.
“I have also travelled to Estonia and Venezuela and the value of that was immense.
“Way back I traveled to Scandinavia and that was a great trip. And so some of the highlights of my career have been international travel with teams, no question.
“We also won some college championships, but the travel was brilliant.”
Brock has travelled extensively during his time coaching and he believes team travel has three facets.
“There’s three things. The experience of international travel and cultural exposure. Then there is the additional time you have together with your team. The NCAA allows you so many practises prior to your departure and then the practises and games while you are there,” said Brock.
“It could be a three-week window where a team might have no chance of been together and then they get the benefit of a trip like this.
“That is a Division III situation. Division I can do summer school and they can do individual work-outs, but they don’t get the opportunity to compete.
“The third thing is the educational value for the students and coaches of where we go. Whenever a student gets involved in a service enterprise it is a win win.
“The people you are servicing win and the people that doing the servicing win. “
‘Run it again’
After over 40 years in the game, Brock has picked up a considerable bank of knowledge and his experience is vast, but he says he never got away from the “fundamentals”.
Asked about the most valuable advice he has picked up along the way, he said: “It’s hard to narrow it down. If I was categorized it was that I was somewhat of an old-school coach. I did things they way they have always been done, not to say that I haven’t made changes in the process of coaching that worked out with kids and how they have changed,” said Brock.
“But I have never got away from the basics and fundamentals. The classic line that I think will be on my grave is ‘run it again’.
“When I retired I heard from a lot of people and from a some people I was shocked that they even wrote to me at all because I thought they could not stand me. But what most of them said was ‘thankyou for making us do what we did, I am a better man for it’.
“They hate you for the discipline at the time, but they grow as a result of it. I have never strayed from that belief that redundancy has value, discipline has value. And I learnt that from the people I worked for and with.”
“It is inherit upon us to make sure that the time we have with them we force them to focus.”
Brock acknowledged that changes in the game have also seen him make changes to his coaching.
“The biggest difference now is the distractions the kids have not to what they had 15 years ago.
“Fifteen years ago the iPhone was invented and from that day forward everything changed. There is a tremendous number of distractions for young people today and not in a good way,” said Brock.
“It is inherit upon us to make sure that the time we have with them we force them to focus. And we keep them from any of those distractions. And the successful teams buy in and eliminate those distractions in the process of their mission.
“The rules of the game of basketball have changed dramatically in basketball. The three-point line changed everything in 1986 and the shot clock was introduced in 1989 and those rules changed the way the game was played.
“What the NBA has done now is become a focus for entertainment and not always good basketball. And because all the kids see how the NBA players play, they try and emulate that and that is not necessarily the right way to play the game.
“A lot of kids don’t value what you are dong at the time. But just because the kids don’t value it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it that way.”
‘Communication’
“I don’t mean there is cruelty or abuse or verbal harassment, it’s the ‘run it again’ concept. That’s not the way we do it, ‘run it again’.
“I was never a yeller, don’t get me wrong I did raise my voice, but it was more actionable, ‘run it again’.
Asked about who he managed to communicate with his players, Brock said he continually re-evaluating during his career.
“They are all different and one form of communication does not work for all. As a coach you are trying to be flexible but firm and constantly re-evaluate.
“The way you have been able to communicate with a team maybe totally different the next year.
“That’s the way it is in teaching and coaching is teaching.”
The final-four team of 2018
Asked about his most memorable team, Brock pointed to his 2018 team, which were brutally’ defeated at the NCAA Tournament.
“The team that went to the final four in 2018. I actually coached at Trinity in San Antonio for 10 years from 1989 to 1998 and then went to Springfield. And I took my team back to play there against a coach who was a very good friend of mine and we played in a tournament.
“It was a travel opportunity and something we had to plan for because the expense was high. And we were awful, we were embarrassing. And I was wild. It turned out we had some really good players and that made it worse.
“We then took a holiday break over Christmas and when we came back we had a five or six days to practice before we started to play again and we changed some things.
“We changed some of the systems and we changed some of the positions of the players. And we went on a tear and lost about two games from January 1 until the end of the season.
“We then got in the NCAA tournament and were not thought to be a team that would make any noise. But we ended up winning the first round, then the sectional tournament, both of which were at the host site, who were the No.1 seed, to get us to the final four.
“But we lost our game in the semi-final. We had a five-point lead with 45 seconds left and they did what teams do - they fouled. We went to the line and missed two of them. We lost. It was brutal,” said Brock.