Radford coach living dream

Radford coach
living dream
Greenberg, 55, took long, winding path to mid-major post

RADFORD Radford's basketball players sat in their locker room before the most significant game of their careers and looked up at the blackboard, where coach Brad Greenberg had written one of his favorite quotes, from 19th-center philosopher Henry David Thoreau.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

"Hey, we all dreamed about this stuff," Greenberg said as the Highlanders prepared to play Virginia Military Institute in the Big South tournament final, an NCAA tournament spot on the line. "I'm not going to make it seem as though I'm too cool to say I didn't dream about this."

He always longed for this life, coaching his own team. Twenty-five years ago, "that's all I thought I was ever going to do."

But as he talked to his players, his brown hair had receded and grayed since those days, and at age 55, this was just his second season as a head coach -- a position he wanted so badly that he almost chased a high school job four years ago.

He traveled a winding path to this mid-major program, working as an NBA assistant and front-office employee from 1984 to 1997, building an NBA Finals team, drafting Allen Iverson, before circling back to college ball.

His methods as a head coach, and a well-read and curious man, were just as eclectic. He did yoga with his players. He compared their progress to making an acoustic guitar, after he read a book about the subject. He played a CD of Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson at a team meeting, finding a lesson in the album's first track.

"He showed us a different side of us we had never seen before," senior guard Kenny Thomas said. "He brought us into almost like a new world."

The Highlanders beat VMI, so their world expands to the NCAA tournament tomorrow, when, as No. 16 seed, they play No. 1 seed North Carolina in Greeensboro, N.C. Regardless of the outcome, Radford's progress under Greenberg legitimizes the potential he saw in this job when it opened in 2007.

He knew he needed to fine-tune the Highlanders' identity after they went 10-20 last season. "Aspirations aren't strategy," he told them when they reconvened this season, borrowing a phrase from Robert Blackwill, a former Iraq War adviser to the Bush administration, that appears in Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial."

The Highlanders had to play better defense, improve their ballhandling and throw the ball inside, their strongest area, with the arrival of Artsiom Parakhouski, a junior college transfer from Belarus. Greenberg constantly wrote those goals on the blackboard.

But he knew a well-mapped strategy might not fulfill aspirations. When he was 30, he figured he'd soon be a college head coach. He was an assistant at St. Joseph's when it came within a game of the 1981 Final Four. He interviewed for Division I head coaching jobs and thought Columbia would hire him in 1984.

After Columbia passed, Greenberg jumped to the NBA, becoming an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers under Jim Lynam, his mentor and coach at American University. In 1989, he moved into player personnel with the Portland Trail Blazers, who made the Finals in '90 and '92. Then, in '96, the big job: general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. That year, he drafted Iverson, a future Hall of Famer, but the Sixers fired Greenberg after just one season.

Now what? He stayed in Philadelphia, still getting paid by the Sixers, "just trying to figure out my life." He hoped another NBA front-office job would open for him. No luck. Should he return to coaching? But how? Or maybe quit basketball altogether? The disappointment of losing his job and uncertainty of his future weighed on him.

"I definitely had some moments where I needed to try to take care of myself better," he said. "That was a tough period for me. I wasn't in a great place."

One day, he went to an ashtanga yoga studio in his neighborhood. He tried it, ended up going three or four mornings a week for two years. He always left "walking taller than I did when walked in there," he said.

He stay involved in basketball: scouting, broadcasting, writing for NBA.com. He worked for a start-up company, HoopsTV.com. He was around, but out of sight. "I think he just dropped off the basketball map," said Jud Heathcote, Greenberg's longtime friend and the former Michigan State coach.

By 2001, Seth Greenberg saw his older brother needed a push. Seth, in his sixth year at South Florida, wanted to hire Brad as his director of basketball operations, and start his journey to a head coaching job. "Your roots were in coaching," Seth told Brad. "Follow your heart. That's what you always wanted to do. Why not chase your dream?"

Brad became Seth's top assistant when he moved to Virginia Tech in 2003. Within a couple years, Brad itched to be a head coach and considered a high school job in Boca Raton, Fla. "You're nuts," Seth said, urging him to wait for a better opportunity.

He got it with Radford. The new job let his daughter, Ali, finish high school in Blacksburg -- a priority for Greenberg, who is divorced, because his son, Cory, did not enjoy that luxury. Greenberg didn't even need to move out of his condo in downtown Blacksburg. He still gets his morning coffee and bagel at the same shop.

He brought his usual creativity to Radford. With the Blazers in the early'90s, he used computers to analyze players and keep records. "To me, he was way ahead of most organizations," said P.J. Carlesimo, the former Blazers coach and a friend of almost 30 years.

Last season, Greenberg introduced the Highlanders to yoga. Before this season, his assistant Rick Hall gave him a book about guitar maker Wayne Henderson. Greenberg read it he reads while working out on an elliptical machine and relayed an anecdote to his players: Someone asked Henderson how he makes a great guitar. Find a fantastic piece of Brazilian rosewood, and cut away everything that ain't a guitar, he replied.

"How do you make a good basketball team?" Greenberg asked his players. "You get rid of everything that isn't good basketball."

In November, after the Highlanders lost by two at Virginia, Greenberg brought a CD to a team meeting and let the players, feeling quite confident, listen to Wynton and Willie's live version of "Bright Lights, Big City": Bright lights, big city/Gone to my baby's head -- the inherent warning obvious.

After some of these odd lessons, Greenberg asks Hall, "You think they got that?"

"They think I'm crazy sometimes," Greenberg said at his favorite coffee shop last week. Before he headed to work -- with the front page of the newspaper tucked under his arm, the sports section left behind on a table -- he talked about his future aspirations by quoting his friend Bruce Hornsby's song "Jacob's Ladder": All I want from tomorrow is to get it better than today/Step by step, one by one, higher and higher.

"I don't look too far ahead," Greenberg said. "Right now, I appreciate where we are."