Published: May 17, 2008 11:57 pm            

HUGH CONRAD | More than meets the eye

When trying to select a coach, athletic administrators never know if they have made the right choice.

Was Mike Tomlin the right pick for the Steelers? Was Dave Wannstadt the right guy to lead the Pitt Panthers?

When Dr. W. T. “Skip” Hughes was selected to coach at St. Francis in 1945, the Loretto school was taking a chance because Hughes was a dentist with little coaching experience, although he had played basketball at Pitt.

Despite his lack of coaching experience, Hughes built St. Francis into a nationally known competitor in the 1950s after recruiting Maurice Stokes.

Say this about the game plan used by St. Francis Athletic Director Bob Krimmel to select a new men’s basketball coach: It was a different approach than that used in recent years.

In fact, I had this question when I saw the coach at Lycoming on the list of interviewees: Why is St. Francis, an NCAA Division I college, interviewing the head coach of an NCAA Division III program?

Not only did Krimmel interview Don Friday, head coach at Lycoming, he also hired him earlier this week as the school’s 20th head coach.

What attracted Krimmel to Friday was the coach’s experience as an assistant coach to Pat Flannery at Bucknell University in Lewisburg and at Lebanon Valley College in Annville.

Lebanon Valley, Friday’s alma mater, is also a Division III program, and Flannery, with Friday as his assistant, led the college to the Division III national championship in 1994.

Friday has also proved himself as a head coach, winning almost 63 percent of his games at Lycoming in five years.

One person with some unique perspective on Friday’s hiring is former St. Francis Sports Information Director Pat Farabaugh, who served in a similar capacity at Bucknell when Friday was an assistant there to Flannery.

“I think Donnie has a good chance to succeed at St. Francis for a lot of reasons, but a couple of things from our time together at Bucknell stand out in my mind and lead me to believe that he can turn around the Flash,” said Farabaugh, who was at Bucknell from 1995 until 1999. “He worked a lot with the team’s defense at Bucknell, and we played very stingy man-to-man and match-up zone that won a lot of games. Those Bison teams wore down the opposition by playing good defense and it often led to easy scoring opportunities on the offensive end.

“The other reason I think Donnie will fare well at St. Francis is because he learned the ins and outs of the game from, in my opinion, one of the best coaches in all of college basketball. He was an assistant under Pat Flannery for 14 years – five at Lebanon Valley College and nine at Bucknell.

What Pat did at Bucknell is amazing, and he is Donnie’s mentor.”

Farabaugh is currently teaching journalism at IUP and is working to complete work on his Ph.D. in communications at Penn State.

Friday said on Wednesday that his experience with Flannery was fortuitous for him.

“It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” Friday said. “(Flannery) came to Lebanon Valley when I was a senior and had been a student assistant. He gave me the chance to be a college coach.”

So, Friday knows how to win.

Was this a good hire for St. Francis? No one ever knows for certain until a coach produces on the floor, but this was definitely a break from the past hiring process used by St. Francis.

The last three coaches hired by St. Francis – Bobby Jones, Tom McConnell and Jim Baron – were all assistant coaches at the Division I level. All of those hires looked good on paper, but only Baron succeeded. Jones won just 33 percent of his game over nine seasons and put together just one winning season.

In the past two years, Krimmel has had an opportunity to put his own mark on the Red Flash program, hiring Susan Robinson Fruchtl to lead the women’s team last year and Friday this year.

Now, the Red Flash fans are excited to see if these programs can turn around.



Hugh Conrad is a freelance writer who covers St. Francis for TheTribune-Democrat.

        

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