By Joe Scalzo | scalzo@vindy.com
The phone call that changed Jerry Slocum’s life came in October of 1975 when he was a 22-year-old in his second full month as a special education teacher at Lakeland High School in Shrub Oak, N.Y.
Although Slocum had played college basketball at The King’s College in New York City, the former all-state quarterback had just started his coaching career as Lakeland’s offensive coordinator for the football team.
Then, in mid-October, Nyack (N.Y.) College, an NAIA school about 30 minutes north of NYC, fired its basketball coach and needed to hire a new one. Fast.
“They had asked someone, ‘Who can we get as a coach?’ and someone said, ‘Well, Jerry Slocum’s around,’” said Slocum, who was coaching about 30 miles away. “So I got a call saying, ‘Hey, would you like to come over for an interview?’”
Slocum was wary — he was just a few months out of school and he had just started at Lakeland — but he mentioned the call to his new bride, Kim, who crinkled her eyes and said, “You’re going to tell the Lord what not to do on this?”
“Like all good wives,” Slocum said, “she was right.”
He did the interview and by the time he got home, Nyack had offered him the job. Slocum got clearance from Lakeland’s superintendent to take it and he spent his first month teaching high school kids in the morning and early afternoon, coaching football until 5 p.m. and coaching basketball from 8 to ... whenever.
“I was too young to know I wasn’t supposed to be able to do it [the job] or that I wasn’t supposed to be good at it,” Slocum said. “I’ve said it a few times but ignorance is bliss. It really is.”
Nyack went 10-16 that first season, a seven-win improvement that made everyone but Slocum happy. (“I was pulling my hair out.”) The next season, he went 17-14.
“That’s when they said, ‘You’re our guy,’” said Slocum, who admits he has no recollection of his first victory. “The first three years, I buried my cars recruiting and going to clinics. My first five years, my wife was making more than me as a nurse. But I just progressively enjoyed it more and more.
“But if you had told me that first year that I’d still be doing it 40 years later, I would have said you were crazy.”
On the cusp
More than 39 years after that fateful fall, the 63-year-old Slocum is one win away of becoming just the 48th men’s basketball coach to win 700 games. He’s won 118 of those at Youngstown State, where he’s coached since 2005 when Penguins athletic director Ron Strollo recruited him in the same way Charlie Donovan recruited Lou Brown in Major League. (“How would you like to coach the Penguins this year?” “I don’t know.”)
Slocum won 55 percent of his games in 12 years at Nyack, then won 71 percent of his games in nine seasons at NAIA Geneva and 70 percent of his games in nine seasons at Division II Gannon. But YSU was a different animal, a football school in a basketball conference that had just fired John Robic, a former hotshot assistant under John Calipari.
Robic had gone 31-27 in his first two years with the Penguins, who then jumped from the Mid-Continent Conference to the Horizon League before the 2001 season. Robic went 27-86 over the next four years and promptly went back to being Calipari’s top assistant, a job he still has. Armed with the league’s smallest budget and weakest tradition, Strollo managed to talk Slocum into taking a job that most good coaches wouldn’t approach without a hazmat suit.
While Slocum hasn’t been as successful as he (or the fans) would have liked, he’s won 39 percent of his games over the past 10 years, a solid improvement over Robic. And while he can be difficult to deal with, particularly after losses, he’s softened in recent years, a development that has coincided with YSU’s best stretch of basketball in more than a quarter-century.
The Penguins won at least 15 games in each of the previous three seasons — the first time that’s happened at YSU since 1982-85 — and Slocum guided them to their first postseason tournament win as a Division I program, a 99-87 victory over Oakland in the first round of the College Insider.com Tournament in March of 2013.
He counts that as one of his two favorite wins, alongside one in 1991 that gave Geneva its first NAIA tournament berth in 25 years and left his boss, Chick O’Data, in tears.
“That was a big moment,” Slocum said of the CIT victory. “We had never gotten a postseason bid, so to get one and win one, that was big.
“Losing was a new thing for me. I admit there’s been a learning curve. After the amount of games that we’ve won over my time, then coming over and having to fight for all kinds of stuff, I’ll be the first to stay I needed to grow up. But I like to think I’ve gotten better.”
Cementing his legacy
Slocum’s first chance at 700 comes Saturday night at home against Detroit, which beat the Penguins in overtime on Jan. 29. While Slocum will have at least three other opportunities — YSU finishes the regular season with a road game at Oakland and a home game against Milwaukee before playing a first-round Horizon League game — sophomore Marcus Keene said the team is hoping to do it on Saturday.
“We talked about that as a team because we knew he could get to 700 by the end of this year,” Keene said. “It would mean a lot [to do it Saturday] because it’s at home in front of all the fans.”
Assistant coach Michael Wernicki, who has been with Slocum since he was hired at YSU, said Slocum hasn’t mentioned the milestone around the office — “That’s just not what he does” — but knows it would mean a lot to join a list that includes coaching legends like Mike Krzyzewski, Bob Knight, Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp.
“From a personal standpoint, I don’t care who you are, if you get to that milestone and you look at the list of guys that have done it, it really validates a career,” Wernicki said. “Whether he gets 700 or not, his career is validated. But it really validates a career of hard work, perseverance, recruiting, knowing what you’re doing, Xs and Os, game management. The whole package. You don’t get to 700 if you can’t do all those things.”
For Slocum, the milestone is meaningful for what it represents, whether it’s his relationship with his staff and his players (two of his players from the first Nyack team invited him to be in their wedding party) or his ability to win at different places and different levels, from small Christian schools in the NAIA (Nyack and Geneva) or an urban state school in Division I.
“I got an email just yesterday from a guy I haven’t talked to in 25 years,” Slocum said. “He named his son after my son, Aaron. It’s just a cool vibe and there’s a lot of memories involved with it.”
But Slocum’s favorite part is that he’ll get to share it with his best friend, the one who saw his future before he did and has been by his side through all of it.
“I don’t know how many Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays where she put up with a guy who was either in a good mood or a bad mood,” said Slocum. “Losing was hard on our family. It’s hard on me.
“It takes a special person to put up with that for 40 years.”
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