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This is where he always saw himself, back in the day that seems so near at times. Sitting here in this chair. Staring across 94 feet of polished hardwood. Sizing up “1s” and “2s” and “3s” and “4s”and “5s”, which is pro hoops-speak for guards and forwards and centers.
It’s probably too big a stretch to say Jaren Jackson was born to coach. But he did get a pretty good jump on it.
“I was always very curious,” says Jackson, a former CBA Coach of the Year who’s on the cusp of his first full season is head coach of the Mad Ants. “I always considered myself a student of the game. I was open to whatever a coach wanted to do, style of play or whatever. I was open to that.”
But?
“But at the same time, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, I’d challenge a coach,” he goes on. “I was very thoughtful and creative – kind of a coach on the floor sort of thing – and if there was something a particular coach I played for wasn’t doing or I felt didn’t seem as experienced in, I would call him on that, I guess. Players don’t usually do that.”
And you can imagine how immensely, ahem, popular it must have made him at times. And how invaluable an asset it made him at others.
“I felt like I knew the game at an early stage of my career, and at some point I wanted to coach and be a teacher through the game of basketball,” Jackson says.
So, he questioned. And observed. And questioned more. And learned the subtle trick of doing all of that without making it sound as if he were questioning the coach’s authority, because, as someone who wanted to be a coach someday, he knew the value of that authority.
Knew it then. Wields it now.
Twenty years removed from his days as a player for John Thompson at Georgetown, 10 years removed from winning a ring with the San Antonio Spurs in 1999, he remains close enough to his playing days to sometimes get the urge to “break a sweat” with his players. Mostly he settles for using those playing days as an object lesson: Here is where I’ve been, what I’ve done, where it took me. And where it can take you.
“Anyone who knows about his playing career knows that he has a championship, and he’s played on numerous teams in the NBA,” says DeWitt Scott, the IPFW guard who’s been a revelation in training camp. “We know when he says something, it’s legit.”
And so they’ll listen when Jackson talks about his striving – the four CBA teams he played for, the one season he spent in France, the championship teams (one World Basketball League, two CBA, one NBA) of which he was part. All the bouncing around from remote outpost to remote outpost. All the qualities that got him out of those outposts and onto nine different NBA teams.
“I definitely use that as a tool, you might say,” says Jackson, who was the valedictorian of his high school class in New Orleans and has a finance degree from Georgetown. “I’m sure these guys look at me as an example of what it’s gonna take for them to get to the NBA. That path from going from the minors to the majors is something I share with these guys on a daily basis in some sort of way on the court.”
Where the path takes Jackson and his team this season, of course, remains to be seen. He likes the size of the team. He likes the balance, the ability to put players in their “rightful positions.” He likes his own development after taking over at midseason for Kent Davison.
“I just want to be better prepared (this year),” he says. “That’s the challenge for a coach.”
Bring it on.
