It is the drive home after a game – mostly after a loss – when the life of coaching haunts Dane Fife the most. He can try to drown it out with as much conservative talk radio as one 30-year-old can endure or even crank up Whitesnake to a thumping decibel because his wife, Blair, isn’t in the car to tell him to tone it down.

But sure enough, whether riding next to him or laughing from the back seat or just drifting in and out of his consciousness as he passes through the night, Fife and his demon companion usually meet at the same intersection.

“Ultimately the biggest issue that haunts me is the inability to change certain kids; my inability to help them realize that it’s not my way – it’s life’s way – that I’m trying to get you to follow; not my way,” Fife says from his second-floor office in Gates Center. “Be independent and be yourself, but understand what’s going to be accepted in society and what’s not. You, son, are not going to be accepted if you don’t learn to adapt. It’s the whole community theory.”

For five basketball seasons as the head men’s coach at IPFW, Dane Fife has been a fabric of the Fort Wayne community.

Although he has been in the consciousness of the state’s basketball audience since he arrived at Indiana University in 1998 as a hard-nosed guard out of Clarkston, Mich., it is Fort Wayne that has watched him grow the most.

He was 25 when he came here as a graduate assistant at IU under Mike Davis, the coach Fife stood behind when Bob Knight, the legend who recruited him, was let go. With a program still stinging, still polarized, it was Fife, named the Big Ten’s Defensive Player of the Year that season, and his IU teammates who carried the Hoosiers to the 2002 NCAA national championship game.

Indiana hasn’t come close since.

So when the Fort Wayne school went in search of someone who could take its men’s basketball program to new heights, it was the reputation IPFW hired as much as the young man.

Fife has improved the men’s team’s record every year since he was hired.

While the Mastodons take a 15-14 record into their Summit League tournament game against South Dakota State at 7 p.m. today, it is a significant jump from Fife’s first team that won 10 of 28 games.

“There isn’t a coach on the plant that dreams of having a sub-.500 record,” he says of his overall mark of 68-84. “I don’t think that we’ve been raising eyebrows, but I think we’ve done a really good job of bringing this program to a new level each year.

“Wins and losses needs to improve, but I think behind the scenes, there’s a business element – the guts of the program – we’ve done a pretty good job of putting this program in position to sustain itself, to sustain a solid stake in the Division I community.”

There’s that word again – “community.”

Fife grew up in the small Clarkston community north of Detroit, the son of a coach, son of a Michigan basketball captain, son of a former NBA player who went on to pitch professional baseball, then went on to become an assistant at Michigan before he turned to coaching his sons Dugan and Dane at Clarkston.

So when Fife instructs a player, yells at a player, puts his arm around a kid and tries to explain help side defense as much as explaining the importance of attending class, it’s as much the father inside that gym as it is the son.

“My core values, what I teach, comes from observing my dad for 30 years; observing my parents for 30 years,” Fife says. “It doesn’t have much to do with coaching. It’s work ethic, honesty, integrity, don’t be a jerk – which I can be from time to time.”

He admits he might not have been ready to coach at 25; he could X and O, because that’s part of his dad; part of his DNA. But “running the business,” as he puts it, no, he wasn’t ready.

And he’s not sure how long he’ll stay at IPFW.

He laughs and says maybe 30 years but says if the right assistant job came along he’d have to think about it, because he could learn different aspects of the game as somebody’s assistant.

Fife remains good friends with Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, who tried to recruit him to be a Spartan. He occasionally attends a Michigan State practice. They talk frequently.

“It keeps the cynic in me suppressed because it gives you hope; it gives you hope that gosh, you know what, if that’s what this business is about – it’s helping kids, it’s about helping young coaches,” Fife says. “It’s not all about money. You see a lot of cheating and a lot of things that go on in this business that bring out the cynic in you, but guys like Tom Izzo, guys like Matt Painter, guys like Tom Crean – those are the types of guys, to me, inspire me to really be proud to be in this business and makes me excited to be in this business.”

And it’s because of that, Fife says, the quest of wanting to do more will always haunt him, no matter how old, how young.

stwarden@jg.net