Eastern head women’s basketball coach Brady Sallee met with his team following a disappointing 2007 season.

The Panthers won just 10 games, and Sallee and his players talked about why they did not succeed to the expected level.

Those postseason meetings served as a forum for Sallee to not only sell a change in philosophy to his players, but more importantly create a vision for what the team wanted to achieve the next season. He said a lack of a unified vision was one thing he noticed during the 2007 season.

An effort by Sallee, The Daily Eastern News’ Coach of the Year, to give the Panthers a unified vision for the 2008 season led to Eastern’s success this year.

Eastern’s successes were a 19-win season and a trip the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament title game.

“At the beginning of every year, I put the goals out and the girls shared in them at times,” Sallee said. “As the season progressed we didn’t talk about it a whole lot. By the end of the year, we were kind of a lost soul. The vision wasn’t in front of us. We were just kind of playing day-to-day. I identified that as something we had to change. We had to talk about that vision not only on day one but day 101, day 201.”

That’s the direction the post-2007 season meetings went. Sallee said the Panthers not only talked about a plan for the next season but also started developing a way to execute it.

“We didn’t necessarily talk about Xs and Os,” Sallee said. “We talked about what was going on between our ears, and that’s where we first started developing our goals.”

As the Panthers moved into the 2008 preseason, however, Xs and Os became important. Sallee’s basketball philosophy became important. And that philosophy was simple. Work hard.

“I want to be the hardest working team that we ever play,” Sallee said. “That’s probably as simple of a philosophy as I can make. I think there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat offensively. I believe in sharing the basketball and having a balanced basketball team, but when it all comes down to it I think the team that works the hardest most of the time wins. I want to hang our hat on how hard we play and how hard we compete.”

That philosophy on how the game of basketball is played has roots 15 years earlier to Sallee’s start as an assistant coach.

A pitcher’s mentality

Sallee’s first assistant coaching position was as a student assistant at Division III Thomas More College. But the basketball court was a new venue for Sallee. He was a baseball guy – a pitcher for Thomas More.

Sallee said the attitude he had as a pitcher has carried over into his coaching style and especially in the decisions he makes from the bench.

“To be a pitcher, you’ve got to have a little bit of an attitude,” he said. “It’s that me versus the world type of attitude. You’ve got to be able to stand on top of that hill and let your best be good enough. From an attitude standpoint, a toughness standpoint I think that’s carried over into the way I think now.”

Even though Sallee is no longer staring down batters from 60 feet, 6 inches away, he said coaching correlates to his time as a pitcher. But this time around he’s the one calling the “pitches.”

“I am still throwing it up there across the plate to see if the other team can hit it,” Sallee said. “Whether it’s a play that I call, whether it’s a substitution I make, it’s those decisions you can look at and see them pitch-by-pitch. There’s definitely times when you’ve got to tighten up and throw your best pitch and there’s times where you can maybe gamble a little bit and try to trick people.”

Sallee said he learned several things during his time at Thomas More, and those lessons have stuck with him since and remained true in any basketball program he’s been with. One of those was, hustle could get a coach a long way in recruiting and building relationships. But it’s what happens with that coach-player relationship that mattered most.

“If you have low expectations, that’s what (the players are) going to do,” Sallee said. “If you have high expectations, they’re going to strive to get there. That was definitely true early on (at Thomas More), and it’s been the same everywhere I’ve been.”

Taking a career chance

Sallee moved on after Thomas More to be an assistant at Idaho State. But after two years with the Bengals (1994-95), he took a chance on another Division I coaching job at Kent State.

Sallee said it took a leap of faith to make the move to work with head coach Bob Lindsay at Kent State because the athletic department only OK’d Lindsay hiring an assistant on an interim basis with the understanding the job would open again at the end of the season.

Lindsay said Sallee had to be hired on an interim basis because at the time of year he was hired, Kent State did not have enough time to go through a complete search process. However, Lindsay said Sallee was not hired with the intention of keeping him for only one year.

“I said to (Lindsay) and he said to me, ‘If I’m just really, really good at what I do, then I’m going to make it an easy choice for them to keep me,'” Sallee said. “I went there with no promises, but it was a great opportunity for me to get back into an area I thought I could be at my best and work for a guy I thought could really make me good at this business.”

Kent State’s success during Sallee’s first year with the team – the Golden Flashes won their conference tournament and upset Texas A&M in the first round of the NCAA Tournament – meant Sallee’s job was safe. He said it was a no-brainer for the Kent State athletic department to keep the coaching staff together after such a successful season.

“I was very, very fortunate it worked out the way it did,” Sallee said. “You look back on your career and think how easily it could have worked the other way, and what would I have done, where would I have been. The seven years at Kent State you could probably look at and say they were the most influential on me as a coach on my career. (I) Started really thinking in terms of really developing my own philosophy not only as a recruiter but as a coach.”

Lindsay said Sallee grew as a coach during his time at Kent State and Sallee left Kent, Ohio, with one of Lindsay’s most prominent coaching characteristics.

“I’m real demanding out of players,” Lindsay said. “I think Brady took a little of that from me. What he did learn was the game has to be taught. There’s no such thing as over-teaching the game. There is such a thing as over-coaching the game. I think he saw the difference between those.”

Stacking a résumé

Sallee had the opportunity to interview for head coaching positions while at Kent State including Akron and several Division II schools, but he said he felt he needed one more big school on his résumé before he was a viable candidate to be a head coach.

That opportunity came at East Carolina. Sallee said he was offered the head coaching job at Gannon University – a Division II school in Erie, Pa., – but he turned it down to be the Pirates’ recruiting coordinator and assistant coach.

East Carolina head coach Sharon Baldwin-Tener said Sallee’s primary responsibility was to recruit, but she said he also worked with the Pirates’ post players.

“He was an excellent on-the-floor coach,” Baldwin-Tener said. “He was very vocal. He was very energetic. He really pushed the players to be the best they could be.”

Sallee said working in the Conference USA would also help him learn on a national level. He said Conference USA at the time was one of the top six or seven leagues in country, so he said he knew he would be recruiting on a high level. Sallee said the Pirates signed a top 40 recruiting class his first year as recruiting coordinator.

Baldwin-Tener said Sallee’s time at East Carolina was a continuation of his growth as a coach. She said he got more confident as a coach on the floor, and he always had ideas and input from the bench during games. Baldwin-Tener said she spoke with Sallee about the changes he would face when he accepted the head coaching position at Eastern.

“I was an assistant coach for a long time,” Baldwin-Tener said. “It’s a lot different when you’re making the decisions. As an assistant it’s easier to throw ideas out there. When you’re making the decisions you have to go with what you feel is right. What he’s doing now is finding his way and his coaching style and his recruiting style.”

Reaching the top

Sallee said without the East Carolina assistant coach position on his résumé he didn’t think he would have been a viable candidate to be Eastern’s next head coach.

“It was one of those situations where it worked out perfectly, and I jumped on this opportunity when it opened up,” Sallee said. “You can call it luck or destiny or whatever it was, but there were a lot of decisions that were made through those different stops if one decision would have been different I don’t know where I’d be or what I’d be doing now.”

But Sallee is now the head coach of a burgeoning basketball program. And despite a 0-7 start to the 2008 season, he said he never panicked about how the season was progressing.

“There was never an, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got to scrap everything,'” Sallee said. “In the preseason we put it out right out in front of them. In order for us to win we had to be the best defensive team in the league, we had to be the best rebounding team in the league and we had to take care of the ball. That’s what our focus was on. It wasn’t on the 0-7. Our goal didn’t center around being 6-1 after our first seven games. It centered around us being the best in those categories.”

Eastern’s record (19-13, 15-5 OVC) and a trip to the conference title game were the results of Eastern being one of the best teams in the OVC in those three areas.

Morehead State head women’s basketball coach Mike Bradbury has known Sallee for nearly 16 years after meeting him on the recruiting trail.

Bradbury said recruiting players that fit into a system was one thing Sallee had always done well.

“They’re much more disciplined defensively now than they had been in the past,” Bradbury said. “What’s it allowed them to do is use their size and athleticism. They went from being an average defensive team to one of the best.”

Nearly all of Sallee’s team will return next season, giving him another year to build on his successful basketball philosophy.

“They’ll be scary good next year,” Bradbury said. “They’ve got everybody back from probably the second-best team behind (Southeast Missouri), and at the end of the year they were better than SEMO. They’re clearly the team to beat.”

Breakout:

Brady Sallee Coaching Résumé

2004-2008: Eastern Illinois (Head Coach)

49-68 career record

2003-2004: East Carolina (Assistant Coach)

1996-2002: Kent State (Assistant Coach)

1994-1995: Idaho State (Assistant Coach)

1990-1993: Thomas More College (Student Assistant Coach)

Family

Wife: Mandy

Children: Avery and Taryn

Scott Richey can be reached at 581-7944 or at [email protected].