Padecky: Wisdom flying solo

ROHNERT PARK - Sonoma State’s Natalie Wisdom is entering the void, smiling. Yes, smiling and grinning and laughing and for a moment there you’d think she forgot where she was and what she was doing. She’s a college basketball coach going solo, really solo.

Wisdom can’t call Duke or Kansas or Kentucky for advice because there’s not a female assistant coach for the men’s team at Duke, Kansas or Kentucky who can help her. In fact, there’s not a men’s woman assistant anywhere. She is alone, the only female assistant coach for a men’s team in NCAA basketball at the Division I or Division II level.

So Wisdom, 25, should fidget. A leg should be bouncing up and down. Her answers should be short and clipped. She should be a mass of staccato energy, giving off enough electricity you could run a toaster oven off her charge. Instead, you get this ...

“The men’s game is the same as the women’s,” Wisdom said. “OK, the men play above the rim, the women below it.”

Wisdom paused, saw the opening and charged through it.

“Oh, wow! These players can dunk! Can we really do that?”

Wisdom sat back, laughing. A little self-deprecation goes a long way. Wisdom is aware of her singular status and how it might feel like a crushing anvil on her back. Which it might be if she was the only SSU coach possessed with the gift of humor. She’s not.

“Look,” said Pat Fuscaldo, SSU’s men’s head coach, “if Natalie can handle my three Jack Russells, she can coach men’s basketball.”

Yes, you got it - Pat Fuscaldo hired his dog sitter to coach his men.

Only in the small, quirky world of Sonoma County could we somehow connect Jack Russell terriers to men’s college basketball through a young woman who once was coached as a fifth-grader by Fuscaldo’s wife, Molly Goodenbour, the legendary Stanford All-American who also once coached the women at SRJC - where Wisdom was team captain her two years there.

Stop me if you read that previous paragraph before.

Of course you haven’t.

And I bet you never read the next paragraph, either.

“Once I heard how well Natalie handled those Jack Russells,” Fuscaldo said, “that sealed the deal for me.”

Goodenbour had gotten to know Wisdom through youth basketball camps Goodenbour had run. Fuscaldo in turn had gotten to know Wisdom through the many recruiting trips he made to SRJC to see the men’s team. Fuscaldo also became good friends with Lacey Campbell, SRJC’s women’s coach.

Fuscaldo and Goodenbour would go on vacation and ask Wisdom, who starred at Rincon Valley Christian, to take care of the hyperactive Jack Russells. A connection was cemented. Beyond finding a doctor and a mechanic, nothing relaxes a couple more than finding someone they can trust to take care of their animals. So when Wisdom approached Fuscaldo this summer, Wisdom grabbed his full attention.

Fuscaldo had just lost an assistant, Zach Zapponi. What about me, Wisdom asked.

“I really want you to think this over,” Fuscaldo said to Wisdom. It wasn’t meant to discourage her. It was meant for Wisdom to think it through. Wisdom really needed to know where women stood in men’s college basketball.

Nowhere, actually. According to a USA Today article in 2013, only three women have been paid assistants at a men’s program. It was in the early ’90s and the women lasted a very short time. Possibly even more significant was the number of women in college coaching today.

In 1974, 90 percent of all women collegiate athletes were coached by women. In 2013, the same college that did the original research - the University of Minnesota - found only 38 percent of all women collegiate athletes were coached by women.

“So there is gender bias,” said Marlene Bjornsrud, executive director of The Alliance of Women Coaches. “So what Natalie is doing, you can call her courageous and brave. It is very different to be the only woman in the room.”

Wisdom shrugged at being brave or courageous.

“I mean, what have I done?” she said.

True, the SSU men completed just their first week of practice Wednesday. Games haven’t even started yet. But athletes ? contrary to popular belief - are very intuitive people. They can smell baloney from a mile away. If a coach is a hood ornament or a political appointee or just a gasbag, players will reject and ignore.

“We look at all of it as information,” said team captain Mike Harris, a forward. “We listen to what our coaches have to say and apply it to our performance. We don’t treat her any less or more seriously than the other coaches. I don’t care who they are, as long as they know what they are talking about.”

In the perfect, mature and educated world that we all would like to live in but don’t, it shouldn’t matter that Wisdom didn’t play men’s basketball. Previous experience is not a solid criterion to be a good head coach in any sport.

Rick Majerus never played college basketball but became a coaching legend at Utah, winning 517 games. Doug Blevins was the kicking coach for six years with the Miami Dolphins, so good he was on the ballot for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013; yet Blevins had cerebral palsy and never kicked a football in his life. Charlie Weis was the offensive coordinator for three New England Super Bowl champions, yet flopped as a college player.

The crux of what Wisdom faces is contained in this little pearl uttered once by President Theodore Roosevelt: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

So even though the first game has yet to be played, SSU’s men have walked in their classrooms and found Wisdom sitting in their seat. It’s her way of monitoring their attendance. It gets their attention.

“I asked one player where he sees himself in five years,” Wisdom said. “He said, ‘Hadn’t thought about it.’ Well, think about it. College basketball is for a very short time in your life.”

So when Wisdom is not working her day shift at a Starbucks in Santa Rosa, she’s at SSU’s gym. While she has that degree in criminology and criminal justice from SSU, a basketball gym feels like home for her.

“When I want to be alone,” Wisdom said, “I go to the gym by myself and shoot free throws. It’s a great place to think.”

To think about what she wants to do with the rest of her life, yeah, Wisdom spends a lot of time on that. Such thoughts began in earnest two summers ago when she was a student intern in Washington for Congressman Wally Herger of Chico.

Wisdom met with three Supreme Court justices, one of them being Clarence Thomas.

“He told me I was 24 and this is the time for me to work and learn and explore,” Wisdom said. “I’m basically a shy person, and I went to Washington to put myself out there. I went outside my comfort zone.”

Truth to tell, Wisdom has stayed out there. She had been Campbell’s assistant at SRJC for four years. Felt comfortable. Loved the place. But she wanted to stretch herself.

That she has done. She is out there, all right, and while she doesn’t see any women out there with her, it’s no bother. She’s curious to see what happens next. Could be anything. She places no limitations, except one. For the rest of her life, the only thing Natalie Wisdom will be able to dunk is a donut. Everything else? She’ll man up. Or is it woman up?

To contact Bob Padecky, email him at bobpadecky@gmail.com.