Anyone can balance a spinning basketball on his own finger. White balances on Eric Pritt's finger.

"Sometimes you've got to use your head!"

March 24, 2009

The season just ended marks eleven years that Greg White has coached men's basketball at the University of Charleston.

"My goal this year was to win the championship," White told Putnam Rotarians today. "Guess what? We finished thirteen and fifteen, my worst year in coaching.

"We didn't have the year we thought we were going to have," he confessed.

"We started the year with three freshmen, a sophomore transfer who had never played, and a fifth year senior. We ended up 13 -- 15.

"Day two of practice, my best player -- in the top three of hundreds I've coached -- goes for a layup. He's going full speed and smacks into the wall. He's got a pelvic hairline fracture. He's out for the year.

"Another player -- six-two, 285 (he could lift this entire building) -- rolls his ankle. We think it's a sprain. He's torn his achilles [tendon]!"

"Winning to me is being the best person I can be; getting up every day, and helping those fourteen young people -- or any other students at the University of Charleston -- who walk through my door and say, 'Coach, I need help; Coach, I need some encouragement,' and assisting and helping them to succeed."

White stresses a regimen of five Cs at the University of Charleston -- Communication, Costume (your dress and appearance), Character, Challenge and Change. Learn to deal with these things and you will be a winner in any game.

"There're going to be a lot of things said about you," he told the group. "I never did worry about the people that don't know me. I worry about the people that do know me.

"You should be more concerned about your character than your reputation. Your reputation is what others think of you. Your character is who you are."

Next season will be a better one. And Coach Greg White continues to be a winner -- in attitude, if not in the stats. White is a winner as part of a progressive university which has "raised $85 million in seven years, which has gone from a commuter campus to a residential campus with three new student dormitories; which has a great faculty and great students."

And, best of all, he says, is the privilege of being called "coach."