Phil Brown: Brown leaves after 20-year purple patch
Issue: Volume 28 Number 3
‘Goodbye, farewell and amen.’ The sign-off on the email from outgoing Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) Women’s Basketball Head Coach, Phil Brown, to AIS staff and players may have been considered curious to most, but it was Brown’s very deliberate choice.
It was, of course, also the title of the bittersweet final episode of the US television series M.A.S.H. featuring a US mobile hospital unit during the Korean War.
Not that Brown compares his time at the AIS with the Korean War. Rather, he talks of the friendships, the humour, the common goals and, yes, sometimes the battles that he experienced in his 20 years (and one month) coaching AIS women’s basketball.
‘It’s that moment when you have a tear in your eye and you look back on all the friends you’ve made, the talented players you’ve worked with and you realise what you’ve gained,’ Brown told Sports Coach two days before taking up a position in the United States as the University of Oregon’s Associate Head Coach of Women’s Basketball.
It’s a position he took, he says, after much soul searching. ‘Midway through last year I felt I was spinning my wheels. I needed a new environment in basketball. It’s not so much about a job; it’s a lifestyle thing and I wanted to change my lifestyle.
‘I have no regrets. There have been ups and downs along the way, but that’s coaching, that’s life. There have been challenges around every corner, but equally there have been lots of highlights.’
Those highlights make for impressive reading. When Brown joined the AIS program ‘for two months’ in 1986, few women in Australian basketball could perform a jump shot and the country had few offensive players. The AIS women’s program was relatively unknown throughout the basketball world. Less than 20 per cent of the players in the Women’s National Basketball League were AIS graduates and no Australian female had played professionally overseas.
Brown was appointed head coach of the AIS women’s program in 1991. Fourteen years later, more than 60 per cent of the Women’s National Basketball League are AIS graduates, more than 20 Australian women play the game professionally throughout the world and in 2002 the national women’s team, the Opals, was comprised wholly of former AIS scholarship holders.
In 1998–99 Brown led the AIS to its only Women’s National Basketball League championship and was named League Coach of the Year for both seasons. The AIS Basketball program now has an international reputation as one of the best junior developmental programs around.
This Brown attributes as much to the ‘amazing staff and facilities’ at the AIS as to the program, the players and the coaches.
‘The challenge has always been to consistently assess the program, to look at ways of improving it … to think about doing things better. I’ve also been very fortunate to be in a supportive environment where I can do this,’ he says.
Brown has made his mark by coaching women and, he says, there is an art in being successful. ‘Women players need to embrace a team mentality, camaraderie,’ Brown says. ‘When it’s there, they’re very coachable. It takes time to cultivate, but when you get it, it’s the most powerful thing around. It’s about sisterhood, values, mutual respect, the care factor. I don’t think you always get that in men’s sport. The guys say they are a tight outfit until there’s stress and it can quickly fall apart.
‘With women I think you need to take a more of a holistic approach. You need to care about them as people, think about their health and wellbeing, what they’re doing outside the sport, but also that they’re having fun when they’re playing.
‘The girls I’m coaching are often coming away from home for the first time, and I’m very conscious of my role. I think this developmental period is as much about life skills as basketball skills. They learn respect, hard work, listening and understanding, attention to detail, punctuality and tolerance. The lesson here is that you might not be the best, but you need to be the best possible basketballer and person you can become.’
It’s rare in sports circles to find a coach who has stayed with the same elite program for one decade, let alone two.
Some in basketball circles say he may have stayed a little too long, but Brown says the challenge of having half the squad graduate and six new players joining the squad on scholarship every year kept things fresh.
‘The challenge when I started was to increase the skills depth of players. On the whole, Australia was known for having tough, defensive players but not many shooters or one-on-one players. We were known for having the ANZAC approach, and I wanted us to still be known as hard-nosed defenders.
‘As time went on, the challenge became to keep producing those high calibre but well-rounded players. After all,’ he adds, ‘not everyone goes on to become an Opal.’
Brown knows what he’s talking about.
He played for three years at National Basketball League level, but describes himself as a ‘scrubber’. ‘I did the best with what I had, but a long-term playing career at that level just wasn’t for me.’
It must have been a disappointment to the man who first fell in love with the sport as a primary school student when the Harlem Globetrotters World Tour came to Canberra. Brown remembers going to the event at Manuka Football Oval because there was no venue big enough in Canberra to host the crowds. ‘There was torrential rain but I saw this unbelievable display of basketball and next day my mates and I were out mucking around pretending to be Globetrotters.’
The fad was short-lived. Through his early high school years Brown concentrated on cricket and football. He was drawn back to basketball in the early 1970s when it was still a ‘minor’ sport in Australia, and began taking it seriously in his late teens. He made the ACT under-20 team and joined the Canberra Cannons in the National League in 1979. He left the Cannons in 1983, coached university-level basketball for a time, then went back to the Cannons as an assistant coach and spent time as an athlete tutor at the AIS.
Adrian Hurley was then Head Coach of the AIS program.
‘Adrian knew I was keen on coaching and with most of his coaching staff and senior players away at the World Championships, he asked me to come on board for two months to help out,’ Brown says.
‘Adrian taught me early on to leave something in better shape than when you started and I think that’s the philosophy I’ve carried with me the most.’
Former AIS scholarship holder, Olympian and professional Women’s National Basketball League player Michelle Brogan is one who firmly believes the program is in better shape. She finds Brown’s commitment to the program ‘extraordinary’.
‘I certainly don’t think I could stick with a program that long where the only thing that changes are the faces,’ she says.
Brogan was on the AIS team when Brown was first appointed assistant coach. ‘He was young, he was enthusiastic,’ she recalls, ‘and at that stage I hadn’t had much experience with many young coaches. He took the rookies under his wing and spent a lot of his time working with the girls in their second or third year of the program. I remember him being very technical. He worked and concentrated on techniques. Over time, as he became more confident he also became more assertive.
‘But he was an enjoyable coach. He understood when you made mistakes and expected you to learn from them. I think he’ll do well with the girls at Oregon because he’s big on fundamentals.’
At the other end of the scale Renae Camino, a recent AIS scholarship holder and one who was named in the All Star Five at the recent under-20 Junior Women’s World Championship, says she will remember Brown most for his motivating style.
‘He is the most positive coach I have ever worked under,’ she says. ‘I was a little intimidated when I came in on scholarship last January because I knew all of the great athletes that he’s coached.
‘But he got us into a routine straight away and he is always so motivating, even when we lose he looks on it as a learning experience.’
Camino says she’ll particularly miss her ‘little chats’ with Brown. ‘When we go anywhere on flights we’d sit in alphabetical order, so I’d often get to hear about all the squads he’s worked with and the players he’s had and that was always really interesting.’
She says Brown always had a few stock phrases that he used every day and she recalls one in particular, ‘He always said ‘we need to look at where we’re going because we haven’t arrived yet’.
Look out Oregon, Phil Brown will be arriving soon.
