The Columbus Rotary Club is well-stocked with businessmen. And while basketball is not unfamiliar to club members, Mississippi State women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer put his profession in terms Columbus Rotarians could easily understand.
Schafer, who completed his fourth season at MSU in March with a trip to the NCAA Sweet 16, described his efforts to build the Lady Bulldogs’ program much like building a business Tuesday at Lion Hills Center
It starts with a business plan or “blueprint,” as he described it.
“One of the first things in a blueprint is surrounding yourself with good people,” said Schaefer, who was joined at the meeting with three of his coaches — assistant head coach Johnnie Harris and Dionnah Jackson and Carly Thibault. “I’m smart enough to know I can’t do this by myself. In fact, I told (MSU Athletics Director Scott Stricklin) I wasn’t coming without Johnnie. There’s just something about her. She has a presence. When she goes into the home of a player and sits down with a parent, there’s just a feeling they get. She wears many, many hats for us.
“So it starts with good people. It’s family. They don’t work for me. They work with me.”
Schaefer said, like any business, you need a good product to sell.
During the Bulldog hiring process, as Schaefer was with Texas A&M as an assistant preparing for an NCAA Tournament game, he asked his wife, Holly, to check out the MSU campus and Starkville.
“She was there all day, looking at the campus, the city, facilities,” Schaefer said. “When she got back home that night, she told me, ‘Vic, you can win here. They have great facilities and the people there want to win.”
Building a program also requires a vision.
Before his arrival, MSU had had some modest success, but had never built much of a following. The season before his arrival, the Lady Bulldogs averaged fewer than 2,000 fans per game.
Four years later, MSU’s average attendance eclipsed 5,000 per game, among the top 15 teams in the nation for attendance. On the court, MSU improved from last in the conference in his first season to second in the SEC last year. The year before that, Schafer’s Bulldogs finished third.
The product MSU put on the floor was a brand people could identify with.
“I do think our style of play has something to do with that,” Schaefer said. “We play hard, and our players honor the game. I think people appreciate that. If you come to one of our games, we’ve got you. You’ll come back.”
Consistency matters, too, he said.
“Usually, the better your team gets, the grade point averages go down and the tattoos go up,” Schaefer said. “That’s where the teaching comes in. Our GPA was 3.31 and 13 of our 15 players had a GPA of 3.18 or better this year. We expect a lot of our players, not only on the court and in the classroom but everywhere. We don’t apologize for being demanding and our players have come to expect that.”
Finally, of course, there is the bottom line.
“You need to have fun,” he said. “But it’s not much fun if you’re not winning. It’s the same in business, if you’re not making money, you’re not having much fun.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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