|
By Kathleen S. Carr '96
Basketball Life Lessons: Rodney J. “Rod” Baker ’74
Head coach, Rochester RazorSharks
I play basketball. Not professionally, certainly, but I feel confident teaching middle school kids the importance of maintaining a triple-threat position. But Rodney Baker ’74 spent three years teaching the Harlem Globetrotters. I can’t compete with skills like that. And when I ask him if he has any “moves,” he says, “I have more ’trotter moves than I wish I had.”
Baker and basketball have traveled together since he was a child. He played during his first year at Holy Cross and ended up coaching the JV team during his last year. He spent 14 years coaching the players’ camp with Coach George Blaney—whom calls “as good a human being as I have ever been around.”
“Basketball is about knowing how to interact with people,” Baker says. “It’s about being even-keeled”—which is important when you are coaching a group of young globetrotters who endure a relentless season that begins the day after Christmas and runs through April. That’s 135 games a year—playing every day and twice on Sundays, with two teams that travel around the country together. These men are recruited from training camps around the world. They have to be good at their game, but also have good people skills. Every night ends with a 30-minute autograph session in front of hundreds of demanding fans.
“You have to have a really great personality to pull this off,” Baker notes.
And while he’s referring to the players, it’s clear that Baker himself exemplifies this great personality. He’s not new to this: Prior to his stint with the Globetrotters from 2002-05, Baker coached at Brown, Columbia, St. Joe’s, Tufts, Seton Hall, the University of California, Irvine, Cincinnati, Rutgers and Michigan. While at the Globetrotters, Baker was charged with improving the basketball portion of the team, but he still had to learn the entertainment skills that the ’trotters are famous for—and he had to learn to recognize and recruit players who could pull them off. Clearly he has become quite the scout, recognizing not only talent, but also dedication. Several of the players he recruited for the ’trotters have spent their entire careers with the team, which, for some, has meant a 20-year commitment.
Baker is now settled back home in Rochester as head coach of the ABA championship winning team, the Rochester RazorSharks.
*
Passion Seeker: Burke Magnus ’88
General manager, ESPNU network
How does a Holy Cross graduate go from Mount St. James to ESPNU?
Thoughtfully.
When Burke Magnus ’88 graduated from Holy Cross, he faced the typical litany of questions from family and friends.
“I had people asking me, ‘Will you go to law school? How about business school? Will you teach?’” he recalls. “Frankly, I didn’t have a great sense of what I’d do for the next 40 years. But I knew I liked sports.”
Magnus worked as a legal assistant in New York and California, and now says that law school was “the best thing that never happened to me.” He spent time investigating the legal career path but realized it wasn’t for him. Instead, he discovered the graduate sports program at the University of Massachusetts.
“I had no idea how to get into the sports industry,” Magnus says, “but I knew it was my passion, which is critical.”
He landed an internship for credit at CBS in New York, and got hooked on the programming side of sports entertainment.
“I learned rights and acquisitions and how to cut deals with the NFL and PGA tours for the network,” Magnus explains. “This side of the business is responsible for making the program schedule and maximizing audience ratings and revenue.”
His connections at CBS helped him get a job at ESPN, where he has been working for the past 11 years on NASCAR, the NFL, men’s college basketball, and, for the past two years, as general manager of the startup network, ESPNU.
“I love what I do,” Magnus says. “Holy Cross taught me how to write and how to communicate, which gave me the structure to be successful in almost anything. I just needed to follow my passion.”
“There isn’t any blueprint for a job like this,” he continues. “Lots of folks go through communications programs, but I think there’s nothing in a communication degree that would prepare you for the business side of this job better than a degree from Holy Cross.”
Magnus lives in Burlington, Conn.—just 12 miles from ESPN’s Bristol headquarters—with his wife, Colleen, his son, Burke, age 7, and his daughter, Quinn, age 5. He spends 150 days a year on the road maintaining relationships and attending all of the college sports conferences. His job requires him to be visible. “That’s part of the trade-off,” he notes. “Travel gets old, but it’s still exciting from time to time.”
And when he forgets about how exciting a Final Four or a Super Bowl can be, his Holy Cross buddies remind him.
“I have a core group of guys from Holy Cross that I’m in touch with regularly,” he says. “I take them to the Final Four, to the Super Bowls, and I get a little jaded at these events. But then I look over at my buddies and their faces are lit up like Christmas morning. It’s great.”
Kathleen S. Carr is a freelance writer based in Melrose, Mass. She can be reached at kath.carr@gmail.com.
|
