Northwestern Coach Returns to His Roots
EVANSTON, Ill. - On the morning after he earned his first Big Ten Conference win last week, Northwestern Coach Chris Collins sat in his office, a sparsely decorated room that overlooks a practice court inside Welsh-Ryan Arena.
Northwestern lost to lowly Illinois State this season and was blown out by Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa by a combined 76 points this month. But on this day, Collins was all smiles after a tense affair that had ended in triumph over an intrastate rival, Illinois, which was then ranked 23rd. He leaned back in his chair with a deep, satisfied breath, as his gaze shifted to one of his office walls, painted Wildcat purple and empty save for a few hooks on the wall.
'I have mostly Duke stuff,' Collins said. 'We'll have to get some pictures up there from last night.'
Collins is in his first year at Northwestern, having spent the last 13 as an assistant at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski. Evanston is a long way from Durham, N.C., where national championship banners hang from the rafters of Cameron Indoor Stadium. Northwestern has never reached the N.C.A.A. tournament, a record of futility stretching over more than seven decades.
But Collins, 39, grew up just a 10-minute drive down the road while his father, Doug, coached Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls in the late 1980s. The homecoming is a big part of what drew him back, intriguing him more than the dozen other head coaching opportunities he could have pursued in recent years.
'Chicago has always embraced me as one of its own,' he said.
Collins was in junior high school when his father, the first overall pick in the 1973 N.B.A. draft, landed with the Bulls. Chris was perhaps the luckiest 12-year-old in the world; before Bulls games, he laced up new Nikes and delivered them to Jordan.
In 1992, Collins was named Illinois's Mr. Basketball while a senior at Glenbrook North High School. Collins chose Duke over other basketball powerhouses like Illinois and Florida. As Collins weighed his recruiting options his junior year, Northwestern turned in a 5-23 season, 0-18 in the Big Ten. He made a visit and caught a few games, but as Doug Collins said: 'He wanted the bright lights. That wasn't Northwestern.'
Now Chris Collins is the face of the program. His Ivy League haircut and boyish features are splashed everywhere: on pocket schedules, media guides and a life-size decal on the wall of the N Club, a hospitality suite at Welsh-Ryan Arena.
Collins has toured the Chicago area, promoting his team and rebranding the program, as he described it. He threw a ceremonial first pitch at Wrigley Field and appeared at a Blackhawks game - anything for visibility and a foothold in the talent-rich Chicago area.
Northwestern has not had a basketball coach like this before. Collins's predecessor, Bill Carmody, deserves credit for taking the program to the brink of the tournament during his 13 years. But Carmody, 62, sometimes looked and sounded like an accountant.
Collins is more like Pat Fitzgerald, the 39-year-old football coach at Northwestern. Energetic and spry, each could pass for a graduate assistant.
'I just tell Chris that all it takes is one year,' Fitzgerald said. 'Like when we went to the Rose Bowl in '95. You can change the culture and totally change the program.'
In Evanston, Collins has assembled an exclusively Chicago staff. He plucked Armon Gates from Loyola. Another assistant, Brian James, was Collins's high school coach. Patrick Baldwin, also on the staff, played on that 5-23 Northwestern team.
'Because we're all from here, there's an ownership we have,' Baldwin said. 'And when a guy like Chris walks in with his background - his dad, Duke, everything - it's instant credibility.'
Absent a miracle, Northwestern will not break its tournament drought this season. The Wildcats are 10-10 with a difficult Big Ten schedule looming. But there is hope.
While its offense has struggled, Northwestern has played some of the toughest defense in the country. The Wildcats are allowing only 63.5 points per game. Collins has also secured a highly regarded recruiting class for next year, including Victor Law, a top-100 player from Chicago.
While at Duke, Collins returned to the Chicago suburbs to lure a top recruit, Jon Scheyer, to Durham in 2006. Last year, he helped Krzyzewski land another Chicago prize, Jabari Parker. Collins said he knew most of the high school coaches around town because he had played against many of them, and others had coached against him when he was a player.
After his team defeated Northwestern last week, Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo said: 'He's got guys to play hard. That's the No. 1 thing that's going to get him a lot of wins in his career. 'You get a foundation' - that's what I told him. That's what Bobby Knight told me one time.'
Still, the road to relevance is long, especially in the Big Ten. There is little to compare with Duke, where national championships always seem within reach and the Cameron Crazies are cheering wildly. Welsh-Ryan Arena has not had much of a face-lift since it opened in 1952. Northwestern's academic standards and its financial support for basketball could also be challenges for Collins, Izzo said.
Collins speaks regularly with two former Duke players turned coaches, Johnny Dawkins at Stanford and Tommy Amaker at Harvard, about the painstaking task of building programs at academically rigorous schools.
'No promises were made to me,' Collins said. 'But I know the administration here wants to make this relevant.'
He also seeks advice from Krzyzewski, who Collins said created the greatest winning culture he had ever seen, and from his own father, a brilliant tactician.
Patience, though, is not his strong suit.
'We play Wisconsin and we get killed,' Collins said. 'But our big guy has the best game of his career or we have an eight-minute stretch against Michigan where we play really well. It's hard for me because I've never been a moral-victory kind of guy, but I have to look for these things.'
In the last week, Collins delivered two more victories, not of the moral variety, when Northwestern beat Indiana on the road and then defeated Purdue in triple overtime.
Through it all, Collins is settling back into the neighborhoods he knew as a youngster. He bought a $2.5 million home near campus. His parents bought one, too. Doug Collins is at nearly every home game.
And in moments when there is quiet, just for a second, Chris Collins closes his eyes. He imagines Northwestern in a Big Ten championship game, cutting down nets. He sees the tournament selection show and hears an announcer call Northwestern.
'I'm a dreamer,' Collins said. 'That's why I came back here.'
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