Frank Vogel: Smiling kid from South Jersey hasn't changed in rise to NBA coach
Zak Keefer
zak.keefer@indystar.com
He was a basketball dreamer in search of a basketball kingdom, so he swapped his senior year on the court for an 11-hour drive in his beat-up Dodge Colt to quench his coaching ambition in a city he didn't know a soul.
Picture his dream dying once, twice, a dozen times in his first few weeks on the University of Kentucky campus. Picture the South Jersey boy smiling through it all, unabashed and undeterred. "Hi, I'm Frank Vogel, how are you?" he'd say to anyone, everyone. His perpetually positive disposition would serve him well. It would have to. It was all he had.
Frank Vogel's passion pulled him from one end of the basketball spectrum to the other — from tiny Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., a Division III program that was an afterthought, to Lexington, Ky., where life stopped and started with Wildcat hoops. There, Vogel hoped to heed the gospel of coach Rick Pitino.
He drove to the basketball office, was met by the team's equipment manager and was kindly ordered to get lost. "You think you're the only kid who comes here and wants to coach?" Vogel was told. "We don't have anything for you. Period."
Twenty years have passed since the smiling South Jersey boy refused to let his dream die for good. He hung around the practice facility for weeks, hoping someone would ask for help. Need me to mop up puke off the floor? No problem. Wash sweaty jockstraps? I'm your guy. Edit game tape? I'm great with computers.
He became the kid who talked his way into a student-manager position for Pitino's Wildcats, the manager who became a video coordinator in the NBA at 24, the assistant coach who paid his dues for a decade, the interim coach no one thought would last and the head coach who re-branded and revived the Indiana Pacers.
Through every stop, every hurdle, Vogel's startling ascent is laced with the quiet confidence that earned him his first shot in Lexington. Where does it come from? Why does an NBA head coach still labor like he's a low-level assistant? Why do game days still begin with film work at 6 a.m.?
Because it was the only way a fast-talking, always-smiling Division III point guard without a single coaching connection could rise from a basketball outpost in Huntingdon, Pa. to the sideline of the Eastern Conference's No. 1 seed.
He earned his first head-coaching job with the Pacers in 2011. In three years since, he has guided the Indiana one round further in each postseason, the steady climb punctuated last season by a seven-game war with the eventual champion Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. Now, as the playoffs begin Saturday against the Atlanta Hawks (7 p.m., Bankers Life Fieldhouse), the expectation is clear. The Heat are waiting.
Vogel's job is to get the Pacers over the hump.
"We have an opportunity-of-a-lifetime mindset with this group, and I want a championship," Vogel says, smiling, that trademark confidence surfacing again, just as it has at every stop of the impossible journey that has led him to this moment.
It's one he's worked for his entire life.
Picture a Division III basketball team gathering the final time before Christmas break, the coach telling his players to enjoy the holiday and that he'll see them in three weeks. Picture every player but one smiling.
Picture him steaming.
Juniata College was never enough for Frank Vogel. By his junior year his passion exceeded that of everyone in the program — even his head coach, a part-time teacher who was routinely late for practice because he had to monitor detention after school.
"I wanted more," Vogel says.
More was Rick Pitino, the University of Kentucky, the coach and the program Vogel became fascinated with from afar. He poured through the pages of Pitino's book. He watched their games.
While most said the Wildcats, saddled by NCAA sanctions from the previous coach, wouldn't be competitive for three or four years, Pitino ignored it.
"We're going to win right away," Pitino promised in his introductory press conference.
They did. Vogel loved the bravado. While he slumped at home over the holidays, free time at his fingertips, Vogel saw that Pitino's team was practicing three times on Christmas Day.
"I wanted that," Vogel remembers. "That's where my level of commitment was, not with three weeks off in the middle of the season."
Walk-on, practice player, student-manager, ballboy, it didn't matter. Lexington was where he needed to be. He'd learn from Pitino. He'd become a coach. He'd do whatever it took.
So Frank Vogel, the kid from Wildwood Crest, N.J., who as a teenager earned his way on the Late Show with David Letterman because he could spin a basketball on the end of a toothbrush, chased his ambition. He talked his way into the famed Five-Star Basketball Camp, met Pitino and told him his story.
"If you decide to come to Kentucky," Pitino told him, "let me know if there's anything I can do to help."
It was all Vogel needed to hear. With no guarantee of even landing the lowest of positions, he traded in his senior season at Juniata, packed up his Dodge Colt and drove to Lexington. "You don't have anything lined up?" his parents asked. No, he told them. But at least he'd be there. At least he'd be near it. At least he'd have a chance.
Bill Keightley, the longtime UK equipment manager, met him and told him to scram. Vogel stuck around, shooting on the practice court during the daily 4 p.m. pick-up games, a gnat that wouldn't retreat. He waited three weeks before finally taking Pitino up on his word. He walked up to his office, was met by Pitino's assistant, Jim O'Brien, and begged for a position.
This is Kentucky basketball. This is the greatest thing in the world to me. I can help you. I know basketball.
O'Brien thought for a second. The program had just got its hands on a new video-editing system from Avid Sports that no one knew how to use. He asked Vogel if he was good with computers.
Vogel wasn't. So he lied.
"I'm great with computers," he said.
O'Brien convinced Pitino to give him a two-week trial as a student-manager. It was all he needed.
No matter Vogel barely knew how to type; he knew how to work. He lived at the practice facility, cutting film and wearing out the 1-800 number to Avid Sports with around-the-clock calls. How do I do this? And this? And this? He pestered them so often they came to know him on a first-name basis.
"I became one with that machine," Vogel says. "It was my meal ticket."
He spent two seasons as student-manager, was on the bench for the Wildcats' 1996 national championship and formed relationships that would open up doors for the rest of his career.
"I've had guys work for me over the years that love to tell you how hard they work," Pitino says now. "Then there's Frank, who never said a word. He'd put in 14-, 15-hour days and never complain. Not once. The only way we could tell he pulled an all-nighter was from his bloodshot eyes."
So in 1997, when Pitino left Kentucky for the Boston Celtics, he brought the 23-year-old Vogel with him as video coordinator. Three years after wrestling with the decision to leave Juniata College, Vogel had earned a job working for the most storied franchise in the NBA.
Picture a couple's second date sidetracked by a stopover at the Boston Celtics' practice facility. Picture Frank Vogel asking the woman who'd become his wife if she minded if he finished up some film work before they went to the movies, then dragging her to his office while he did so.
"I was like, 'Oh my gosh this man is obsessed with basketball,' " Jenifer Vogel remembers.
They met during the NBA lockout of 1998, when Vogel finally had some free time, at what he is somewhat embarrassed to call "a fine drinking establishment." He asked her for a date. She said no. He asked again. She said no.
"My friends were all like, 'You can't date a guy you met in a bar!' " she says. "But he had a heart of gold. There was something about him that was so real."
She finally agreed. They hit it off. And one Christmas Eve they weren't planning on spending together — the Celtics flew out of town the next day — he drove to her hometown in Connecticut, surprised her and proposed.
Two daughters followed as Vogel's coaching career slowly scooted forward. When O'Brien took over for Pitino in Boston in 2001, he promoted Vogel to assistant coach. When O'Brien went to Philadelphia in 2004, he brought Vogel with him. When he came to Indiana in 2007, he did the same.
By 2011, he was O'Brien's lead assistant when Pacers president Larry Bird called him at home on a Sunday.
"We're going to make a change at coach," Bird told him. "Are you interested in the job?"
Vogel hesitated. He'd been with O'Brien 14 years. O'Brien was, as Vogel puts it, "my mentor in every sense of the word."
Vogel told Bird: "I think it's too soon to make a change. Are you sure you want to do this?"
Then O'Brien's voice came on the line.
"This is what's right for this team, Frank," he said. "And you're the right guy. You're ready."
Bird gave him an interim title. Vogel was suddenly, at 37, the youngest coach in the NBA. He never thought it'd last.
"I didn't think I had any real shot of keeping the job," he says.
Picture the new coach grabbing the microphone at Bankers Life Fieldhouse before his first game and pledging the Pacers — then 10 games below .500 — would make the playoffs for the first time in four years.
Picture Vogel standing before his team and telling them, right then and there, they were going to change their identity. Picture Vogel scrapping O'Brien's run-and-gun offense and installing a power post system, barking his favorite phrase at his players over and over: smashmouth basketball.
Picture him moving his struggling 7-2 center, Roy Hibbert, from the high post to the low block, gambling that Hibbert would become the backbone behind the Pacers' new brand of basketball.
"We're going to throw you the ball down there, and you're going to sink or swim," Vogel told him.
Defense would drive the resurgence. He introduced Hibbert to a little-known wrinkle in the rulebook, which allowed defenders to jump straight up and absorb contact from a driving player as long as he established legal defensive position before leaving his feet. It was the first Hibbert had heard of the NBA's rule of verticality.
To explain his point, Vogel points to a photo in his office from his first playoff series as head coach. Chicago's Derrick Rose has reached the rim while Hibbert trails from behind.
"Look at where he is," Vogel says. "Roy was doing way too much of this back then. We had to get him to stop chasing ball screens and stay under the basket."
Vogel would teach Hibbert to not run to the ball, but to the rim. It became an arduous process. Put the back of your hands on the front of the rim, Vogel preached on a daily basis. Back of your hands, front of the rim. Let the driver come to you. They drilled Hibbert relentlessly, ordering him to never take a charge again.
"It was just monotonous," Hibbert says, "doing it over and over and over, getting it down-pat and the timing right."
He would master what he now calls the Straight Up, and its effectiveness would forge the last line of a Pacers' defense that became best in the league. Now drivers — the Knicks' Carmelo Anthony in last year's playoffs, Miami's LeBron James in this year's regular season – are routinely denied at the rim by the towering Hibbert, often left crying for a foul that won't come.
"They didn't used to honor the interpretation of the rule like they do now," Vogel says proudly. "Roy changed that. He's redefined how big men protect the rim."
Classify it among Vogel's most impressive achievements in his three-plus seasons, right next to another gamble that has paid off nicely: Inserting the electric but erratic Lance Stephenson into the starting lineup with Danny Granger hurt last season, then deftly handling the highs and lows that came with it.
"It wasn't going to happen for him if I yanked him out of the game every time he made a mistake," Vogel says.
With Vogel's backing, Stephenson soared. Then he sank. After an 0-for-4, zero-point performance in a loss in Utah mid-season, the latest in a string of poor performances from Stephenson, Vogel sat him down. The coach was direct.
"You're not just Danny Granger's fill-in," Vogel told him. "You're one of the (starting) five now, and you can't check out on us. We're counting on you."
That's when it finally clicked for Stephenson, Vogel says. This year, the former bench-warmer has become one of the league's surprise stars.
Vogel kept good on his promise to the fans that first year — he won seven of his first eight as head coach, the Pacers made the playoffs for the first time in four years, and that summer, Bird scrapped the interim title.
"I was pleased with the results of that season," Bird says. "That summer, he interviewed elsewhere, we interviewed other people, but we interviewed him last and I gave him the opportunity."
The climb has continued each successive season. Indiana finished 56-26 this year, the franchise's third-best regular season record in its 38-year NBA history. The Pacers won the East's top seed for the first time in a decade.
That perpetually positive disposition he carried with him from Juniata to Lexington has become his staple in Indianapolis. In many ways, he remains the egoless former student-manager whose first job in the sport included mopping up puke and washing jockstraps. And smiling through it all.
"The most down-to-earth coach I've ever played for," Hibbert says.
"If you go through an entire NBA season, you just can't stay upbeat the whole time, but somehow, Frank does exactly that," adds Pacers executive Donnie Walsh. "His positivity is one of his greatest strengths. The players have bought into that."
When a sizzling early-season start soured late, Vogel took the heat, including some from Bird. His routine, much like his outlook, never flinched: On gamedays he's off to Bankers Life Fieldhouse by 6 a.m., not home until 11 p.m. Roadtrips are more of the same: Room service, film study, repeat.
"Everyone has their ups and downs," adds Bird. "We talk on a daily basis."
"That's Frank's M.O.: If something's not working, he'll work every hour of the day to fix it," his wife, Jenifer, says. "He still comes home after every game, win or lose, and re-watches the entire game."
The same quiet confidence and work-all-hours-of-the-day mantra remains rooted in his psyche. Unabashed and undeterred, just as he was all those years ago when he was a smiling kid from South Jersey with nothing more than a dream.
Star reporter Candace Buckner contributed to this story. Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at 317-444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.