Coach of the Year: Cultivating talent

Somewhere in Pike County there’s a farm that harvested more than just food last fall. The area staples, corn and soybeans, grow on its 800 acres, and some 4,000 hogs get fattened there until they’re ready to be shipped off to the Cargill plant in Beardstown — and then to dinner plates everywhere.

Mmmm. The other white meat.

One of the hands on this Pike County farmstead happens to be Griggsville-Perry senior Perry Bonds. After morning classes at school, he’d show up for work each day around noon and tend to whatever his boss told him to tend to, until late afternoon, when it was time to hit the gym.

Once at the gym, the farmhand-to-farmer dynamic turned into a player-coach relationship. Because Bonds’ boss at the farm also happened to be his head basketball coach of four years, Todd Bradshaw.

The romantic ideal of rural high school basketball doesn’t get more rural than that. It would make for a good Kevin Costner movie, if Kevin Costner still made good movies.

Anyway, farming’s been good to Bradshaw, especially recently, with corn prices soaring. The boon has allowed Bradshaw to add another grain truck to a fleet that already included two tractors, a truck and a field cultivator. Not a bad starting five, for a thriving farm.

Bradshaw was equally optimistic about what his starting five on the basketball court might harvest in its 2007-08 campaign. By early November, he could hardly contain his excitement. Two nights before the official start of hoops practice, Bradshaw sent text messages to all of his players: “Are you ready for basketball season?”

One of them, senior guard Drew DeSpain, texted back a reply.

It said, “Are you ready to be Coach of the Year?”

•••

The Jacksonville Journal-Courier’s Boys’ Basketball Coach of the Year is Todd Bradshaw.

In 2007-08, Bradshaw’s Griggsville-Perry Tornadoes won their third straight Pike County Conference title, finally captured a regional championship and finished 25-6 overall. A banner year, really, but one could hardly blame the coach for being surprised at getting Coach of the

Year recognition, despite DeSpain’s prediction.

To put it bluntly, the man’s been snubbed before. Not intentionally, but it seemed in the past that no matter how well Bradshaw’s team performed, some other coach at some other area school got the accolades. Under Bradshaw, the Tornadoes had three consecutive 20-win campaigns from 1999 to 2002 (26-4, 20-9 and 23-9) and even produced such standout players as Ryan Burch, Drew Webel and 2002 JJC Player of the Year Nathan Emerick. But this is Bradshaw’s first such award.

“All the guys on the team obviously came together for me at the start of the year,” said Bradshaw, “and I want to thank and recognize them for that. This award really is a reflection of our entire team and the community of Griggsville-Perry.”

The community has embraced Bradshaw since he arrived in 1999 to be the basketball team’s new head coach, then just two years out of college with a teaching degree from the University of Illinois. After a year of teaching and coaching hoops at Rantoul (1997-98), Bradshaw returned to Pike County to help his father on the family farm. He also coached junior high basketball in Pittsfield, from 1998-99.

Years of farming and coaching have shaped Bradshaw’s philosophy. Of course, his philosophy shaped the teams he coached, especially this year’s group.

Admittedly, it doesn’t seem like much of a “philosophy” at first — especially on the farm.

“I try to get Perry (Bonds) — him and the other guys — to do as much of the dirty work as possible,” said Bradshaw.

But being a boss, or a coach, is about leadership. Leadership is about getting others to do what one needs them to do.

“You have to be a leader,” said Bradshaw. “You have to try to tell people what to do, but in a way where it seems like you’re not just bossing them around. It’s about trying to keep everybody involved and keep it a team atmosphere.”

On the farm, letting Bonds and the other farmhands (none of whom currently play basketball) do the “dirty work” might seem over-arching. But that “hands-off” attitude translates to a whole different dynamic in a big game. At Griggsville-Perry, Bradshaw coaches his kids up, and then he more or less turns them loose after tip-off.

“I try to give my players a lot of freedom,” Bradshaw said. “You know, if you look around the area, you see a lot of low-scoring games. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we try to get up and down the floor. With Perry (Bonds) and Drew (DeSpain) and some of those guys (like Brian Baker), I gave them the green light to shoot pretty much anytime they wanted to shoot.”

Ironically, the only Tornado who didn’t always have the so-called “green light” to shoot when the season began was Bonds, the team’s best scorer. He did average over 14 points per game as a junior, but he did that as a point guard. It wasn’t Bradshaw who kept Bonds from shooting, but the position itself, as arch-rival Pittsfield made painfully evident in late November, when the Saukees spanked Griggsville-Perry, 53-25.

Painful as the loss was, it led to a small lineup change that made the Tornadoes even more difficult to defend, and which probably catapulted Bonds to his Player of the Year award. Bradshaw moved DeSpain to point guard and shifted Bonds to the wing.

A slasher, driver and tremendous outside shooter, Bonds was free to be more creative as a scorer. And if he drew an extra defender, well, he still had the devastating ability to find an open teammate.

“It tremendously helped my game,” said Bonds. “I didn’t have to create as much for others. I could create for myself instead. It also allowed me to stay in better game shape and took a lot of pressure off of me.”

The switch paid immediate dividends, touching off a seven-game winning streak that included a 57-38 thumping of those same Saukees in a rematch, with Bonds scoring 23 points, while both he and DeSpain dished five assists.

“That rematch with Pittsfield was our biggest win of the regular season,” Bradshaw said. “That was the night we started thinking this could be our year.”

Often, great coaching is more the result of a steady hand and a few well-timed moves than strategic brilliance during a game. Bradshaw knew his players well, and figured that the best way to keep them all playing together was to give them ownership of their own season and let them have fun.

Imagine that.

“I tried to let the seniors know, this is your team,” said Bradshaw. “We’re gonna get you in shape, and we’re gonna teach you some plays, but in the end it’s gonna be up to you. We’re gonna ride your back and hope that it will be good enough.”

Giddyap. Griggsville-Perry went on a tear, taking 11 of its next 13 games (both losses came against Carrollton) and, after a 53-52 loss to West Central, the Tornadoes won nine of their next 10. They finished their regular season in dramatic fashion, rallying from a 49-40 fourth-quarter deficit to defeat visiting Southeastern, 53-52, on Valentine’s Day.

By the time the Tornadoes hit regionals, they were much more than a solid supporting cast revolving around one star in Bonds. What many folks outside of Griggsville didn’t realize was how talented the so-called “role players” really were. DeSpain had sacrificed some of his scoring output to take on point guard duties (freeing Bonds up). Drew Kennedy developed a reputation as a dangerous three-point marksman, and it could be argued that Baker, not Bonds, was the team’s hottest scorer as the postseason approached.

In fact, many teams simply couldn’t afford to double-team Bonds, as much as they wanted to.

Carrollton head coach Jeff Krumwiede went 2-2 against Griggsville-Perry in 2007-08, and expressed the wrenching dilemma that many of the Tornadoes’ opponents were faced with: “Whom do you leave open on their team? Whom do you disregard?”

In the Carrollton Regional, Griggsville-Perry defeated Northwestern, 78-52, with 26 points from Bonds and 22 from Baker, then ousted Calhoun, 69-50, with Baker striking for 32 points while Bonds supplied 22, with eight assists. In the regional title game against Carrollton, Baker was the team’s leading scorer until the fourth quarter, when Bonds exploded for 18 of his game-high 25 points to lead the Tornadoes to a 51-46 win and their first regional title since 2002.

That key win cemented Bonds’ legend at Griggsville-Perry and cinched long overdue recognition for Bradshaw, whose nine-year tenure at Griggsville-Perry is behind only Krumwiede’s 14 years at Carrollton and Jeff Abell’s 10 years with Bluffs/West Central in terms of longevity.
It’s been a bountiful harvest, and Bradshaw is plenty thankful.

“Basketball and sports have always been my passion, my love,” Bradshaw said. “Farming just brings in the money. I’m very fortunate to have a school district that allows that, and that is patient with me, as well as a community that is supportive.”