For most of college basketball, mid-August is vacation time.
Players, finished with the grind of summer workouts and classes, head home before the semester begins. Coaches, who spent June and July weekends on the road recruiting and weekdays running workouts, catch flights to a beach and recharge the batteries before the team returns.
But on this humid Monday morning in Fairfax, Va., the scene is far from a vacation. The George Mason men’s players that are still in town (about half of the roster) are in the team’s practice facility for workouts well before 9 a.m. Leading that workout is the new head coach of the Patriots, Kim English. English still looks young enough to be a support staffer hoping for his first big break and fit enough to hop on the court and dominate the players he’s currently coaching.
Well, English young enough to be a support staffer and he sometimes ditch the whistle to hop in on five-on-five runs with his current players. At 32 years old, English is the fourth-youngest head coach in Division I men’s basketball. He’s less than a decade removed from getting drafted into the NBA out of Missouri by the Detroit Pistons. But at the age that many former players start lining up what’s next, English is several months in as a head coach in the Atlantic 10, at a program that was in the Final Four 15 years ago. To say he’s ahead of schedule would be an understatement.
Perhaps that’s the goal of this morning’s workout: to get ahead of schedule. There’s an attention to detail about it that you won’t find everywhere. At one point, English takes the time to show his players how VCU will trap them on the sideline and how to get out of it … at least four months before his team will play against the Rams. When the team starts a shooting drill, English steps in to demonstrate a near-full-speed rep to set the tone for the team. He may be young enough to be still playing, but there’s little doubt when watching him command this practice that Kim English was made to be a coach.
“He’s got the ‘it,’ ” says Frank Haith, who coached English at Missouri and later hired him as an assistant at Tulsa. “The kids are going to love him. He’s going to have great presence and passion with him because he’s going to build relationships and trust. He’s an unbelievable communicator and he’s brilliant.”
English began preparing for this moment before his playing career concluded. Most college assistants have a blueprint of sorts written down of what they’ll do when they eventually get a head coaching job. English started his in 2014, while he was still fighting for a spot in the NBA. Now, the document is 40 pages long and includes everything from core philosophies to assistant coaches and staffers he’d consider hiring. Two of the names on his prospective coaches document are now on staff with him.
“I still look at it every day,” he says.