Apache Paschall uses bunker mentality to propel players (and himself) at St. Michael's Academy
11/22/09 - 01:56 PM
Apache Paschall and St. Michael Academy are reigning champions ... Muncy for News
BY Mark Lelinwalla
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, November 22nd 2009, 1:30 PM
Robert (Apache) Paschall might as well be the Rodney Dangerfield of the CHSAA.
The St. Michael Academy girls basketball coach is fresh off of leading the Eagles to a state Federation championship, and they were recently ranked fourth in the nation in ESPN's Fab 50 preseason poll.
But where's the respect?
One recent afternoon on W. 33rd St. in Manhattan, the Eagles are waiting to begin practice but find themselves playing second fiddle to a step team tryout.
The Eagles should be warming up on the decrepit court, which doubles as an auditorium at the tiny girls school; instead, they are watching would-be steppers clapping their hands and stamping their feet.
The players look to their left, amid the clamor, and the auditioning steppers follow suit.
Paschall has entered the gym, and instantly he receives the all-eyes-on-me treatment. He has just stolen the scene, as he usually does when he steps foot onto any court.
Paschall laughs off the situation with the steppers, but on another day the scenario might have helped feed his me-against-the-world mentality, a mindset that Paschall employs not only to motivate his team but also to function in life.
Simply put: He's 6-3 and 260 pounds, with an outsized chip on his shoulder to match.
"I have to have that atmosphere around me," Paschall says of his inclination to embrace the role of underdog. "It's strategy," he adds. "It's how I maneuver. Sometimes I'm looking for it. Sometimes it's right in your face."
* * *
Growing up, Paschall didn't have to look too hard to find such an atmosphere. He was only 7 when his mother, Elaine Bartlett, went to prison for selling cocaine. She received 20 years to life, the mandatory sentence for a first-time offender under New York's Rockefeller drug laws.
Bartlett served 16 years, and was released when then-Gov. Pataki granted her clemency in 2000.
Her story is chronicled in "Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett," a 2004 book by Jennifer Gonnerman.
In his mother's absence, Paschall bounced back and forth between his father's home in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and his grandmother's on the lower East Side, the neighborhood where he now lives.
That's just scratching the surface of Paschall's staggering lineage. His uncles died a year apa
rt, in 1992 and 1993, one stabbed to death while attempting a street-corner robbery in the Bronx, and the other of an AIDS-related illness.
Another uncle is still in prison, having admitted to five murders and involvement in narcotics trafficking. Paschall's younger brother also did prison time for selling drugs. An aunt is living with HIV, and another lost her life two years ago because of complications during childbirth.
All the while, Paschall, 32, has used basketball to escape. His grandmother helped him with tuition for LaSalle Academy, and he swore he would go down a different path.
In 1992, when he was attending Pine Ridge School, a prep school in South Dakota where he played basketball and football, he made his ambitions clear in a letter he sent to his mother in prison.
"Ma," Paschall wrote, "I'm going to be somebody, no matter how much or how little world status I have."
Mission accomplished. While serving as head coach at St. Michael's for the past nine years, Paschall has built Exodus into a grassroots basketball empire. He balances those efforts by serving as an activity specialist at a nonprofit community center in Harlem, where he works with Eagles assistant coach Ron Kelley.
Paschall and another assistant, Lauren Best, also run Big Apple Recruiting, a basketball scouting service for colleges.
"He grew up with nothing," said Best, "and if he hits the Lotto tomorrow, he'll be the same guy and stay hungry."
* * *
Paschall didn't go to college. Instead, he founded Exodus, his summer ball organization, shortly after he returned to New York from Pine Ridge in 1997. He conceived it as a program for boys.
That changed the following summer when his younger sister, Danae, asked him about the possibility of starting a girls squad.
"I told her to go out and find some players around the way," Paschall said. "Then, we'll see."
Danae Paschall combed the lower East Side looking for players. One of those she found was Best, who was then a junior at St. Michael's.
The two played on Exodus' first girls team in 1998, and Best helped Paschall land the coaching job at St. Michael's when then-coach Jennifer Maxon - now the school's athletic director - took a maternity leave in 2000.
Paschall shut down his boys program in 2002; Exodus now counts eight girls teams and has plans to revive a boys affiliate in Florida.
Paschall credits former Banneker HS coach Rodney Johnson, now Exodus' executive director, with changing the way he viewed girls basketball.
"Rodney told me to run a girls basketball team as if they were a boys squad," Paschall says. "So I did."
That means pursuing fast-break opportunities on offense and playing hard-nosed defense, traits that have become synonymous with Paschall-coached teams. Paschall's squads also tend to flaunt their coach's me-against-the-world mentality.
* * *
That was the case last season, when rumors began criss-crossing the Internet that he had instructed his Eagles to throw the Archdiocese 'AA' championship game against St. Peter's so they could avert a matchup with Christ the King on the Royals' home court if they reached the CHSAA state championship finals.
Paschall vehemently denied the charges, but quickly used them as a tool to get his players to focus on beating Christ the King in the opening round. He called the matchup "the Super Bowl," much to CK coach Bob Mackey's dismay, and said that the Eagles were tired of being regarded as "second-class citizens," adding that his players were "willing to die on that court" if that's what it was going to take.
His piercing words helped propel St. Michael's to a victory over CK, and the Eagles went on to defeat St. Peter's for their first-ever CHSAA state title.
Weeks later in Glens Falls, the Eagles faced PSAL and three-time defending state champion Bergtraum in the state Federation championship game. Paschall told his players that they were playing against Bergtraum's pedigree as well as the insignia on the Lady Blazers' jerseys.
The Eagles rallied from a 10-pointhalftime deficit to beat Bergtraum, adding their first state Federation championship to their most successful season to date.
The bunker mentality worked last year. But with the Eagles' core of Kentucky-bound guard Jennifer O'Neill, South Carolina-bound center Brittany Webb and sharpshooter Alyssia Rohlehr intact, what can Paschall possibly pull as motivation this time?
"People are saying what we did last season was a fluke," Paschall says. "So this time around, it's about legacy."
Nobody has made any public comments to that effect, but Paschall says none of that matters; the important thing is that the mission becomes ingrained in the minds of his players.
The Eagles are already buying in.
"People don't think we could do it again," Webb said. "They think we got lucky last year."
Some coaches, however, say they won't continue to accept Paschall's hard sell.
"He acts like he's the underdog and used and abused, which is not the case," says Mike Flynn, director of the Philly Belles summer squad. "He has the top team and the top players."
Mackey agrees. The longtime CK coach says he is tired of Paschall's conspiracy theories, that there's no place for such thinking
in the CHSAA.
"To say it's them against the world is a little ironic," Mackey says. "I'm a Catholic high school administrator. There's ways we do things. If (Paschall's) principal and athletic director allow him to act like that, then so be it. But it's not the way of the Catholic league."
But Paschall is not one to hold back; he frequently says what he feels, consequences be damned.
When members of SlamJam, a now-moribund girls hoops Internet message board, would aim insults at Paschall and his program, the Eagles coach was known to fire back, slinging his barbs until late into the night.
Paschall concedes that his swagger and attitude can "rub people the wrong way," but until those people get to know him, he says, they'll never really understand.
Kelley, Paschall's assistant, can attest.
"When I told people I was going to St. Mike's, they told me, 'Ron, don't do that to your reputation by coaching with him,'" Kelley says. "I always asked them, 'What is it that he did?' and nobody could ever answer me."
Using motivational triggers is one of Paschall's strong points, but it's nothing new. His former St. Michael's and Exodus players said they've always known him to have a back-to-the-wall mindset.
Kia Vaughn remembers. Paschall molded her into a solid player with Exodus. Vaughn graduated from St. Michael's in 2005 and went on to star at Rutgers, and recently completed her rookie season with the New York Liberty.
"I remember going against CK with Tina Charles and Carrem Gay, and Apache told me, 'They said you (stink), you can't play,'" says Vaughn, who's playing in Israel during the WNBA off-season. "Most of the time, he knew exactly how to push my buttons to get me so steamed up that I can run through walls for him."
Anjale Barrett, Vaughn's former high school teammate who's now a sophomore guard at Maryland, agrees.
"Even if we won, we had the mentality that everyone wanted us to fail," says Barrett, who graduated from St. Michael's in 2007. "It's just the type of person Apache is. He thinks everyone is against him from day one."
* * *
In many ways, coaching at St. Michael's keeps Paschall hungry.
The school's basketball court falls well short of regulation size, and the scoreboard has been stuck on 5:05 and 50-50 for several years. If the battered backboards and hardwood could talk, they'd beg to be upgraded.
The gym's modest setting strikes a chord with Paschall, despite the fact that he recently signed a new sponsorship deal with Under Armour.
He says most of his players come from low-income families, another subject he can relate to.
"I wouldn't have it any other way, coaching these kids," he says.
What separates him from coaches such as Mackey and Bergtraum coach Ed Grezinsky, he adds, is his ability to relate to kids on a more personal level.
"That's their disconnect," Paschall says of his coaching peers. "I can go uptown, get some soul food, play spades with their parents and talk about Eddie Murphy 'Raw,' because I come from that."
The Eagles understand the challenges inherent to repeating, and they know that teams will be trying to knock them off their perch.
Mackey insists there's no rivalry between CK and St. Michael's, pointing to the fact that the teams don't even meet during the regular season. Still, even Mackey will acknowledge that the Eagles are the hunted.
"Everyone in the city took aim at Christ the King," Mackey says. "Now, the shoes are on the other foot; we get to hunt. Somebody will get their hairs raised about that."
Paschall knows teams are going to be gunning for his Eagles, and he's about to give them more firepower: He is guaranteeing another CHSAA title.
"There's always stuff to motivate," Paschall says. " . . . Yeah, we're going to do it again. That's what God intended."
And that would give Apache a chip on the other shoulder as well.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/high_school/2009/11/22/2009-11-22_apache_paschall_st_michael.html#ixzz1HLjlQDBt
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