By Grant Pepper
On our way back to Dre White's office we cut through the Ada High School boys' locker room.
It was there, in that locker room, where White wrote the date “February 19, 2016” on the whiteboard last week leading up to the boys basketball team’s first conference game of the season -- a home bout with local rival Allen East last Friday.
He followed that date with a number, “665.” It had been 665 days since that date, nearly two years ago, which was the last time Ada had won a Northwest Conference basketball game.
Following an 0-8 finish in the NWC last season, this was a game that White and the Bulldogs had been looking forward to since the offseason began. They wanted nothing more than to erase that “665” from the board after a win on Friday.
And after 32 minutes of stingy defense, which led to a 40-32 win, they did just that. The Bulldogs went up 15-5 after one quarter and never looked back.
“It was a big win for us,” White said with a grin that told you he was underselling the game’s magnitude. “It was nice to come in after the game and erase that 665 off the board and put 0 on there. And to be where we are right now, 1-0 in the league, you can never complain about that.”
It was White’s first conference win since he was hired last season, and it is a step towards one of the team’s goals this year -- to get back to the .500 mark in the NWC.
“We set some realistic goals -- you know, we’re not going to go from 0-8 in the league to winning the league,” White said. “But we really do think we can compete right around the middle of the league and have right around a .500 record in the league, so we need to start taking steps in the right direction.”
The Bulldogs went 4-19 last year, losing their last seven games in a season that was laden with frustration and the signs of a program deeply entrenched in the rebuilding process.
While he couldn’t predict such a rough start, White knew what he was walking into. But that didn’t make his first season at the helm any easier.
After all, as much as White was new to coaching, he was even less accustomed to losing.
Played for Bath and Ohio Wesleyan
Dre White was hired 18 months ago. A native of Lima, White graduated from Bath High School in 2010, where he was a two-time first team All-WBL hooper. He then played at Division III Ohio Wesleyan University, where he was a pivotal piece on the Battling Bishops’ three straight 20-win teams (from 2012-2014).
White studied exercise science at OWU and didn’t plan to get into coaching right away. “Plan A,” as he calls it, was to go to PT school and become a physical therapist. When that didn’t work out, however, he considered the possibility of jumping into coaching alongside his day job.
“When I was playing in college, I loved basketball and hadn’t known anything else, so I had a hard time seeing [myself] get away from it. So I thought this could be an extension of basketball for me,” White said. “But I guess I saw it more as a down-the-road kind of thing, not getting my first head coaching job at 23 years old. It was a little eye-opening for me at first.”
At 23, White stepped into a program in limbo. Bulldog basketball had gone from being an NWC stalwart from 2005-2009, which included a state semifinal run in 2009, to suffering six losing seasons in the seven years since. They had graduated their two leading playmakers from the year before in Blake Willeke and Brayden Sautter, and White’s June hiring made it difficult for him to run a full-fledged offseason program leading up to his first season.
“Coming in here, I knew we were going to struggle,” White said. “I knew we were going to go through the rebuilding phase.”
But White was up for the challenge. After serving as a varsity assistant with the Allen East girls' basketball team for two years after college, White accepted a position with the Bath girls' program as a varsity assistant in the summer of 2016. One week later, however, he was offered the Ada job. He took it immediately.
“One thing led to another and here I am,” White said with a chuckle.
After three straight NCAA Tournament appearances at Ohio Wesleyan, playing for a program that suffered just 28 total losses in White’s four years there, the transition last year wasn’t always easy.
White said that he had to learn to be more patient, more understanding. He had to learn to enjoy the process of improvement more than ever before.
“The biggest way I’ve progressed is to be more understanding, trying to be more positive,” White said. “Coming back the next day with the same mindset of embracing the process, or respecting the process of what it’s going to take to get this thing turned around.”
Despite that outlook, however, you could see the frustration building on the sideline during Ada’s slide last season. White, just two years removed from performing at his peak, was forced to direct traffic on the bench in a suit and tie.
“When you’re playing, you can make it happen. When you’re coaching, you have to prepare for them to make it happen,” Andy Winters, who played alongside White for three years at Ohio Wesleyan and is now an assistant coach at Capital University, said.
Another challenge that White faced as a young head coach was earning the respect of his players -- some of whom were just five years younger.
White says that he has to ride the fine line between being the fun, young coach and the coach that has no command over his team. He has to work this balance alongside JV coach Jacob Sherrick, who was just 19 last year when White asked him and his father, Rick, to be a part of his staff (he had worked with both of them at Allen East).
“I always tell [Jacob], it’s difficult for us being young,” White said. “Because some people say, ‘They’re young, they don’t know what they’re doing.’ I always tell him that it could be our biggest strength or our biggest weakness. And I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of making it a strength.”
Seasoned perspective
Even as a young head coach, sometimes decades younger than the parents of his players, White approaches his job with a seasoned perspective.
In his day job, White runs a youth program at Goodwill Easter Seals in Lima for 16-24 year-olds. He helps at-risk youth from Lima.
“For the most part, [Ada] is a really well-rounded community. We have a campus in our community. So these are kids where the majority of them are coming from educated families who are familiar with a college environment, a college town,” White said.
Just as White spends his days providing structure for troubled teens, he spends his nights figuring out how to rebuild a basketball program that hasn’t been accustomed to winning lately.
After last year’s first round state tournament loss to New Bremen, who had won just one game all season heading into that matchup at Coldwater High School, White told his players in the locker room that he would need their help. He would need their buy-in just as much as they’d need his.
“I sat them down after our tournament game last year at Coldwater, and I said, ‘The reason you guys have success in football is how much you guys buy in,’” White said. “And we’re starting to have that here, we had decent numbers this fall with the lifting and conditioning. We’ve had guys start to buy in, but it’s going to take some time. It’s just a matter of keeping them engaged, keeping them coming back for more. Because we’re going to see some tough times here for a little bit, but we’re taking steps in the right direction.”
White was able to have full control over the team’s training this past offseason, conducting regular lifting, conditioning and skill sessions over the spring, summer and fall. He got the team into a Wednesday night league this summer where they played against some of the area’s top competition -- the likes of Perry, Elida and Lima Central Catholic.
“We struggled, but we’ve got to see those kind of teams to get better,” White said. “I’m a firm believer that you have to play against better competition to become a better player.”
White also used his local connections to bring in University of Findlay All-American Taren Sullivan, also a Bath alum, to work with Ada junior Connor Frazier on his post game. He took the team to Capital, where Winters and the Crusader coaching staff gave the team a taste of the college life.
As White put into getting his team better this offseason, came luck along the way. Senior quarterback-turned-shooting-guard Seth Conley decided to come out for the team this year, a pleasant surprise for White and a team that is seeking leadership. 6’7 senior Seven Williams, who moved to Texas after playing for Ada in junior high, transferred back to his hometown and will be eligible after the midway point in the season -- the 11-game mark -- which will provide a potentially lethal high low between himself and the 6’5 Frazier.
"We have to buy into the defensive game"
As White reclines in his chair in his office, he seems relaxed. He has a film session with his team in 15 minutes but is more than willing to talk about pretty much anything. This is far different from his persona on the bench, where he will jump and wave and implore his team to play defense.
Sometimes during games, one can spot White in a defensive stance, guiding his players through possessions on that end of the court. Defense has been a focus this season, as White said bluntly that “we have to buy into the defensive end because we are going to struggle some offensively.”
The team graduated their two leading scorers from last season and is still finding their way on the offensive end of the court, with new faces needing to step up in scoring production this season. With that offensive inexperience, White says that the need for his team to play with defensive intensity has increased.
“We’re still finding ourself on offense, and I think that’s coming. They’re starting to see what works and what doesn’t. But the one constant you can always have is intensity on the defensive end,” White said.
This defense-first philosophy makes sense, considering that White was Ohio Wesleyan’s lockdown defender back in his college days, according to head coach Mike DeWitt. White led the North Coast Athletic Conference in steals during his senior season, averaging nearly two per game.
“He was a great defender for us, and one of the best defenders in the NCAC in his time here,” DeWitt recalled. “We would pretty much always put him on the other team’s best perimeter player, and more often than not, he would hold that person below his scoring average.”
In Ada’s two wins this season, they have allowed 35 and 32 points, respectively. Last season, Ada held just one team under 40 points. It’s clear that White’s approach is starting to rub off on this young team.
And for now, only one number matters. Zero. The number that was on the whiteboard last Friday, symbolizing the fresh start that this program needed. It was a number that took a year to earn, and one that White and the Bulldogs wish to keep.
The 25 year-old head coach who once considered coaching to be a “down-the-road” venture, who isn’t used to losing, and who is giving his players every opportunity imaginable to play against the best in order to be the best, can recline for a second -- Ada is currently tied for first place in the conference.
On Friday night, they traveled to Delphos Jefferson with the intention of staying there.
Follow Grant Pepper on Twitter: @GrantPepper
