Meet Sam MacKay and Jim Jabir – the senior point guard and the veteran coach of the unbeaten University of Dayton women’s basketball team.
The Flyers are 12-0 going into today’s game at Bowling Green and are ranked No. 15 in the latest Associated Press poll, the highest national ranking in the program’s history.
You could say the two people who are the guiding forces of this team are like a sneaker-and-sweat socks version of Oscar and Felix — The Odd Couple — but MacKay prefers to go big screen.
“I’m from Philadelphia originally,” she said. “You know the Rocky movies there? Well, we’d be like the last movie — Rocky V — the one with the cocky young kid (heavyweight Tommy “Machine” Gunn) who says, ‘I’m all this and I’m that,’ and then the old Rocky comes in and says, ‘No, you’re not,’ and gives him training and teaches him about life.
“That’s the two of us. We sit back now and laugh at it, but the truth is we’ve been going round after round after round, so much so that when I leave here he’s not gonna be leaving my life. I’ll probably take him to my grave.”
Then again, it once looked as if she’d send him to his first.
Jabir is old school. MacKay has a penchant for machine-gun flash that drives him nuts.
“She’s got a lot of skill, but there’s also a lot of junk to her game,” he said. “She’s a flashy type of kid and in years past she’d play a couple of minutes and try to do something really cool with the ball, something really flashy and end up throwing it away and I’d yank her out of there as fast as I could.”
MacKay said she understands where her coach is coming from, but she also tried to explain where she’s been: “Growing up, I always played with guys so the ‘easy’ pass wasn’t always easy and a no-look pass got it there. I had to find a way and that became who I was and the way I played, though Coach didn’t necessarily always like it.”
With a pause and a smile, she added: “I think there a part of it he does like because when it goes well he’s all about it. But the second it doesn’t, it’s, ‘You need to be less flashy.’ ”
Those mindsets have led to a rocky — not Balboa — road at times.
“I’ll never forget one of our first practices when I got here, he said my transfer papers would be waiting for me if I didn’t get back on defense one more time,” MacKay said. “I always remember that. I had some smart-aleck comment and he has the same type of humor and came right back and that’s the love-hate deal I was talking about.”
The situation got a little more serious the following year and during a conference in Jabir’s office she said she told the coach, “If this is the way it’s going to be, it’s time for me to go. And he was kind of at the same point and said he’d help me find a new school.”
Yet, after three years as a back-up to Patricie Lalor (but the star of Jabir’s doghouse), Sam MacKay is now the Flyers’ leader in assists, steals and 3-point field goals. She’s second on the team in minutes (29.3 per game) and free-throw percentage and third in scoring (11.0 ppg.) Her assist-to-turnover ratio is one of the best in Division I basketball.
Best of all, she’s become the rudder on a team with six freshmen.
“She’s our catalyst,” Jabir said. “She sets everything up and has hit huge shots for us. There’s an argument for her being our MVP.”
Philly in her blood
Although Jabir recruited her out of Dublin Coffman High School, where she holds multiple school records and was the Ohio Central Conference player of the year as a senior, MacKay celebrates her Philadelphia roots.
Her mom grew up there, her dad still lives there and she was born and raised there until she was 6. And she now returns in the summer to play pick-up basketball games with a collection of college players who still live there.
“People joke with me all the time,” she said. “They go, ‘You grew up in Dublin, not Philly,’ but I think the blood is just in me. My mom didn’t raise me like a Dublin child. I wasn’t in that nice bubble. I had that don’t-back-down Philly outlook.”
She came to Ohio when her mother remarried Ron Richards, who was involved in the drag racing world and worked as the crew chief for five-time world champion Jegs Coughlin Jr.
Initially she was interested in Villanova but said that offer fell through when the Wildcats coach came to see one of her games and realized, at 5-foot-8, she wasn’t big enough or equipped to play the two and three positions. Kent State also had a lot of interest, as did Memphis, but she said she was sold on UD the first time she came to visit:
“I absolutely loved it. The family atmosphere, the coaching staff, everything. Dayton became the standard everybody else had to make.
“When Coach Jabir recruited me, he was definitely selling his school and the program, but he was more selling life. There wasn’t that pressure like I got from some schools. He talked about what should make a player comfortable with their choice and if it wasn’t his school, it was OK. I liked that.”
And then came a few of those behind-the-back and no-look passes and, well, the comfort level changed.
‘Always a little edge’
“We’ve been told we’re the same person,” MacKay said with a laugh. “Becky, our team’s sports psychologist, has had conversations with each of us and said, ‘You know you both need to take a breath and calm down. You react the same way.’
“Underneath, I know he’s right about most of it, and eventually I come around, but it’s hard. I don’t give in. Inside I always said, there’s this little piece of me I’m not giving up. He won’t get that part of me.”
And Jabir admits that’s what he likes about her: “She’s always had that little edge to her, that twinkle in her eye. It’s an indomitable spirit.”
MacKay needed that her first three years at UD. Although she played in 84 games, she never started. Her first two seasons she averaged about nine minutes a game and last season that went to 14.6.
Coming into this season, though, she – and Jabir – knew everything would change. Lalor had graduated and she was the only point guard with experience.
Jabir pressed her to get into better shape and she took his suggestion to heart. She met with trainer Jaime Potter and got a new diet to follow and then went through rigorous spring workouts with Kendel Ross, the Flyers’ strength and conditioning coach.
She then decided to spend the summer in Philadelphia, where she trained regularly with several college players from there and played twice-weekly pick-up games at Drexel University, which draws 20 to 30 top players on certain nights.
Through it all she stuck to her diet and conditioning and reported back here 20 pounds lighter than last season.
Rocky beginning
Although the Flyers are having a banner year, it didn’t look that promising at the start when they lost their lone exhibition game to Division II powerhouse Ashland at UD Arena.
“The lights came on, the jerseys came on, the fans were there and everyone kind of freaked out,” MacKay said. “The freshmen freaked and we couldn’t reel them in and then we freaked with them. We were embarrassed and yet it served us well. The next week we had so much improvement and it’s kept going.”
After beating BCS schools DePaul (10-3), Arizona State (7-4), Vanderbilt (9-3) and Michigan State (11-3), as well as 10-1 Toledo and 8-4 Akron, the Flyers are ranked sixth nationally in RPI, one of the prime factors when it comes to NCAA tournament consideration.
“The personality level of this team is more in your face,” MacKay said. “If there’s a problem, it’s handled up front, not whispered about. We’re more like guys. We go right at each other, then it’s over and we’re friends five minutes later. You don’t find that on a lot of girls teams.
“There’s a type of boldness this year. The freshmen are fearless because they just don’t any better. And the returnees — all of us had something to prove. Besides (Andrea) Hoover, no one ever really had stepped out. They had a game here or there, but nothing continual.”
“As for me, maybe I have changed, though coach still yells at me for trying to be too flashy. He says, ‘You’re trying to get on ESPN instead of just making the simple pass.’ But that’s just him and me.”
And that’s what she thought was happening when she was walking out of practice with two teammates and Jabir, who was huddled with a reporter across the court, called out:
“Hey Sam, you need to stay for a minute, OK?”
She answered a bit hesitantly, then trudged up the Cronin Center steps to his office to await what she figured was the inevitable.
When Jabir finished talking, he had to go search for her to bring her back for this interview.
“I thought I was going to get yelled at again for something,” she said with noticeable relief.
Told that her coach had just suggested she was the MVP of the team, she beamed without saying a word.
In a love-hate relationship, this was the look of love.
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