His car isn't packed with belongings from his previous address like some of students' cars. The rooms in his Ann Arbor home are no longer jumbled with boxes that are crowded inside dormitory pads. And he has his own Michigan e-mail address which new students will soon have the opportunity to use.
But Brian Ellerbe who has one full year under his belt as coach of the Michigan basketball team - the same squad that finished the season 25-9, captured the inaugural Big Ten Tournament title and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament - is treating his second season at the helm like a rookie.
Like a 34, soon-to-be 35 year-old Michigan freshman.
"Although I've been here for one year, it's like being in the job for the first time," Ellerbe said.
It all started for Ellerbe on May 29, 1997 when he joined the Wolverines as an assistant coach. But it was one October afternoon that truly signified the beginning for Ellerbe.
Athletic Director Tom Goss called a press conference on October 11, following the Michigan-Northwestern football game to announce the firing of then-coach Steve Fisher. The announcement came days after the University received the report from a Kansas City firm it hired that revealed minor NCAA violations.
Ellerbe was the newest member of the team, but in that press conference, Goss said Ellerbe and not 10-year assistant coach Brian Dutcher, would lead the team's practices until a new coach was chosen.
This was news to Ellerbe, who was still in the process of settling into his Ann Arbor home with his wife, Ingrid, and their four-year-old son Brian Jr. and two-year-old daughter Morgan Ashleigh, after Ellerbe spent the last three years as coach of Loyola (Md.). Because his radio and television were in boxes, he had no way of knowing his fate.
"I had just moved and we hadn't unpacked our boxes yet," Ellerbe said. "So I was looking for a radio to listen to the press conference. That was the quickest thing I could do was to turn on my ignition and listen to it in my car."
After a two-week coaching search that involved Goss talking to numerous candidates in person and over the phone, Goss decided to go with Ellerbe, but just as an interim coach.
Consider the situation Ellerbe was thrown into: he took the reins of a team that was completely recruited by and had total respect for Fisher, his top assistant, Brian Dutcher, who had been with the team for nearly a decade, was passed over for the job, an NCAA investigation of the program was pending, the Wolverines hadn't won in the NCAA Tournament in three years and recruiting would be all but impossible with the recruits knowing that the coaching situation at Michigan was not a stable one.
So not only did Ellerbe have to be a coach, but also a crisis management expert, a public relations man, a psychologist and a basketball doctor.
He had to do all those things knowing that if he didn't do his job well, he would be the next victim of a Goss press conference. And movers would be back.
He was not the man, but the man for the moment.
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| MARGARET MYERS/Daily After serving as head coach or assistant coach at five different schools in the past 10 years, Brian Ellerbe was selected as Michigan's head coach last fall. Ellerbe hopes his stay in Ann Arbor will be an extended one. |
Ellerbe attributed the success to his old coach's even-keel philosophy.
"I was always taught from (Rutgers coach) Bob Young, you can never be too high, you can never be too low," Ellerbe said. "You never beat the team down, you never take a loss out of proportion, and you never look at a win as the greatest thing in the world, because you've got to come back tomorrow and prepare."
And prepare he did, adjusting to old players - guards Travis Conlan and Louis Bullock, forwards Maceo Baston and Jerod Ward and center Robert Traylor - as a new coach. But the players who began the season feeling hurt by the Fisher firing adjusted quickly to Ellerbe's coaching style.
Or the lack thereof. Ellerbe let his veteran team do its own thing instead of breaking in something new.
Staying with the game plan, not forcing new ideas into a system that the players were used to, was the Ellerbe way. And it's a philosophy that he will stick to with the 1998-99 team, a squad that only returns Bullock and point guard Robbie Reid from last year's top six.
"I think you coach according to what your personnel is able to give you," Ellerbe said "I'm not going to stick a round peg into a square hole. We're not to the point where there is a set system and we're just going to plug kids in."
Baston and Traylor turned the paint into a black hole for the opposing players where opponents would rarely come out alive without a bump and a block.
Conlan and Reid showed their full support for Ellerbe following Michigan's second-round NCAA Tournament loss to UCLA in March. Goss said after the defeat that he would sit down with Ellerbe and then make a coaching decision in the following few weeks. Goss interviewed several candidates and reports had Goss choosing between Ellerbe, Seton Hall's Tommy Amaker and Oklahoma's Kelvin Sampson.
Traylor helped Ellerbe's cause by saying he would definitely not return to Michigan if Ellerbe was not hired. Of course, Traylor left to enter the NBA Draft, anyway, but Ellerbe says the support was especially kind.
This was the second coaching search circus for Ellerbe in five months.
Yet, he had no gut feeling if he thought Goss would give him the nod.
"You can sit in your office and agonize but that's not going to change what is ultimately going to happen one way or the other," Ellerbe said. "It was just a waiting game, there was nothing we could do."
Then, on March 20, Goss met with Ellerbe and they talked for three hours. Goss had made up his mind, Ellerbe was his guy. They would sign a four-year contract that would carry Ellerbe through the beginning of the 21st century.
And finally, after a full season and two coaching searches, the Capital Heights, Md., native, a man who served as an assistant or head coach at five different schools in the last 10 years, had something any coach craves. Stability.
"It's more of a real relief to know and understand that you have some stability," Ellerbe said.
So now he doesn't worry about moving.
"The good news is you have a job, now let's get to work," he said.
What Ellerbe has been doing to keep himself busy is remaining active in the recruiting process, coaching sophomores Josh Asselin and Brandon Smith on the Big Ten All-Star team, and having his players go through a spring and summer conditioning program.
It's fitting that the official beginning of the Brian Ellerbe era will get under way with a new start. Gone is his experienced senior class and Traylor is in the NBA.
Dutcher, Fisher's top assistant, is off looking of a job, while Ellerbe has brought in his own assistants.
But also vanished is the tarnished NCAA investigation, one of the basketball program's low points in several years. And with it's finality most likely comes the shift of the media from the off-court problems to on-court results.
Still here is the backcourt of Reid and Bullock, a duo Ellerbe calls "as good as any backcourt in America."
He's not moving out, but moving forward.
"My family loves Ann Arbor. and we'd like to stay around a while," Ellerbe said. "I've moved my family a good bit over the past years and we want to have a chance to establish some roots and hopefully have a great, great career at Michigan."
09-08-98
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