1998-99 GIRL'S BASKETBALL RECAPS

June 19, 1999  

By Steve Beaudry, Leader-Telegram staff 

Pointing the way

Tireless coach LaBarbera a character with character

Randi Miller’s desperation 3-point shot clanked off the back of the rim. The basketball kangarooed high into the air and then plopped into Nicki Robinson’s waiting hands as the fourth-quarter buzzer sounded.

Coach LaBarbera

Robinson, Eau Claire North's point guard, happily heaved the ball toward the Hudson High School gymnasium's ceiling.

The calendar said Jan. 5. The scene on the court suggested some mixture of New Year's Eve, Mardi Gras and a jailbreak.

Pure pandemonium. North players were swarming Robinson and jumping around like kernels in a popper. Within seconds, some of the players' classmates had spilled from the bleachers onto the floor like scattered BBs, bouncing every which way.

Chico LaBarbera had seen enough.

The North girls basketball coach briskly weeded his way through the mass of gleeful humanity. Even from behind the scorer's table, a near-sighted, novice lip reader easily grasped LaBarbera's message.

"Calm down. … Calm down. … Get up. … Get up," a stoic LaBarbera said as he peeled his giddy players off each others’ backs, one by one. "Line up. … Line up. … Get in line now.

"Go shake hands with them."

With their 58-50 victory over Hudson last January, the Huskies defeated the defending WIAA Division 1 state champion. They halted the Raiders' 49-game Big Rivers Conference winning streak. They did it in under the Raiders’ roof. They notched their biggest regular-season victory in what would prove to be their winningest season in LaBarbera's 12 years at the helm.

But …

"Calm down," LaBarbera kept saying to his players. "Line up. Shake hands with them."

LaBarbera wouldn't allow his players to bask. At least, not in the crestfallen Hudson players’ presence.

"He let us celebrate that night in the locker room and on the bus and at McDonald’s," Robinson recalled Wednesday, "but he reminded us that he wasn’t pleased with how we acted on the court."

Win with grace and humility. Lose with grace and dignity. No Xs or Os in LaBarbera’s dog-eared playbooks were as important to him as good sportsmanship.

LaBarbera formally announced his resignation from his coaching positions at North and Eau Claire Memorial on Monday to devote more time to his wife and four children -- all of whom participate in sports.

With LaBarbera’s retirement, the city's high school coaching community lost a good sport. A patient teacher. An innovative strategist …

OK, OK. The list doesn’t stop. Look up "Coach Chico LaBarbera" in a thesaurus, and expect to find "infinity." Trying to define "Coach Chico LaBarbera" is like trying to divide by zero.

"Chico? Chico is by far the smartest, fairest, most structured, most poised, hardest-working coach I’ve ever had in any sport," Memorial senior Crystal Walker said.

"Yeah, right," LaBarbera said when informed of Walker’s assessment of him. "It figures she’d say something like that. She’s trying to butter me up."

Walker played second base on LaBarbera’s Old Abes softball team for four years. She also has dated LaBarbera’s oldest son, Mike, for four years.

"I was never able to break Chico’s softball curfews, obviously," Walker said. "But, other than that, he never takes any off-the-field stuff onto the field. He goes out of his way to make sure he doesn’t."

Still, LaBarbera’s players have applied his on-the-field and on-the-court teachings in other areas.

"He’s taught me -- and others, I’m sure -- that having a positive attitude is the key to everything in life," said Robinson, a 4.0 student. "With a positive attitude, you can accomplish almost anything. If you’ve got a negative attitude, you’ve already lost."

LaBarbera, whose 47th birthday is Saturday, began drawing up his blueprint for athletic success at Stevens Point Pacelli in 1979 -- a year after graduating from UW-Eau Claire. He took the reins of a Pacelli team that had had three head coaches in three years. In 1981-82, LaBarbera’s Cardinals fashioned a 21-3 record.

He left Stevens Point the next year to take a Spanish teaching job in Eau Claire at Memorial and DeLong Middle School. He became Memorial’s softball coach in 1985 and then, in 1987, accepted the herculean task of turning around the North girls basketball program. The Huskies’ three-year record prior to LaBarbera’s arrival was 5-56.

"That first year (at North), every game we won was treated like the galactic championship or something," said LaBarbera, whose 1987-88 Huskies finished 4-16.

North’s year-by-year improvement continued through 1992-93, when the Huskies finished 17-4 and won the first of two straight BRC titles under LaBarbera.

"He’s amazing," said Robinson, a student in LaBarbera’s Spanish class. "He’d pour everything he had into his class, and then he’d somehow have something left to use in his coaching.

Chico with Nicki Robinson Leader-Telegram Photo

"I’d walk by his classroom during lunch and see him taking a nap, and I’d know why."

"He doesn’t sleep at night," Walker said. "He’d either be writing up a test or preparing a play."

LaBarbera was that rare coach who adhered to the schedule of a p.m.-newspaper sportswriter (i.e., Dracula hours). To a sportswriter working at a p.m. paper, 2 a.m. means the same as 2 p.m. to a 9-to-5er.

"If you need something, call anytime except between 1 in the morning and 1:30," LaBarbera once told me. "I can’t miss Hogan’s Heroes."

If LaBarbera finds a few spare hours during his retirement, he might consider authoring a how-to book for coaches dealing with the media.

To this scribe, LaBarbera was always cooperative and never combative.

Sometimes he was complimentary. ("When you’re writing for Sports Illustrated, I’ll be able to point to your name and say, ‘Hey, I know that guy,’ " he said after a softball game on June 4, 1998.)

Sometimes he was comical. ("You need a haircut," he said on April 22, 1999.)

Sometimes he was critical. ("I have a problem with your All-Northwest girls basketball team," he said on March 31, 1999.)

LaBarbera often prefaced his answers to questions with "You can’t print this, but …" and he often closed with "I’m kidding when I say that." But he never ducked a query. And his answers always were engaging.

Chico LaBarbera was -- no, he is -- a character with character.