Obsession 2 Coach Part IV Here we go… I spent my college years and graduated from a Christian School (Point Loma Nazarene University) in San Diego, so at 23 years old, I was somewhat sheltered from the real world. What I would experience living in San Francisco, on $12,000 a year, would flush my blinders right down the toilet. Here I was in San Francisco with a job, but no money. I needed to find a paying job FAST to enable me to focus on my real job…Volunteer Assistant Basketball Coach @ San Francisco State University. At the time, that was the greatest job title I could ever want. It was August 1982 and I was lucky enough to land an Athletic Director’s job at a small private high school, Bridgemont High, in downtown San Francisco. With an enrollment of only 60+ students I was offered $12,000 a year which included double duty as the Physical Education teacher. My teaching job was a joke because the school was located in the old Cogswell College building with NO facilities for P.E.
Cogswell College, home to Bridgemont High in 1982–1983. BHS took half of one floor By now, I had already spent a few weeks with my “new dad”, Coach Wilson. His ingenuity and creativity had started to rub off on me, so I came up with the idea of holding PE class in the streets of San Francisco. “Brilliant”, I thought. I could send the students off each period running amongst traffic, hookers and pimps and I could spend the hour working on my career as a college basketball coach. I put the plan into action and my bosses at Bridgemont “loved my assertiveness and drive”. (Wonder what they’d have thought if they knew I spent the day in my studio apartment down the street, making recruiting calls and writing letters to recruits all over the city while Johnny, Bobby and Stan were being educated by Miss Pussy Galore and company in alleys all over San Francisco.) I WAS SET! I had the perfect paying job to fund my real job…which was to learn EVERYTHING I could from Coach Wilson. AND I DID! Coach Wilson was different. He looked at everything from a different angle than most people. I learned that and grasped onto it from day one. It was like I had “found home”. HE made sense and so did EVERY crazy idea he had. I wasn’t about to suggest things or new ideas for his program, but I sure as hell did as Athletic Director at BHS. And as it turned out, the ideas I got