St. Thomas More head coach Dave Hollenbeck looks on from the sidelines during the Class A championship game on March 19. STM beat Viborg/Hurley and won its third state title in six years, all have come under the guidance of Hollenbeck. (Photo Kevin Cox/IDS)

EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s almost two weeks since St. Thomas More captured the Class A basketball title. With a few good night’s of sleep, and a few days of perspective, Cavalier head coach Dave Hollenbeck sat down with IDS reporter Sam Hurst for a lengthy interview about what it takes to build a championship program. In the course of their conversation, Hollenbeck talks about the importance of defense, how weight-lifting has changed the game, his support for a shot clock in Class A basketball, and his desire to play Rapid City Stevens and Central High Schools.

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Sam Hurst: Congratulations Coach. Let’s start with the fact that you’ve won three championships in the last six years. You’re building a tradition at STM. But a coach needs time to build a program, to put his system in place, and not be measured by one season. Time is a hard thing to find these days.

Dave Hollenbeck: Yes. It takes time. This goes back to the way society is these days. Today’s youth, and today’s parents, want instant success and instant gratification. When I took the job 15 years ago I wanted to build a tradition. I wanted to get to where we had a tradition of being successful. And that took a lot of time. Those first seven years it took a lot to get over the hump. We struggled getting out of the district. We struggled getting to the state tournament. But now that we’ve been there and done that, we have a high expectation that filters down to our younger kids. They see what we’re doing. And they see how successful we’ve been. But with that it puts a pretty big target on us all the time. Everywhere we go people really give us their best shot. Everyone wants to beat us.

Sam Hurst: Maybe the competition makes you better.

Dave Hollenbeck: Yes, it does.

Sam Hurst: You had some great senior players this year. I’m thinking of Duffy, Tucker, and Bassett. Was it their talent or the system they played in that won the championship?

Dave Hollenbeck: You’ve got to have talent to win championships.  That’s the bottom line. You’ve gotta have good players.

Sam Hurst: A system can’t win a championship?

Dave Hollenbeck: No. But continuity and a system of high expectations can help secure the opportunity of winning a championship. If you don’t have the right things in place, good talent can get beat. But you’re not going to win without talent. It’s got to be a combination of both.

One of the things about our program is that we’ve had continuity within our coaching staff. I have great coaches.

Sam Hurst: Did you know you had a team that could win a championship this year?

Dave Hollenbeck: We knew we were going to be a good team this year. We just didn’t know if we could win it or not because this was such a good year for ‘A’ basketball. There were so many good teams. We knew that whoever won this was winning something really special because of how good the competition was.

Hollenbeck and senior Liam Duffy celebrate after STM knocked off Viborg/Hurley and won the Class A state title on March 19. (Photo Kevin Cox/IDS)

Sam Hurst: So how about next year? How are you going to keep the expectations high when you lose Duffy, Tucker and Bassett?

Dave Hollenbeck: Obviously, you can’t replace a front line like that. Not only are those guys big, but they are good. We just have to do things a little different next year. We have to change our style a little bit. It involves more of a perimeter-oriented lineup, obviously, because we lose so much size. But we’ve got some good kids coming back, 6’6” and 6’5”, 6’4”. They are big enough provided that we get better. We’ll be competitive. Obviously to be as good as we were this year is very difficult. We have a lot of work to do.

But I love the kids I have coming up because they are hard working kids. In fact, I have to give them a lot of credit for this championship because they were the ones in practice every day beating on these five guys who did all the playing in the state tournament. It’s going to be their turn next year. I know how tough they are. These guys were brutal in practice. They made our starting lineup better. I swear today that that’s a big part of why we won the state championship.

Sam Hurst: Defense is a badge of honor for you, isn’t it?

Dave Hollenbeck: Yes. Our view is that if you can’t defend you will never win the big game. If you can defend, you can beat any team that plays run-and-gun and scores a lot of points. In today’s game there are four different ways to guard a screen. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, even the NBA couldn’t guard Stockton’s and Malone’s screens. But now they can. Partially it’s because they have changed the rules so that you can zone now in the NBA. But the fact of the matter is that defensive schemes have become so much more complex than they used to be. There are so many different ways to defend now. Those high scoring teams get shut down by good defensive teams.

We get criticized for not scoring a lot of points. But we limit the entire game’s possessions by how well we defend. We don’t give up easy baskets just so we can turn around and go score again. We defend, defend, defend.

People think we don’t want a shot clock. We would love to have a shot clock so that we only have to defend for thirty seconds. The shot clock plays into defensive-minded systems. I’d love to have a shot clock. If you can defend those first 25 seconds real well, the shot clock is in your favor because you’re going to force the other team to jack up a shot.

Sam Hurst: So why don’t you have a shot clock in ‘A’?

Dave Hollenbeck: I think in South Dakota it comes down to money. There are only sixteen or seventeen ‘AA’ schools. I don’t know what the cost is. Is it $5,000 to put the whole system in? But the ‘B’ and ‘A’ schools voted it down. I don’t know if it is so much on the principle of it or the cost of it.

Brandon Bassett is a shining example that weight lifting works in high school hoops. (Photo Kevin Cox/IDS)

Sam Hurst: One of the biggest changes in high school basketball has been that the players are so much stronger. It seems like teams that don’t lift weights these days are at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Dave Hollenbeck: Yes, definitely. We’ve got our own weight guy, Scott Benson, who works our guys out at his house. He takes them in 10, 12,14 at a time. That’s a huge advantage for us. I know that other schools are lifting. And some have way better weight facilities than we do. Our guys also do a lot of the Warwick Workouts, which allows them to develop the necessary skills in the off-season. Basketball is a sport of skill. But every day it is becoming equally important to have the strength. We saw it in the tournament. Those Chester kids, those Roncalli and Viborg kids, they are big and strong.

The whole need to lift weights goes back to the style of basketball these days compared to the 70s and 80s when I played. We had way different bodies. We weren’t big and physically strong. It was more of a finesse game. I think the game was called a little different back then. Today’s games are a lot more physical. I think the officials allow it to be more physical. So now if you are going to win in that type of environment you better lift weights.

Sam Hurst: Brandon Bassett’s strength got you a ton of points in the paint.

Dave Hollenbeck: Yes. Bassett is one of the players who bought in to the lifting side of it. Not every kid has bought in to that. They don’t understand how important it is. The further you get into the playoffs, the more important it becomes.

Sam Hurst: Brandon was so impressive because he was not just bulk. He had some athleticism and you have to figure that some of his athleticism was because of weight-lifting; taking the bulk and turning it into strength.

Dave Hollenbeck: That’s where Scott Benson has been so important to our program. He’s not only making them stronger, he’s making them more athletic. He’s working their cores and the athletic muscles. They can jump a little better. They’re a little quicker. And they are stronger. That gets back to ‘Do you have to have superstars to win ball games?’ I think if we can train them right and get their minds right, and get them in the right situations, you don’t have to have superstars.  You have to have good players, but there are a lot of things that we can overcome.

Hollenbeck is well-known for bringing his passion for basketball to the sidelines. (Photo Kevin Cox/IDS)

Sam Hurst: You are so animated on the sidelines. You’re always waving your hands. Are you calling plays? What are you doing?

Dave Hollenbeck: I get caught up in the game. I’m in to it. I love the game. I have passion for it. I want the kids to know that.  When I had my arms out, that particular night against Viborg, we were playing zone defense, so I was trying to get them to spread out. But we also have a lot of plays. We have a very complex system. We have so many set plays against zone and man-to-man. That’s part of the way the game has changed. Defenses have gotten so good that you have to find ways to score. You can’t just run up and down the floor and say ‘Okay we’re going to turn the horses loose, and hit a bunch of shots.’ That doesn’t work. It might work against some teams on your schedule, but in the end, I love to play those teams who think they are going to run up and down on us because we are going to take away all of your lay ups. Then, we’re going to go out and defend the three-point line. So what are you going to do if you don’t have a plan in place so that you can manufacture points?

A team may be able to get up and down, but they better be prepared when that up and down gets shut down. And against good teams they will shut that down.

Sam Hurst: You are seen by a lot of people as more of a college coach than a high school coach. You talk about the complexity of your system. Are you building a program at St. Thomas More that expects more out of your players than other high school programs can expect?

Dave Hollenbeck: You’re right. We’re trying to prepare these kids for college. I’ll be honest with you. We demand it in the classroom. And these guys perform in the classroom like it’s college prep. When they come to the basketball floor, we expect the same thing.  If I have guys who are good enough to play college basketball, when they get recruited and they show up to play college basketball, I want them to be successful. I do not want them to have to transfer or leave or whatever because they couldn’t handle it. I don’t want them to leave the game. So…yeah. Our system is complex. I was a college coach. My assistant coach was a college coach. We talk to college coaches. We go to clinics a lot.

Sam Hurst: So with the program you’ve built, have you ever thought about playing “AA” schools? Have you ever thought about how you would stack up?

Dave Hollenbeck: We have played “AA” schools over the years. Our first big win at St. Thomas More was back in January, 1997. It was 9 below outside. We were playing Spearfish and they were ranked #3. They came and played us at our gym. That night Padraic Duffy hit five threes. We hit a last second shot and won the game. The stands cleared out onto the floor. It was just huge excitement. That was the night I met Liam Duffy and his brother Brandon, and their father Dan. After that game they came down on the floor. They were tiny. Dan was holding their hands. Liam was a tiny little squirt, he must have been about four years old.  Last year we went down and got whipped by O’Gorman. They beat us by 14 in the Schooler Classic. They whipped us kind of hard because we weren’t quite prepared for their physical play. But then we went back to Sioux Falls a couple of weeks later and played Sioux Falls Washington. I think at one point in the third quarter we had them down 28. They were ranked four or five in “AA”. We ended up defeating them handily.

We want to play the “AA’s”–especially locally. To me it makes no sense that we don’t play them. I think it would be great for the community.

If we were to play Central or Stevens at the Civic Center, how many thousands of dollars would that generate for the programs? Now subtract the costs to taxpayers to load the teams on a bus and drive them East River. Erase that and then add $10,000 for playing St. Thomas More where you don’t have to start up the bus. To me as a taxpayer in difficult times, when we’re making all these cuts in schools, why not have St. Thomas More play Stevens and Central once a year at the Civic Center?

Sam Hurst: There are no SDHSAA rules that would block you from playing across class lines?

Dave Hollenbeck: No. None. If Darren Paulson (Central High School Activities Director) wants to play St. Thomas More, I’ve got a game open on my schedule for next year. All he has to do is schedule it. Same thing with Stevens. I have two open games on my schedule. I’ve filled 18 out of 20 and I’ll play Central and Stevens next year for the other two if they would agree to it, but it’s up to them.