The season ended months ago, but it still haunts Shannon Sciria. The 30-year-old took over the Pembroke Academy boys’ basketball team last year and the Spartans suffered through an 0-17 campaign in 2015-16.
“I’ve had to sit around all summer with the record that we had and that kills me,” Sciria said. “It keeps me up at night how bad our season was, it really does.”
It’s a manner of speaking, but the truth is Sciria did not just “sit around” this summer. He traveled to the epicenter of the college basketball world, North Carolina’s Tobacco Road, and worked Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke basketball camp as he tried to make himself a better coach so he could help PA become a better team.
“I’ve applied to work the camp five or six times before, but it’s really competitive. They have north of 500 applicants for 65 spots,” Sciria said. “But they offered me a spot this year and it was really kind of mind-blowing. It was extremely humbling just to be around all these other great coaches, most of them from the Division I college level and junior college level, and then to be around Coach K and his staff and listen to him talk every day, my knowledge has just ballooned.”
Sciria was on the Duke campus from June 17-22. The days were long – 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. – as he ran the ball handling station for the 10-13 year-olds at the camp (the age range was 10-19, all boys), coached games, officiated games, helped with agility drills on the university’s track and monitored the dorms at night.
And in between all of that, he was asking questions, making connections and learning.
“I didn’t go down there to be shy,” said Sciria, who was an assistant with the women’s basketball team at St. Anselm for three years and for the women’s team at Southern New Hampshire University for two years before taking over the PA program. “There were a lot of people there that know the game a lot better than I do and I was trying to be a sponge the whole time. You certainly don’t have the opportunity to be around that many smart basketball brains and not take advantage of it. I was trying pick up things that we really needed to be better at at Pembroke.
“I ask my kids to be better, I ask them to put the work in during the summer, and if I’m asking them to put in the work, then I need put in the work as well.”
The kids definitely noticed.
“I thought it was awesome that he went down there,” said Noah Cummings, who became a starter for PA in the seventh game of last season as a freshman. “He’s always talking about what you can you do to be better, and he just wanted to learn from the best. … It definitely makes me want to get in the gym with all the guys and be ready for whatever he’s going to do this year because I know he’s working just as hard as the players are.”
Cummings also said he saw his coach working hard, and growing, during the course of their trying 2015-16 season.
“He’s a young guy and a new coach, and he always said he wants to grow as a coach,” Cummings said. “So he would see stuff he thought he needed to improve and he’d ask us what we thought and then do everything he could to change it. He definitely improved with a lot of stuff, like practices got harder and we responded to that. He was just mostly figuring out what he can do to make us better.”
Sciria knew he needed to learn more about breaking the press to make his PA team better, and he said he definitely picked up some pointers there. Apart from the mechanics of the game, Sciria also learned a lot about the intangibles of coach-player relationships, team building and leadership from one of the masters, Krzyzewski.
“Listening to Coach K every day was amazing,” Sciria said. “He would talk about his philosophies, the way he deals with players, the way he deals with other coaches and just his leadership style. I really feel like I grew immensely in those five days.”
Sciria spent more time talking with Krzyzewski’s assistants than the head coach himself, but during one of Krzyzewski’s talks it seemed like the words were being directed right at the Pembroke head man.
“Something Coach K said that really clicked with me was that when you coach a sport or play a sport, you have to deal with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and if you can’t accept that then you shouldn’t be playing or coaching,” Sciria said. “And we certainly were at the lowest of lows last year and I’m doing everything in my power to correct that.”
And with their coach leading by example, the rest of the Spartans are working to correct it, too.
“When I’m thinking about it I’m like, man, my freshman season was 0-17,” Cummings said. “But then I think, now it’s our team and we can focus on just getting better every year. And obviously you can’t go lower than 0-17, so we can build up now. I think it’s going to be a really good run the next three years, so I’ve been looking forward to it.”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at 369-3341 or at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20.)