100% Cotten - UNCLE MIKE
12/17/2004 12:00:00 AM | General
Dec. 17, 2004
If I were a professional placement person who specialized in finding the right job for the right person, I certainly never would suggest that Mike Petersen be a high jump or pole vault coach.
He'd set the bar too high. But he can't help it - it's his nature.
Through their first seven games, the Wake Forest women's team and its new "nutjob" coach - his word not mine - had yet to be beaten, forging the best record for the women's program in almost two decades.
"My goal is to win every game," Petersen said prior to his team's junket to Hawaii where the Deacs would face a ranked Houston team and the homestanding Rainbows. "I look at our schedule, and I think we ought to go 29-0. It probably won't happen, but that's just me. I want our players to think that way, too - that every single game is an opportunity for us to win. We're getting more comfortable with what we're doing, but we still have an awfully long way to go."
From day one on the job at Wake Forest Petersen has preached a hard-hat mentality. That showing up for work every day ready to put in a full day would produce dividends. And he's been right.
"We're pretty demanding in terms of the level of effort we ask for," Petersen admits. "But when you reinforce that with wins then it gets easier to get them back in to the gym and ask them to work hard again. The wins have been good for our players from the standpoint of all this nonsense they put up with the knucklehead coach they've got is paying off."
Petersen's humor and self-deprecating style have made him an instant hit with the Wake Forest family - including the student body. He's been known to be right there in the midst of the students at men's games with advice for the referees. He's "hair, teeth and eyeballs" as one of my high school football coaches used to say. That's Tennessee-talk for meaning he's all over the lot.
"I'm going to come to the gym every day with energy," Petersen says unapologetically, "because I love it. All I ask our players to do is match my energy level. If they match me every day good things will happen."
"My expectation for how hard we should work and play is really high. And my tolerance for not doing those things is really low. The players sensed that right away."
I'm sure it didn't take a group of young women with the intelligence it takes to be a successful Wake Forest student very long to "sense" in what direction and at what speed Petersen was heading the day he stepped on campus. He's not exactly what I would call subtle. The more I think about it, there is absolutely no way Petersen left any room for "sensing" when he laid out the grand plan. He told his team the way it was going to be.
"If you would have asked my team this past spring - after the first day of conditioning - the players would have said they had inherited a total nutjob," Petersen admits. "I'm like their crazy uncle they don't talk about much but kind of like to visit only on the holidays."
And so the Wake Forest women's team and its crazy uncle-of-a-coach head to Paradise basking in the Pacific sun and the glow of a perfect 7-0 record and dreaming of that elusive 29-0 standard to which Petersen aspires. Will it really happen? I doubt it. Not this season anyway. But the team with the new work ethic is laying bricks.
"The foundation for my program has to be that we're going to play as hard as we can possibly play every time we take the floor," Petersen says. "The rest of it will take care of itself."
The bar has been raised.
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