Word: wootten
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...boys' school run by the Trinitarian Order in Hyattsville, Md., ten miles from the White House. In recent years, the march from Washington's inner city has become a stampede. Los Angeles Lakers Forward Adrian Dantley, NBA rookie of the year last season with Buffalo, learned about Wootten from James Brown, who starred at De Matha before attending Harvard on a scholarship. At Wootten's suggestion, Dantley spent the summer before his freshman year boning up on his studies. By the time he graduated, he could meet Notre Dame's tough admissions standards...
Nearly a head shorter than his gangling charges, chubby and a bit owlish behind the plain frames of his glasses, Morgan Wootten looks more like a history teacher-which he is until afterschool practice begins-than the builder of a basketball dynasty. While still an undergraduate at Montgomery Junior College in suburban Washington, he was offered a coaching job at a Catholic boys' home. "I fell in love with coaching," Wootten says, "and changed my major from prelaw to education." Now 46, he has remained a high school coach despite a stream of offers from colleges-including Wake Forest...
...What Wootten strives to keep is a remarkable rapport with his players. When he began coaching in the '50s, the role model for his profession was a Marine drill instructor: shouting, short hair and slavish obedience. But Wootten encouraged his players to call him by his first name. Although he insists on tidy hair and coats and neckties on game day, Wootten allows the team to vote, by secret ballot, on training rules. His simple, if heretical explanation: "The team sets the rules because it's their team...
While he never breaches the privacy of his players' dressing room ("That's their home"), the door to Wootten's tiny, cluttered office is always open when there is trouble to be talked out. His kids, says Wootten, come to him with "every imaginable problem there is," from breaking up with a girlfriend to family troubles. Former players sometimes return to ask their old coach's advice about marital problems, or to seek help in finding a job. Says Bob Whitmore, who held Lew Alcindor to 16 points in the only game the New Yorker...
...Wootten is also a superb and innovative teacher of basketball. To get ready for Alcindor, Wootten had the 6 ft., 8 in. Whitmore hold a tennis racquet over his head all week long so that his teammates could practice arching shots that would float above even Lew's reach...