Four days after he coached Pima College to the national championship game, Brian Peabody and assistant coaches Dylan Hidalgo and Mike Morgan got in a car and drove 870 miles to another Final Four.
This one is in San Antonio. This is the one where some of the coaches are paid about $75,000 a week.
Peabody was paid roughly $16,000 to coach Pima College to the NJCAA Division II championship game. There was no $25,000 bonus for being the Region I Coach of the Year, and no six-figure compensation for producing the best season in 35 years of PCC men’s basketball.
Some say the junior college coaching model is the last resort of sanity in a world of college basketball excesses. If you break it down into time on the job, Peabody was paid about $3.25 an hour to coach the Aztecs to a 31-5 season.
Better yet, he’s not complaining or campaigning for a raise.
“I love my situation; I love Tucson,” he says. “Obviously, I don’t make any money, but I love what I do. I love the challenge, all of it — to try to compete with the big boys is fun to me. People ask me if I’m applying for another job. No, I’m not applying for another job.”
All five of Peabody’s starters exhausted their PCC eligibility during the NJCAA championships in Danville, Illinois. If you think that’s daunting, you don’t know Peabody.
All five starters from last year’s NJCAA No. 7 team graduated after that season, too.
“With our system, you can be good every year,” he says. “We will be very good again next year. Our plan is to win the national championship.”
If there’s anyone who knows the difference between a winner and a loser, it’s Peabody.
His career record is 552-180, and that’s at every conceivable level over 28 years: Green Fields Country Day School, The Gregory School, Salpointe Catholic and Ironwood Ridge. But Peabody’s keenest perspective might’ve been learned from the worst season of his coaching career.
In 2003-04, Peabody agreed to coach at Pima. It was a career mistake, the worst timing possible. The Aztecs went 7-23 and they weren’t really that good.
He left after seven months on the job, part of the house-cleaning by former PCC chancellor Roy Flores, a toxic, one-man wrecking crew who laid waste to almost anything in his path.
Peabody and his plan to build a national championship basketball program at Pima were in Flores’ discordant path.
“Nobody wanted to step foot on the campus,” Peabody remembers. “It was a nightmare situation for everybody. After one season of walking on eggshells, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
Four years later, Peabody coached Ironwood Ridge to the state championship.
Four years after that he was back at Pima, reconstructing a program that had won three ACCAC games, total, in two seasons.
Peabody isn’t rubbing pennies together just to coach the Aztecs; he earns more than $16,000 a year and that’s because he’s a coachaholic. He operates the Just Hoops summer program, provides individual basketball instruction to Southern Arizonans, is a dynamic fundraiser and takes a day off about once every month.
His 16-hour drive to San Antonio this week was actually necessary time off.
“My phone died when we were at the national championships last week and I lost all of my contacts,” he says, with a tone of futility. “I couldn’t retrieve my password, so I lost everything: phone numbers to the guys I’m recruiting, phone numbers to all of my coaching contacts, to family and friends. I lost every contact from 25 years of coaching.
“Maybe all those hours in the car will give me time to get reconnected.”
Putting the Aztecs together again is already in progress.
Pima redshirted seven players this year, which is almost unprecedented in junior college basketball. At least four of them — former Gregory School guard Nick Rosquist, former Ironwood Ridge standout Cole Gerkin, ex-Tucson High players Jordan Robinson and Deondre Eason — are likely to join returning contributors Abram Carrasco, Jeremiah Bailey and Robert Wilson to give PCC another feared rotation.
After the Aztecs returned from the NJCAA championships, Peabody spent three busy days recruiting. He’s not aiming at the low branches. Among those who visited PCC this week was former UC San Diego forward Kennedy Koehler, a 6-foot 8-inch prospect who is strongly considering playing for the Aztecs in 2018-19.
Late March has always been a decompressing period for Peabody. He has gone to the NCAA Final Four every year dating to 2001, when Arizona played Duke for the national championship. It has been a journey like few others. Highs. Lows. Even an 8-22 season as an assistant coach at NCAA Division I Western Carolina.
“We were 1-21 in the ACCAC the year before I came back to Pima,” Peabody says. “This year we were 18-4. Now our campus is the place to be. I’d like to think our best years are in front of us.”
