Christian continuing Mount's coaching legacy

The lean, youthful-looking guy in the white T-shirt and basketball shorts hoisting 3-pointers before practice on the campus of Mount St. Mary's could easily have been mistaken for a player, if not for the whistle around his neck and the lanyard holding laminated practice notes.

At 31, Jamion Christian is still one of the youngest head coaches in Division I. But in two short years he's taken a team that one player described as "dull" and made it fast-paced and exciting. He's taken a team that was so bad it didn't even qualify for the Northeast Conference tournament, and guided it back to the NCAA tournament.

Amid the winning, he has taught his players about accountability, hard work, and the power of positive thinking, all the while molding them into a brotherhood.

Christian concedes he owes a debt to every coach he's encountered, but it's clear two of his predecessors at the Mount played critical roles in getting him where he is today.

It wasn't that long ago that the lean, youthful-looking guy on the practice court was a Mount St. Mary's player. The team's leading scorer one year. And even as his playing time dwindled, a passion for coaching was igniting.

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Christian is self-deprecating when the topic turns to his playing days at Mount St. Mary's.

"I came in here as a pass-first point guard and I left here as a poor-shooting 2 guard," he said Friday.

Christian arrived in 2000 and earned immediate playing time. He averaged a team-best 11.3 points per game as a sophomore and 8.3 as a junior, albeit playing for some pretty bad teams at the end of Jim Phelan's legendary 49-year tenure.

Although he said he said he planned a future in television at the time, looking back on some of Christian's post-game quotes, he sounded a little like the coach he would become.

"We can't afford to get down on our ourselves," he said after one loss.

"They go on a 7-0 run and we think we'll go on a 14-0 run. We don't think negatively," he said after another.

"We've got a long summer ahead of us. Guys have to work out hard and come out ready to win," he said at the conclusion of his sophomore season.

While wins were scarce, life lessons were plenty.

Christian said the professors at the school, many of whom are still there, embraced him and showed him how to be an exceptional student. And then there was Phelan, who assumed a critical role for a 17-year-old who was away from his parents and living on his own for the first time.

"I love Coach Phelan," Christian said, noting that he's trying to continue Phelan's legacy. "From the time I got here ... he's taught me something different. Last year, when we were really struggling, he'd come in the office and sit down and just talk to me. He wouldn't tell me what I should do and what I shouldn't do, he would just talk to me about different experiences he had."

Phelan retired after Christian's junior year and then-assistant Milan Brown took over. With one year of eligibility remaining, without as much talent as some of the younger players in the program, Christian went to the bench.

The former starter barely ever played. But he never checked out. He always felt he was able to contribute. For that, he credits Brown, with whom he remains close.

"Milan did just an unbelievable job making sure I stayed connected with our team," Christian said.

He recalled Brown allowing him to help with scouting reports and to address the team. He said he loved watching the younger players get better, and he learned how to watch film.

"I really just started loving coaching," he said. "Ever since I went through that experience, I didn't get a chance to play very much, but I think I turned it into a big-time positive."

The way Christian handled that year stayed with Brown. When the Mount won the NEC title in 2008, Brown sent Christian a text that read: "Your contributions helped us get there."

When Christian got the Mount job in 2012, Brown, who left to coach at Holy Cross in 2010, returned to Emmitsburg for Christian's introduction to the media and alumni and praised Christian's leadership qualities and basketball IQ.

"He is going to bring a ton of competitive energy to recruiting, practices and preparation," Brown said at the time.

That he has.

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Mount St. Mary's went 19-42 under Robert Burke in the two years between Brown and Christian. Several players quit and many simply said playing wasn't much fun.

Senior Rashad Whack remembers the first time he heard Christian speak.

"You could see just from him talking, not even coaching, that it was going in the right direction," Whack said. "He has a great personality. His character, he was great to everyone. He was young and energetic, so I think that carried over to everyone and gave everyone new life."

Senior Sam Prescott remembers the first practice Christian ran.

"The first workout, I was exhausted," Prescott said. "I thought I was already one of the better players on the team. Then, the guy comes in and shows me what a real workout looks like. I'm tired, exhausted, frustrated. But he was very patient with us. He understood that everything wasn't going to come right away."

That youthful energy ran through the team. It was hard, but basketball was fun again.

"It was kind of dull before. He came in and everything was just so much faster," senior point guard Julian Norfleet said. "We enjoyed being here. We enjoyed working hard and improving each day, and he just focused on us being together as a team and becoming brothers."

While he was preaching togetherness off the court, he was preaching "mayhem" on it. Christian likes pressing and trapping and running. He likes to force turnovers and turn them into layups. He likes to see his players shoot 3-pointers early in the shot clock.

Go figure, a coach who likes to see the scoreboard change.

"I really believe if we can score 85, 90 points a game it's tough for other teams to match up with us," Christian said.

The stats bear him out. The Mountaineers are 15-2 when reaching 80 points since he arrived. In last week's NEC tournament championship game, the Mount played a Robert Morris team whose zone defense had been holding teams to 55 points per game over the last six weeks. The Mount scored 88 and won easily.

Fifth-year senior Kristijan Krajina has played for every post-Phelan coach at the Mount. No question what system he likes best.

"Coach Brown was all about defense. He would like to hold dudes to like 50 points or whatever. We don't care about that. We just want to score," Krajina said. "Coach Burke, he was running the Princeton offense. So that was no fun to watch. We'd score like 50 points a game. We score a lot more now."

That's something high school kids can get excited about, which only helps in recruiting. Byron Ashe, who has moved into a starting role as a freshman, recalled how Christian sold him on the program.

"I was unfamiliar with the Mount. He talked about fastbreak offense, shoot a lot of 3s - that's how I like to play," Ashe said. "It was a perfect choice for me."

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In his first season at the Mount, Christian pulled off quite a turnaround. He took a team that went 8-21 the previous year to 18 wins, guiding them to the NEC title game.

Christian told the players it was possible. They didn't necessarily believe him. Until it happened.

"He spoke it into existence," Norfleet said. "We just went along with it. He ended up showing us that whatever we worked for we could do."

Being able to follow it up with another good year was important to Christian.

"It shows that we have substance as a program," he said.

Not that it was easy. In fact, this season might've been the greater challenge.

Seven players from last season's roster who could've come back are not on this season's roster. Four players who started games in 2012-13, including NEC Rookie of the Year, transferred out.

Christian knew having his kind of players on the roster was critical. That's something else he learned at the Mount.

"We had a lot of good players and we didn't always get a chance to play with them," he said. "It's really important to have guys that you can count on. ... It's really hard to be consistent unless you've got consistent people. And it's really hard to be consistent on the floor, if you're not consistent off the floor."

The players hear about that on a regular basis. While Christian is unrelentingly upbeat, he doesn't tolerate players doing things the wrong way.

"When he has to, he has set me straight," Ashe said. "But I learned my lesson, so I try to stay away from that."

Said Prescott: "He's very positive, but he's one of those guys who believes in 'no excuses.'"

Christian felt good about his roster when practice began. Then freshman Charles Glover, who was expected to play a key role, was lost for the season before it began to a torn ACL. Then Krajina suffered the same injury seven games into the season. Pretty soon, thanks to a few other minor injuries, Christian was giving walk-ons valuable minutes.

That led to lessons about turning adversity into prosperity, kind of like Christian did his senior year.

Christian and his senior leaders helped keep the team together and believing in each other and the Mountaineers rallied to finish fourth in the NEC during the regular season.

But his coaching skills would be tested like never before in the NEC tournament.

•••

In the opening round, the Mountaineers found themselves trailing St. Francis Brooklyn by 19 points with nine minutes remaining and still down by eight with under a minute to play.

There was desperation, but no panic. And certainly no lectures or disgusted comments from Christian. He leaned on something he learned from another of his previous bosses, Shaka Smart at VCU.

"When things are at their toughest, he backs away to allow his players to lead. So that's really helped me in games like St. Francis," Christian said. "The guys know they've messed up. They don't need me jumping them and going crazy on the sidelines. They need me to have their back.

"In those moments of crisis, you've got to have people you believe in and that believe in you. We've got the right guys in the boat this year."

The Mountaineers rallied and eventually won 72-71 on a Whack 3-pointer with 2.4 seconds to play. That remarkable victory had them thinking they could do anything and they followed it up by beating Wagner, the hottest team in the league, 77-72.

They were now convinced they were going to win the league title, but Robert Morris posed a tactical problem.

Zones have, at times, given the Mountaineers trouble. So Christian abandoned his usual offense and called only a handful of offensive plays the entire game, down from 30 or so.

"He didn't call nearly as many ball screens, he just kept us in the gaps so we could attack," Norfleet said.

It worked to perfection as his players believed it would. And now Christian has the Mountaineers in the NCAA tournament. They will learn their their opponent during the Sunday selection show on CBS that starts at 6 p.m.

Getting his team to the Big Dance, as Phelan and Brown did before him, clearly means more to Christian because he is doing it at his alma mater.

"Basically, everything I learned to use in my life, I learned here," he said.

And he's passing along those lessons, on and off the court, to his players.

"We talk about being humble, about a high level of appreciation rather than entitlement, we talk about moving forward every day in your life," Christian said. "We've had some bumps in the road. Things haven't always been great. But I think that's why we play so well in big moments."