Coaching 'right' for Rigby

RICHMOND — On the court with more than an hour left before game time, the Indiana University East players shoot around. Along the sidelines, coach Mark Hester and assistant David Sanders watch their players.
Meanwhile, the door to the locker room on the northwest side of the Tiernan Center at Richmond High School swings open. On the far wall, the Red Wolves logo looms while Tyler Rigby busily scrawls notes in blue marker on a whiteboard.
Rigby was once the player studying those notes on the board — first under coach Craig Teagle at Jay County High School, then at IU East for Hester — from his spot on the bench. Now, he’s one of the coaches making sure his players soak in all of that pre-game information.
“It was weird at first, especially my first year, because I had played with some of the guys,” said Rigby, who joined the staff as a volunteer in 2011 while finishing his degree, prior to his team’s 78-67 victory Nov. 10 over St. Catharine. “It was kind of tough. But over the years it’s gotten easier and easier.”
Each year during his stand-out career with the Red Wolves — he played for them for three seasons after transferring from IU Southeast — Rigby was named to the All-Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference team and earned his school’s male athlete of the year award. He was an NAIA honorable mention All-American as a junior, earned the NAIA National Champions of Character Award as a senior and finished as IU East’s all-time leading scorer with 1,708 points.
After leading IU East to its first NAIA Division II tournament appearance — his career ended with a 95-92 loss to Indiana Wesleyan in which he scored a team-high 20 points — he reached a fork in the road.
“I really had to make a decision whether I wanted to try to play overseas or if I wanted to coach,” he said. “My initial thought was that I wanted to play somewhere. Then the job opened up, and I really couldn’t pass it up at the time.”
And IU East coach Mark Hester, who has led the program since 2007, didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to have Rigby on his staff.
“As a player, he was just the most ridiculously high basketball IQ guy I’ve ever coached,” he said. “He’s just an extremely high intellectual guy, and he carried himself with such a composure as a player that I wanted to give him an opportunity to do that as a coach. I knew he would make a great one, one day. He’s been a blessing.”
The first couple of years on the staff were a blur for Rigby, who has his hands in a lot of everything the team does.
He takes care of all of the scouting for the Red Wolves, putting together a several-page report on each opponent. Most of it is done by way of video, but if future opponents, especially those in the KIAC, are playing within a reasonable distance, he’ll see them play as well.
Rigby is also in charge of recruiting, which involves trips to high school gyms all over Indiana. It’s also a non-stop process of texting and calling to stay in touch with prospective players.
“It’s an everyday thing, an all day thing,” said Rigby, who also handles some of the less glamorous team tasks such as doing laundry and packing equipment for road trips. “It’s probably what I spend a majority of my time on.
“It’s almost exhausting. You can’t stop. The instant you stop, you’re probably going to lose a kid.”
On the court, Rigby’s focus is on the defensive end of the court while Sanders, a four-year starter at point guard for the Red Wolves, acts as the offensive coordinator.
The 2006 Jay County High School graduate who led a run to the Class 3A state championship game has brought with him some of the principles he learned with the Patriots. Chief among those is the importance of help defense, rotating to keep a body between the ball and the basket.
“I know even when I played we weren’t very good defensively. We switched everything, which is a hard thing to do,” he said. “Once we scrapped that for just straight man-to-man, we’ve gotten a lot better. The principles that we’re teaching now are a lot better. We always spent a lot of time on it, but we were never that great defensively. …
“The help side is our main focus. It’s so hard to keep guys in front … they’re so good. ... And this team does a really good job of rotating out of it and picking each other up.”
While his focus has been defense, the offensive prowess he showed in college — two of his records, most 3-pointers in a game without a miss (four) and free throws in a game (14), still stand — has been an asset to IU East as well.
Both senior Vasha Davis, a Morton product, and sophomore Jacoby Claypool, who played at Northrop, credit Rigby with huge improvements in their shooting. Claypool in particular noted that one-on-one time with Rigby helped him eliminate the hitch from his shot and develop consistency that has him third on the team in scoring so far this season at 8.7 points per game.
“He’s everything from mentor to straight basketball genius really,” said Claypool. “When I first came here, I wasn’t the most skilled or most knowledgeable about the game, but definitely spending a lot of time with him over the past year, with film study and in the gym, he’s just taught me so much. He’s made the game just so much more simple, and made my game more complex.”
That word — mentor — was the first Davis used to describe Rigby as well.
As a kid who grew up near Chicago, the transition to a more rural part of the state included its hurdles. Rigby was integral to helping with the adjustment.
“We joke and laugh about it, because I was scared of deer,” said Davis. “It’s been a good transition under him, just knowing that I can give him a call any time.”
As much as Rigby loves basketball, it’s those moments away from the game that he says he enjoys most about his job.
He recalls the team’s trip for a couple of games in New York City, where the Red Wolves crammed in as much sight-seeing as possible on their day off. And IU East’s annual summer camping trip — no cell phones allowed — is his favorite time of the year.
“Every year it seems to get better and better,” he said. “The guys open up a lot more, sit around, talk, just about anything really. ...
“We do a lot of different stuff just to get them away from the outside world and just focus on us.”
It’s building those personal relationships, he believes, that separates good coaches from great ones. In order to truly get the best out of each player, a coach must be able to connect.
“That’s probably one of the major factors in coaching. Everybody knows the Xs and Os. All the coaches, they know all that stuff. You can do it a thousand different ways and it works,” said Rigby. “Whatever way you get them to listen the best, that’s who wins the games, that’s what it all comes down to. I didn’t get that early, when I first started, but now I understand that.”
He said he feels he made his biggest improvement in coaching from last year to this year as he’s finally gotten comfortable with his system of doing things. Now he hopes to continue to grow, with the goal of a head coaching job, preferably at the NAIA level, in mind.
Mostly, he wants to keep working to be a positive influence for the players he comes in contact with, on the court and off.
“Anything involving helping kids, helping young men, that’s what I like to do,” said Rigby. “And it just happens that I love basketball. Coaching seems like the right fit for me right now.”