By Dana O'NeilESPN.com
John Beilein had been on the job just a handful of days when he sat down for his most important meeting.
Across from the newly minted Michigan coach sat a teenager who had no idea who this earnest man was. Manny Harris was a fan of playing the game, not watching the game. He spent his time on the Detroit playgrounds or in the gym, not parked in front of the television. Never really paid much attention to Kevin Pittsnogle, not real savvy about Mike Gansey, didn't know the history lesson on resurgent West Virginia hoops under Beilein.
All Harris knew was that Tommy Amaker recruited him to Michigan, had him sign a letter of intent to play for the Wolverines, and now Amaker was gone and this guy he'd never met was supposed to be his coach.
Second-year coach John Beilein has Michigan on a fast track to its first NCAA tourney trip in 11 years. In those early whirlwind days, Beilein's to-do list was lengthy, but instead of wooing alums, meeting with the media or glad-handing fans, he made Harris his priority.
Saddled with a program that still fancied itself a Cadillac but more resembled a Pinto, Beilein had watched film of the talented shooting guard, saw the way the Michigan Mr. Basketball could score, and knew Harris was the kind of player who could be used as a cornerstone in an epic rebuilding project.
He also knew that Harris wasn't sure he was still coming to Michigan.
"You get so close with a recruit because of how early it starts now, so I tried to let him know I understood," Beilein said. "But I also told him no matter where you go, you're going to be in a similar situation -- that it won't be the coach you wanted to play for. So I told him, why not give it a try? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I knew he wanted to turn around Michigan basketball and I wanted to turn around Michigan basketball, so I said let's see if we can do that."
The ribbon-tied trite sentence begs to be written here. The Wolverines (10-2) have knocked out UCLA and Duke, beating two top-five teams in one season for the first time in 21 years, are ranked 24th in the latest ESPN/USA Today poll and head into Wednesday's Big Ten opener against Wisconsin (2 p.m., ESPN2) as one of the early surprises of the college basketball season.
Go ahead. Try to be trite. Try to say that the turnaround Harris and Beilein craved has happened, that the Wolverines have crested the mountain and order is restored in Ann Arbor.
Fans will agree wholeheartedly. Desperate for something in maize and blue worth celebrating after a football season for the record books of ignominy, they are no longer asking whether Michigan will make the NCAA tournament. They want to know how deep the Wolverines, who haven't been dancing in a decade, can go.
They clogged players' Facebook and MySpace pages after the UCLA win, stormed the court after the 81-73 win over the Blue Devils, and have bull-rushed drinking the Kool-Aid in favor of an all-out kegger on the stuff.
But just try to run that hackneyed nonsense by Beilein and his Merry Band of Realists.
Beilein is so underwhelmed that he likens sophomore coaching seasons to the bout of vertigo that sidelined him against Eastern Michigan earlier this month.
"It's that same dizziness," he said. "Second years are a roller coaster. Just when you think you're getting better and you've made it, watch out, and when you think you're never going to get better, you play great.
"We haven't turned the corner yet. We can see the corner up there, but we haven't turned it."
Beilein's temperance is the drink of choice for his players.
Says Harris: "To me, it feels like we're just getting started. We're only beginning to become what a good program is."
Says DeShawn Sims: "I think we're still climbing the hill. We've developed so much in terms of our team chemistry, so we're steadily moving up the hill, but we're not there yet."
They can poor-mouth it all they want, but the Wolverines are a lot closer to the summit a lot faster than anyone could have dreamed -- already matching last season's win total.
If football coach Rich Rodriguez is looking for hope, he needs only to check in with his former West Virginia co-worker. A year ago, Beilein was Rodriguez, his hoops team matching this year's pigskin crew in futility. The Wolverines finished 10-22, setting a record for losses in a single season -- and, most embarrassing, took an 11-point loss on the chin from Harvard, with Amaker leading the Crimson.
Beilein insisted he was encouraged, saying after the regular season-ending loss to Purdue, "I've seen great progress and I hope you have."
DeShawn Sims has blossomed from a role player to a star for the surprising Wolverines.
What he viewed through the prism of his rose-colored glasses was clear to him if no one else: Sims, a little-used rookie under Amaker, started every game and earned honorable mention All-Big Ten honors as he nearly quadrupled his productivity, going from 3.4 points to 12.3 per game; and Harris, a rookie who also started every game, scored in double figures in 28 of 32 games and became only the fourth Michigan freshman to score more than 500 points.
The losses were hard to swallow, but to Beilein, the experience was worth the pain. The pair, along with guard Kelvin Grady and forward Zack Gibson, learned the rigors of college ball as well as the demands of Beilein ball.
Beilein dislikes the word system, saying he merely teaches players things high school coaches don't have the time to teach. Things like transition defense. Whatever he wants to call it, the way he coaches involves a learning curve. Players aren't used to reading defenses as he demands they do, nor frankly are they used to the steady green light he offers. The Wolverines take around 26 3-pointers per game, despite making only 8.8 of them on average.
"It's almost like a football playbook, there are so many plays," Harris said. "He has his own vocabulary and it's hard to get down. The other thing is, it's not that you step outside of the system, but you have to be able to create. The system puts you in the position to be open. It's up to you to create and finish."
While outsiders cringed at the hefty buyout to West Virginia required to bring Beilein to town and wondered if athletic director Bill Martin was getting his money's worth that first year, the Wolverines became instant converts.
They liked the way Beilein demanded excellence that had nothing to do with
winning but everything to do with how they played. They liked the confidence he
had in them, even when -- or especially when -- their shots didn't fall.
And they liked him.
"There is zero tolerance for negativity with him. Zero," Sims said. "There's aWith Beilein's help, Sims has blossomed from a role player under Amaker into the Wolverines' version of Pittsnogle. The 6-foot-8 forward is averaging 17.2 points and 9.2 rebounds per game and has become the sort of outside shooter required of a big man in Beilein's system, er, style. As a rookie, Sims took seven 3-pointers and missed them all. As a sophomore he took 142 and hit 43. This year, he's 10-for-29.
standard for everything you do, and you gain so much confidence through him. You
feel like you can do anything."
As for Harris, he is averaging a Big Ten-leading 19.8 points per game, but made his coach smile widest when he wasn't the leading scorer. Against Oakland, Harris had 15 points to Sims' 20 but dished out 13 assists to zero turnovers in 36 minutes.
It's the sort of game, the kind of stat line, that brings Harris back to his April 2007 meeting with Beilein. He admits at the time he was teetering on the fence, not sure if he should stay with Michigan or go elsewhere.
Two things, Harris said, convinced him to stay.
"Definitely, one was my love for Michigan," he said, "but the other was the way coach kept everything so real. He didn't come in and lie to me and say that this would be my team. He told me we were going to have a lot of work to do and have to work hard. But he also promised he would make me a better player and we could make Michigan better."
Meeting adjourned.
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