A FAMILY GAME
Father and son Mike and Chris Rao hopeful to be on sidelines together in CEBL
“We all spoke ‘Raonese’ pretty well. It is a different language in a lot of ways, but you get used to it after a bit.”
CHRIS RAO
NIAGARA COLLEGE WOMEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH
Pam Rao just needs to follow the bouncing basketball whenever she is looking for her husband or son this summer.
If the Canadian Elite Basketball League gets the go-ahead to play a shortened season, chances are better than good that Mike Rao, head coach of the women’s hoops team at Brock University, and their son Chris, who is in charge of the women’s program at Niagara College, will be on the sidelines intently following the action of the Guelph Nighthawks on the court.
As newcomers to general manager-head coach Charles Kissi’s staff, the Raos will assist him in his first full season coaching in the springsummer league.
Guelph finished 3-7 under Kissi after he replaced Tarry Upshaw midway in the team’s inaugural season. The Nighthawks finished 6-14 and, with the 4-16 Fraser Valley, B.C., Bandits, failed to make playoffs in the six-team league.
Instead of resting on his laurels after leading the Brock University women’s basketball team to a school-best silver medal at the Canadian championships and its first Ontario title since 1983, Mike Rao didn’t hesitate when he was offered the opportunity to work again with Kissi, his one-time bench boss on the Brock men’s team.
“I mean, how much can I rest? I’ve had a week off and I’m ready to go,” the 61-year-old Welland native said with a chuckle. “I feel good so I can do it, I will do it.
“I feel like working. I feel like learning. I think I feel like learning more.”
The chance to be reunited with Kissi was too much for the retired educator to pass up.
In addition to two seasons at Brock, the elder Rao also knew Kissi for several seasons when he coaching the senior boys team at Notre Dame College School.
“I’ve known Charles eight to 10 years. I always watch his games, and the thing that really impresses me about his team is their compete level,” Rao said. “Their willingness to put it all on the floor.
“That’s what I took from Charles in moving forward in my own coaching career.”
The CEBL isn’t Kissi’s first foray into hoops at the pro level. He joined Raptors 905, the Toronto Raptors G-league affiliate, in 2018 as lead assistant to head coach Jama Mahalela.
They led the club to a 29-21 regular season. In the process, valuable playing time on the development prepared Chris Boucher and Malcolm Miller for their contributions to the Raptors’ National Basketball Association championship in 2019.
Kissi, who coached the women’s team at Ryerson University before taking over the men’s program, has become a walking textbook when it comes to X’s and O’s. And the onetime Toronto police officer shares it freely with his colleagues.
“Things that they’re (Raptors 905) doing. How to defend certain things, how to attack certain things.”
Over the years. Kissi ran some sessions with Rao’s teams at Brock.
“I’m grateful for that. He helped us immensely defensively, and I think it showed this year,” Rao said. “He’s helped me immensely over the last few years, but I think it’s his ability to get people to play — and play hard — that starts sets Charles apart.”
Like his dad, Chris Rao didn’t have to be asked twice about spending the basketball off-season coaching.
“It’s a really cool opportunity. I was going to be coaching basketball one way or another,” he said. “I spent the last couple of off-seasons with the Basketball Nova Scotia provincial team, so I’ve never really had an off-season.”
While basketball is the younger Rao’s job, he has yet to dread going to work.
“It’s fun. It’s a lot of learning,” he said. “The work is good, and it makes me a better coach. That’s the fun part about coaching as much as you can.”
Kissi, who compiled a 107-72 record in five seasons at Brock, looks forward to working with Rao again.
“Mike’s a winner who has figured out how to be successful at every level, both as an assistant and as a head coach,” he said. “We had a lot of fun working together and I can’t wait to get back on the court with him.”
Rao, a head coach at Notre Dame for 36 years before retiring from teaching, doesn’t anticipate any difficulty putting the whistle away and giving someone else the final word in the huddle.
“I’ll be a good assistant, and it’s not going to be hard for me at all,” he said. “I kind of say what I have to say and I go from there. Sometimes they like it, sometimes they don’t, but that’s the life of an assistant.
“You have to accept whatever he says. It’s not a democracy, right?”
Except for one Christmas break tournament at Notre Dame when he was home for the holidays from the Maritimes, Chris has never coached with his father. With the Nighthawks, they will be on the same coaching staff for the first time.
Chris, who played under Mike at Notre Dame, is looking forward to reuniting on the basketball court, this time as a colleague. He doubted that little would change in the relationship.
“We talk about basketball a lot, and now we’ll get to talk about it together in a professional capacity,” Chris said. “The good thing is, neither of us will have the final say over each other.
“We get to discuss and think, try to come up with the best solution.
“Like he said, it’s not a democracy. We’re here to help Charles and help the players get better.”
Before being appointed women’s head coach at Niagara College, the 25-year-old served as an assistant on men’s teams at Cape Breton and Acadia universities. He stopped short of calling himself an “assistant coach on the floor” in his senior year playing for his father in high school.
“I listened a lot. I knew what we were running. I had some really, really good teammates who were way more talented than I was,” Chris Rao said. “I just made sure they got the ball. That was pretty much my job.”
By the time that class of seniors graduated, they all had been coached by his father for several years.
“We all spoke ‘Raonese’ pretty well. It is a different language in a lot of ways, but you get used to it after a bit,” Chris recalled with a chuckle.
He expects to learn a lot going into his second season at the region’s community college
“Coaches are like players in a lot of ways,” Chris said. “We have to have repetition, we have to practise this stuff as much as the players have to practise dribbling.”
He said he owes it to the college and to his players on the Knights “to get better every day.”
Rounding out Kissi’s coaching staff are Kareem Thawer, a onetime men’s team assistant at Niagara University in Lewiston, N.Y., and Mike Girling, an assistant on the men’s team at the University of Waterloo.