Mitchell to coach at Tosa West.
Ex-UWM star coached Custer
Marc Mitchell’s next chapter in coaching takes him to the suburbs.
The former Milwaukee Custer head coach and Milwaukee King assistant is the new boys basketball coach at Wauwatosa West. He succeeds Chad Stelse, who resigned mid-season.
The announcement came Monday and is a high in what has been a roller-coaster ride at moments for the former UW-Milwaukee standout. Last July he was hired as the head coach at King. In October, he was removed from the position in October for a reason Milwaukee Public Schools never explained publically.
“We checked everything and we felt comfortable with all the information we collected,” Trojans athletic director Jeff Gabrielsen said. “That obviously played a role as far as us looking into it, but from the information we found out we were satisfied that Marc was a candidate that we could go with.”
As a head coach, Mitchell spent eight seasons at Milwaukee Custer (now Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education), leading the Cougars to the 2003 state tournament and making a program without much history of basketball success a factor in the City Conference. He lost that job due to a union rule that gave MPS teacher preference on coaching jobs; Mitchell is a para-professional.
At King, he assisted Jim Gosz and helped the Generals reach the state tournament in 2012, ’13 and ’14.
Mitchell takes over a Tosa West program that has had talented players in recent years but couldn’t get overcome the likes of New Berlin Eisenhower and Pewaukee in the Woodland West.
“They’ve had pretty good talent come through the school,” Mitchell said. “And I thought it was an interesting job because they were going into the Greater Metro, playing against Germantown, Sussex, both of the Brookfield schools, just the quality of competition that they’re going to be facing going into the new conference, I thought that would be an ideal thing with great coaches to coach against.”
The new Greater Metro will be loaded that way. Five of the other eight coaches in that conference have taken teams to the state tournament. Menonomee Falls’ Steve Showalter and Wauwatosa East Tim Arndorfer have won state titles.
“Mostly 90% of it was about discipline,” Mitchell said of his interview. “There was hardly any basketball talk. It was all about discipline.”
With Pat McCabe, another former UW-Milwaukee player, coaching the team on an interim basis for the remainder of the season Tosa West finished 12-11 and finished fourth in the Woodland West with an 8-8 mark.
“He had a passion to be a head coach again. I think that was important,” Gabrielsen said. “He’s a lot closer to the program than people think, so the energy, the past successes he had as a head coach, all those things played a big part in the hire.” Mitchell