Out of the spotlight, but still in the game
“I’m not wearing as many fancy suits as I used to wear, and I’m driving a 2002 Toyota that was my mom’s car. I’ve simplified my life a little bit.” — Ben Braun, Oakland Soldiers director of development
Ben Braun spent 37 years as a college basketball head coach, collecting 615 victories and guiding Cal to one Sweet 16 and Eastern Michigan to another. He danced across the big stage, in other words.
But he also found abundant satisfaction in a recent, under-the-radar win.
Braun coached the top team in the Oakland Soldiers AAU program this spring. The Soldiers trailed most of the game April 29 during a tournament in Indianapolis, before surging to topple California Supreme, an acclaimed team from Southern California.
The win didn’t add to Braun’s career total, nor did it generate many headlines. It will not propel him toward another coaching job. But he still felt the old, familiar adrenaline as James Akinjo of Salesian-Richmond scored 27 points to lead the Soldiers to their signature triumph of the spring season.
“It was great,” Braun said. “My happiness and exhilaration wasn’t for me as the head coach — it was seeing the players’ faces, the pride to say we beat this really good team.”
Braun will not coach the Soldiers when they launch their summer season Wednesday. He now
serves as the program’s director of development, roaming among several teams to counsel younger coaches and help players navigate the college recruiting maze. He conducted a coaching clinic last weekend at Contra Costa College.
In many ways, the pairing of Braun, 63, and the Soldiers seems unlikely. He earned handsome salaries coaching Cal and Rice in the latter half of his long career — he received a $985,000 buyout when Cal fired him in March 2008 — but he merely gets his expenses covered with the Soldiers.
If college hoops coaches occupy a lofty status in the sporting galaxy, working with an AAU program — even one as well-regarded and successful as the Soldiers — counts as a step down.
Braun also serves as a television analyst during the college season, calling Pac-12, WCC and American Conference games (among others), and he picks up some work as a leadership consultant. Braun lives in Berkeley with his wife, Jessica, and their kids Julius (age 8) and Eliza (5).
“I’m not wearing as many fancy suits as I used to wear, and I’m driving a 2002 Toyota that was my mom’s car,” Braun said. “I’ve simplified my life a little bit.”
In other ways, Braun’s alliance with the Soldiers makes perfect sense. He tapped into the club’s pipeline during his Cal days (1996-2008), recruiting local players such as Leon Powe, Marquise Kately and Ayinde Ubaka. Along the way, Braun became friends with Mark Olivier, the program’s president.
The Soldiers are in their 27th year, with Olivier involved for the past 24. The list of former players to reach the NBA is long and illustrious, from LeBron James (more on him in a moment) and Chauncey Billups to Drew Gooden and Aaron Gordon to Stanley Johnson and Ivan Rabb.
Even so, Olivier wanted to add a fresh twist. Enter Braun.
“We always talk about recruiting, structure and what college coaches seek,” Olivier said. “But I’ve never been a college coach. For Ben to give that info to our kids, it’s believable because he’s done it for more than 30 years.
“For me, I’ve got to get them to buy in. … So how do you get them to buy in faster? Ben really helps with that.”
More than 20 of Braun’s former players were either drafted or spent time in the NBA, including Powe and Ryan Anderson. And he can always tell LeBron stories.
James occasionally played for the Soldiers in the summers during his high-school years in Akron, Ohio. One of his connections to the Bay Area was Braun, then at Cal — because Keith Dambrot, James’ highschool coach as a freshman and sophomore, served as an assistant under Braun at Eastern Michigan in the late 1980s. Dambrot now is the head coach at Duquesne.
As Braun tells the story, James once carved his initials into Braun’s desk at his office in Berkeley. Braun jokingly asked James if he could count this as his signature on a letter-of-intent. James laughed. (And then, of course, he jumped straight from high school to the NBA.)
Now, on the AAU side of the equation, Braun realizes one giant challenge is getting players to work together. Most are stars on their high school teams, accustomed to taking lots of shots — and it’s natural for them to assume college coaches will be dazzled by their point totals.
Braun has tried to convince Soldiers players that coaches notice other things, starting with whether they can make their teammates better. He amplifies his pitch by pointing out he’s not angling for a bigger job.
That sometimes becomes an issue on star-studded rosters. Among the Soldiers’ top players are former Moreau Catholic-Hayward standout Kyree Walker (MaxPreps’ National Freshman of the Year); 6-foot-9 Mason Forbes of Folsom High; and 6-10 Taeshon Cherry of St. Augustine-San Diego.
“I’m not trying to take these players and ride them, like a lot of young coaches,” Braun said. “I see AAU coaches who say, ‘Follow me,’ and then they try to ride that player to their next job. You do what’s right by the kid: That’s the message I give to coaches and players.”
Olivier approached Braun near the end of the Soldiers’ spring season, suggesting he move into the development role. He agreed, intrigued by the idea of working with even younger kids. The Soldiers have teams ranging from third grade to 17-and-under.
Former Stanford guard Kris Weems and Chris Busch will coach the top team this summer, with Braun lingering in the background to offer his observations. It’s not nearly as glamorous or lucrative as his onetime Division I gigs, but Braun seems content.
“Could I still coach and do I still have coaching in my blood? Yes,” he said. “But what I’m doing now is coaching, because it’s teaching. It’s very gratifying.”