'Suitcase coaches' keep resurfacing in Northern N.M.
Of the 32 Northern teams' coaches in state tournaments, 13 are on either second team or second stint with same program
James Branch calls coaching an addiction, and it’s partly why his name is dotted across Northern New Mexico. Branch, the head boys basketball coach at Española Valley, admits that it might seem like he is one of those vagabond coaches — or “suitcase coaches,” as West Las Vegas athletic director Richard Tripp put it — upon glancing at his résumé, but it’s not quite the case.
“I’m a coach, and that’s in my DNA,” Branch said. “It’s hard for me to give it up.”
So, his coaching journey included stops at Questa (twice), Taos (twice), his alma mater Mora, as well as a pair of girls stops at McCurdy and Mesa Vista before ending up at Española. The reasons for his constant movement range from being fired, to taking administrative positions to simply finding a better opportunity.
Branch had to wait three seasons aftering getting fired at Mora before he found his next head coaching job, but patience was rewarded with the Sundevils, as they are 26-1 and the top seed in the Class 5A State Tournament.
But Branch is a part of a group of coaches who cycle through towns and schools in the North, always willing to put their names in the hat for a basketball job. Their names keep surfacing, though, because of their success. Of the 32 Northern teams playing in the state boys and girls basketball tournaments that begin this weekend, 13 are either on their second team or their second stint with the same program. Seven are on at least their third program.
Branch is on his eighth go-round with a Northern program, which is three more than Pecos girls coach Ron Drake (Santa Fe High, St. Michael’s, Española Valley, Pojoaque Valley were the others).
While it might seem like an old school network that schools keep choosing from, some of those coaches say it’s not so easy to find other pepople who want to be head coaches in Northern New Mexico.
“There are some people who complain, ‘Oh, it’s just the same old coaches that are being hired,’ ” said St. Michael’s head boys coach David Rodriguez, who had two stints at Santa Fe High before taking the Horsemen job this season. “There are a lot of coaches in the stands, a lot of people that know things but never apply.
“In Northern New Mexico, I think it takes a lot of guts to have some of these guys go for some of these jobs. They are high pressure, people want to win and they want results right now.”
Sometimes, no amount of success is enough. Rodriguez recalls when the Santa Fe High girls, coached by Drake, lost to Gallup in the Class 4A semifinals in 1998,
he saw a man sitting on a trash can smoking a cigarette as he left The Pit.
“He’s saying Ron Drake got outcoached,” Rodriguez said. “There were 10,000 Gallup fans and that’s a good Gallup team, but Ron Drake got outcoached.”
Drake, who was at Santa Fe High from 1992-2004, just so happens to have the most wins of any girls basketball coach in the state (608).
If anything, expectations drive the high volume of coaching
changes in Northern New Mexico. There were 23 new head coaches hired for the 201718 season, and 11 had previous coaching experience in the region. In most of those cases, it’s a volatile combination of a demanding community, watchful parents and good, old fashioned politics that drove the changes.
“Everything has to fit,” West Las Vegas athletic director Richard Tripp said. “One of the things with Northern New Mexico is that you have to accept the good with the bad, because it’s going to come. You can’t say, ‘I’m not going to deal with it,’ because, one way or the other, you’re going to deal with it.”
West Las Vegas chose former Pecos and Santa Fe Prep head man Clyde Sanchez to take over its boys program, replacing David Bustos, who was fired in his second stint at the school. Sanchez has ties to the Dons program, having been an assistant for the 2013-14 season.
It’s those types of relationships that often lead coaches to move from one job to another. Branch played at Mora in the late 1970s. Sanchez — a 1981 Pecos grad — took the boys job in 2009. Rodriguez had two stints with the boys program that spanned 18 years at Santa Fe High, in part because he played there in the late 1970s and his dad, Bobby Rodriguez, coached the Demons from 1986-92. In fact, the younger Rodriguez replaced his dad in 1992 after he was fired.
After he was let go at Santa Fe High in 2016, Rodriguez went to St. Michael’s to teach after retiring from Santa Fe Public Schools. He played for the Horsemen for two years — under his dad — and ended up taking over the boys team last summer.
That his athletic director was Tom Manning, who supervised Rodriguez during most of his first stint at Santa Fe High, was an added bonus.
“I roamed those halls, and there are good people here,” Rodriguez said. “And I couldn’t work for better people.”
The trust factor can’t be ignored, either. Current Santa Fe High head coach Zack Cole is one of the few younger coaches who managed to work his way into the coaching circle in the North. He played at Española Valley in the mid-1990s and was an assistant at Capital from 2004-09, but Cole got his break at Santa Fe Indian School in 2012.
His interview impressed then-AD Tom
Shields enough to give him the boys coaching position. Cole walked into a mess, as the program was in the middle of a 38-game losing streak. He stabilized the program to the point that the Braves reached the state tournament in his second year before he went to Ramona (Calif.) Sentinel.
That performance at SFIS was enough to help him get the Demons job two years later.
“In smaller communities, they trust who they know,” Cole said. “If you’re viewed as an outsider, they might not know you enough to dislike you, but they just don’t know you enough to trust you.”
And a trusted name is worth more than the untapped potential of the unknown.