Winning May’s Way : Cal Poly Pomona Women’s Basketball Team Has Benefited From Intense Coach

Darlene May was incensed. Her Cal Poly Pomona women’s basketball team, the defending national champion, had just lost the 1983 Division II final to Virginia Union.

Most coaches would have been satisfied having the country’s No. 2 team.

But as May sat in a plane on the return flight from Springfield, Mass., site of the championships, she made a difficult decision.

Convinced that infighting had cost the team the national championship, May decided essentially to kick three undergraduate starters off the team, including Jackie White, the 1982 Division II player of the year. Though it meant disbanding perhaps her best team May did not hesitate.

“I knew we wouldn’t win the next year with those players,” May said. “It was better to get rid of those people then. . . . I made up my mind on the plane back: It was change time. I’d rather be happy than have those players back. It wouldn’t have made a difference the next year even if they played.”

Six players did not return the next season, four of them at May’s only somewhat subtle behest: If you want to play next season, come see me by this date.

“Some of them made it easy on me,” May said. “They never came.”

White, who transferred to Cal State Long Beach for her senior year and is now one of two women playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, holds no apparent grudge.

“There were some hard feelings between myself and the coaching staff,” White said. “But (May) is fair.”

Said May: “I think they knew what they’d done.”

Those who know May understand her motivation for tearing down what she had built. May, Cal Poly Pomona’s coach for 13 seasons, accepts nothing less than winning.

With five community college transfers on the team the next season, Pomona won the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. but lost in the West Regional final to Chapman, a conference rival of such proportions that Pomona players still refer to the Panthers as “the enemy.”

Then, in the 1984-85 season, with the same group, plus the return of one of the players who had left in 1983, Pomona won the national championship. In 1986, the Broncos became the first team to repeat as NCAA Division II women’s champions.

By then, May, a Placentia resident who spent her first four years after graduating from high school working as a parts inspector in a Monrovia factory, had become the premier Division II women’s coach.

“When she’s winning, everything’s dandy,” said Paula Tezak, a starting guard who played at La Habra High School. “She’s making fun of the other team, telling them they’re bad. But when she’s losing, you don’t joke around.”

But for all May’s apparent competitiveness, there also seems to be a side to her that would rather just take it easy.

She says she would leave basketball if someone would only set her up with a lakeside bait-and-tackle shop so she could pass her days by the water, renting boats and watching the fishermen head out in the mornings.

She has passed chances to coach in Division I--there have been at least three offers (from San Jose State, Washington and Fullerton) in the past five years.

“I feel like I have a big enough challenge right here,” May said. “If I ever moved up, it would be more headaches. Maybe 10 years ago I might have thought a little more about it. Right now, I’m sort of settled. I feel like I really don’t want to go out and start over.”

It was not her competitive nature that led her into coaching.

After graduating from high school, she had so little interest in further schooling that she took a factory job. Four years later, realizing that she was going nowhere, she enrolled at Cal State Los Angeles at age 22. The next year she went to Fullerton College, eventually earning a degree at Cal State Fullerton.

“I figured I’d teach, and at least I’d have my summers off,” May said.

While in school, she started coaching swimming. A few of the girls mentioned that Connelly High School needed a basketball coach, and May went there to start her basketball career. She stayed at Connelly 10 years, along the way coaching Ann Meyers and Nancy Dunkle, future members of the U.S. national team. Meyers played at Connelly her sophomore year, after which she went to Sonora. Dunkle played her final two years for May. In those years Connelly was 55-1.

In 1974, May was named the Pomona coach, where she has compiled a 330-79 record, 18-1 this season.

The years have been good, with the losses coming few and far between.

Three in particular, though, have been especially painful for May. Those defeats were by Chapman College, which until this season was coached by Brian Berger, May’s bitter rival. Berger resigned after last season and is coaching at Colorado State.

When Pomona plays host to Chapman at 8 tonight, it will be the first meeting since Berger’s departure.

“Maybe we can put this thing behind us now,” said May, who called the relationship between herself and Berger a mutual “personal vendetta.”

In the five years that Berger was at Chapman, his teams were 3-7 against Pomona--a good mark, compared to most--winning three consecutive games, including the NCAA regional final in 1984. Pomona beat Chapman in the regional final in 1983 and 1985.

It was a relationship marked by fierce games on the court and numerous incidents off the court, including an NCAA reprimand of Berger for his behavior toward May after the 1985 regional final.

“My opinion is that you don’t win grudge matches,” May said. “We just want to go out and not think about it.”

For all her triumphs, May is not convinced that she has been one of the reasons for Pomona’s success.

“I still don’t know that I’m really good at this,” she said. “Some days I get to thinking I’m doing pretty good job, and then others I think I’m an absolute failure.”

One thing is certain--she is not a coach who leaves things alone.

In a recent game against Cal State Northridge, May crouched by the sideline, shouting directions: “Rebound, get the rebound! Move! You’re doing nothing! You’re not playing offense. You’re not playing defense. Move. Move. MOVE!”

The score was 54-31, Pomona.

It was time to relax, but there was nothing doing. Sometimes May will not stop meddling. That night she used five offenses and three defenses, not counting two varieties of defensive traps. She will shout and she will cajole and she will substitute and as soon as a player comes out of the game she will kneel next to her on the bench and give more directions. The player returns to the game and the one who comes out gets instructions, directions, exhortations.

“She doesn’t change whether it’s a 30-point game or a two-point game,” said Barb Thaller, who played for May at Pomona and is in her eighth year as her assistant coach. “She can’t just sit there. She’s too antsy.”

May is so antsy, in fact, that she does not get enough basketball from coaching. She also officiates, and is one of the country’s best women’s referees. She officiated in the 1984 Olympics and in the Goodwill Games last summer at Moscow. During the season she makes time to work Division III games on off nights.

And in the off-season she picks up the pace on her beloved fishing trips. She’ll say again and again that, given the chance, she would “absolutely” stop coaching to go live by a lake and run a store.

“I don’t see her doing that,” Tezak said. “Whenever you talk to her it’s basketball this, basketball that. No, I can’t see her doing that.”