Kiernan Can Handle Double Team

Kevin Kiernan, Cypress women’s basketball coach, came up with a novel way to deal with the pain of a losing season.

He took another head coaching job to go with the one he already had. That way, Kiernan figured, he had a better chance of having at least one winning team.

But so far, Kiernan, who is splitting time between Cypress and Troy High, where he is the girls’ varsity coach, directs two winning teams.

Cypress, 7-22 last season with a mostly freshman team, is 13-4. Troy is 9-3.

Kiernan is a part-time teacher at Cypress in his fifth year and is a walk-on at Troy.

“I don’t play golf and I’ve got no life,” Kiernan said jokingly. “If I’m not playing basketball or coaching basketball then I’m worrying about it. It’s a sick existence.”

Kiernan, 35, thrives on coaching.

He took over at Troy because the school was having trouble getting a qualified applicant for the job. Troy is in Cypress’ recruiting district so there was no conflict.

Kiernan got the go-ahead from Cypress Athletic Director Dick Van Voorhis and Troy officials cleared the move with the Southern Section office.

“No one was stepping up,” Kiernan said. “It’s in my area and [Troy has] great kids. It’s more of a pure coaching situation because there is no recruiting and I like that.”

At Cypress, Kiernan runs practices from 1 to 3 p.m., then he gets on the Riverside Freeway for the 25-minute drive to Troy where the team works out from 3:30 to 6 p.m.

During nonconference games, Kiernan had only two conflicts and in each case he sided with Cypress. Cypress will play its Orange Empire Conference games on Wednesdays and Fridays and Troy competes in the Freeway League on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The turnaround at Cypress this season has been led by sophomore forward Linda Rodriguez, who leads the team in scoring with 19 points a game. She is also averaging seven rebounds. Holly Pawlowski, another sophomore forward, is averaging 14 points and nine rebounds and sophomore guard Janine Shaw is averaging 12 points.

“We return our top seven from last season,” Kiernan said. “But I really didn’t know if they could do it this season. Last year we kept practicing 2 1/2 hours a day at the end of the season when you should start to cut it way back, but we were working for this season. They just got mentally tougher.”

Kiernan cites his assistants at each school as the main reason he has been able to have so much success.

Christine Collins, a former player at Western High and Cypress College, runs the Troy team when Kiernan is away or running late. David Jankowski is in his first year at Cypress as an assistant but in his second year as the head coach at Rancho Alamitos High, so he is understanding of Kiernan’s situation.

“I know I couldn’t do it without either of them,” Kiernan said. “I try to keep both systems pretty much the same so I don’t get confused. I’m going to keep doing this for a while. I’ll stay at Cypress for as long as they want me and I made a commitment to Troy and they have a lot of good young players.

“My worst fear going into this was that I would lose two games in one day. I don’t think I could handle that . . . No one is coming up to me and saying ‘I wish I could do that.’ Instead, I get a lot of ‘You’re nuts.’ ”