Warsaw native built a perennial Division III contender with Emory basketball through TCC, loyalty
admin_news
INDIANAPOLIS — Less than 20 minutes after losing the Division III national championship on a buzzer-beater, Emory guard Tyson Thomas prematurely walked into the Gainbridge Fieldhouse interview room, waiting to face the music of the heartbreaking loss.
An NCAA communications staffer told Thomas to wait before re-entering the room, and Thomas told the staffer they'd need more chairs at the dais for when he came back. Only two players are required to speak alongside their coach after the game, but when Thomas came back, he was joined by his three fellow seniors — Jair Knight, Ben Pearce and John Coppolino IV — and Emory coach Jason Zimmerman, a native of Warsaw.
Thomas and Coppolino didn't even play in Emory's stunning loss to Mary Washington, but the team's leaders still chose to show up and take the weight of the defeat off other teammates' shoulders. The decision for all four seniors to attend the news conference comes down to Zimmerman's code for the program: trust, commitment and care (TCC).
"This whole season, we've been trying to live that (code) out," Knight said. "And that just lived out in many different ways. We came in this together, and I think we should finish it together as well. I feel like win or lose, there's no way we would rather have it."
"These are three of my brothers," Thomas said. "Everything we do, we do together. And when we were leading this year, we came in with goals. We came in and wanted to be great as a team. Nothing was without these three dudes next to me."
Jason Zimmerman's journey
Zimmerman has been Emory's coach since 2007. When he got his first head coaching job at the Atlanta school, Zimmerman knew he wanted to carry that code that he learned from his college coach, Bob McKillop. McKillop, who had a 32-year run at Davidson, signed Zimmerman to his first Davidson recruiting class in 1991. Zimmerman became an integral piece in building the program that Stephen Curry put on the map over a decade later.
"It's a code of conduct, the code of a character for life, not just for basketball," McKillop told IndyStar. "...Jason represents that not just as a basketball coach, but as a man in his family and in his community."
Thirty-two years after Zimmerman represented McKillop's program by honoring the code, Zimmerman's seniors at Emory are doing the same, even after losing in the program's first national championship game.
"We've been able to build a basketball community and a basketball program that's more than just one year going to the national championship," Zimmerman told IndyStar before the game. "It's been years of work and years of alumni and years of support from many, many alumni. … That's what you want when you're trying to build a basketball program."
Zimmerman grew up on a nameless, 174-acre farm off Old Road 30 in Warsaw. Before he got to high school, Zimmerman idolized and admired former Warsaw coach Al Rhodes, who won a state championship at the school in 1984.
Through Rhodes' coaching and a standout performance at Five Star basketball camp in Pittsburgh, Zimmerman earned an offer from McKillop. He went on to score more than 1,000 career points at Davidson, and after two years as an assistant at Greensboro Day School (where he won two North Carolina state titles), Zimmerman was back with Davidson as an assistant.
How Jason Zimmerman built Emory basketball program
Anyone who knows Zimmerman describes him as a relationship guy. People who meet him are drawn to him, and he manages those relationships well. That, more than anything schematically, is why he's built Emory into a mainstay atop Division III.
"It's one thing to build a program, but it's another to sustain it," said Steve Merfeld, who Zimmerman was an assistant for at Evansville from 2003 to 2007. "And year in and year out, Emory is at the top of the totem pole with Division III basketball, and it wasn't there when he got there. I mean, he really built that thing to the point that it's nationally recognized as one of the best Division III schools in the country."
Zimmerman, who had never watched a Division III basketball game before taking the job, has seen 63 seniors graduate from Emory since he took the job 19 years ago. At least 42 of those players made the trip to watch the game in Indianapolis. That's a testament to their love for Zimmerman as much as it is their love for their alma mater.
Zimmerman cares for others more than himself. It's why, even as tears streamed down his face exiting the dais, he looked at his wife, Traci, and two kids, Trevor and Taylor, and urged them to stop crying. Zimmerman has an acute sense for how to manage relationships, and it's why he's the winningest coach in Emory history.
"It's more than a basketball game," Zimmerman said. "It's the relationships that you build through this great sport. And all these people that I'm talking to you about today have my relationship with all of them has come about because of a leather ball."
"Jason's just an extremely fine person," Rhodes said. "And so his players are very fortunate to have a relationship with him."
Earning the right to play for the national championship
Zimmerman is someone who believes in taking the necessary steps to reach a certain goal. He feels that, in his time at Emory, he's had a handful of teams that were good enough to make the national championship, but this year's group happened to get a few more bounces to go their way to make it to Indianapolis.
But Zimmerman understands that in the single-elimination tournament, if you have enough teams that are good enough to win a championship, you'll get there eventually.
"You have to earn the right to play for a championship," Zimmerman said. "And then you have to play for the championship."
That's a message that Zimmerman claims he got from Rhodes, who preached something similar to his Warsaw teams during the single-class era of the IHSAA state tournament.
"I'm very proud of Jason because of the fact that he still uses a lot of the lessons and things that we taught," Rhodes said. "And hopefully our program helps young men grow up."
While Emory lost on Colin Mitchell's buzzer-beater, it had to earn the right to even be in that position. Mary Washington led by 13 points with 4:49 left and by 10 with 2:21 left. But Zimmerman's team earned the right to play to the buzzer, and it went on a 12-2 run to tie the game at 73.
"They kept believing until it was over, and I didn't expect anything different," Zimmerman said. "I didn't know if we would make the comeback because Mary Washington was playing really well ... but I didn't think we would quit playing."
Jason Zimmerman's place at Emory
Due to his success at Emory, Zimmerman has been presented with opportunities to ascend back up the coaching ranks. That hasn't influenced him.
Zimmerman says it'd take a "really special" offer to take him away from Emory, and that opportunity hasn't come yet.
"In a lot of ways, it was a mirror of the same battle that we had fought at Davidson, with him taking a lead role as part of that first recruiting class," McKillop said. "So to see what he has done by staying at Emory, by not thinking the grass was greener somewhere else. … But he stayed at Emory to build a culture, and that's what he has."
Between watching McKillop coach Davidson for over three decades and seeing Rhodes remain in Indiana for 42 years, Zimmerman has witnessed loyal coaches who haven't jumped ship at opportunities that may seem better.
Zimmerman, who says Emory will be back in the national championship, has remained loyal to the Emory community. After a devastating loss, his seniors reciprocated that loyalty to the program.
"Those guys that he has selected have carried a torch that Jason has lit and fueled year after year," McKillop said. "And when you got players passing the torch from class to class, from roster to roster, and now from decade to decade, that's a pretty difficult journey to take, and he's done it."
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: How Warsaw native Jason Zimmerman built Emory basketball into NCAA D3 power
