Sports

From Sachem to the NCAA Tournament

Mike Atkinson spent one year as an assistant at Kentucky.

It was March 28, 1992 at the Philadelphia Spectrum. With 2.1 seconds left on the clock, Grant Hill threw a football-like pass to Christian Laettner, who spun on the foul line, released and sunk Kentucky's dream of winning a national title that year. Duke won, 104-103.

As "the shot" rolled off Laettner's finger tips, off the glass gently into the net as time expired, Mike Atkinson shook his head, walked to the middle of the floor to shake Mike Krzykewski's hand and left the NCAA East Regional Final for good.

It was a storybook season for Atkinson, who took a year leave of absence from his teaching and coaching positions at Sachem High School North to pursue his goal of coaching collegiate basketball. Eighteen years later, Atkinson spoke of the game like it were yesterday.

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True to his coaching persona, he cites statistics and references to the game the average person certainly wouldn't remember. Former Kentucky head coach Rick Pitino didn't put a player to guard Grant Hill, who was free to heave the ball to any part of the floor.

"Grant could step back as much as he wanted," Atkinson says.

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Atkinson remembers the slight fake Laettner used to throw the Kentucky defender off before he released the ball. He recalls Laettner was 9-for-9 from the field in shooting and 10-for-10 from the free-throw line. What were the chances that he would actually hit the shot? Slim, but it's history now.

What doesn't make highlight reels today is the personal foul Laettner committed against Aminu Timberlake.

"Laettner takes his foot and stomps him on the chest," Atkinson recalls. "No foul, no ejection, no technical. When I watched the game after, I thought, 'how could he get away with that?' All the things that went into that win – it all just worked for them."

Had Kentucky won, it would have made the Final Four with Indiana, who the Wildcats had beaten that season already soundly, Michigan, which featured a young Fab Five and Cincinnati, who couldn't match up with any of those teams.

"We would have had a great shot," Atkinson says.

          Atkinson grew up in Northport as the oldest of eight children. He adapted a hard charging style of play with a quickness complimented by skill orientation that has stuck with the teams he's coached over the years.

He wasn't the only one in the house that adopted an athletic passion.

"It was like a locker room 24 hours a day," he said. "Competing or talking trash or fighting, or whatever it might have been, it was usually over sports."

His younger brother Kenny is an assistant coach with the Knicks and will soon be inducted in the University of Richmond Hall of Fame. His brother Steve is a football and basketball coach at Hauppauge.

         Former Sachem basketball coaches Steve Rich and Dom Savino encouraged Atkinson to coach at clinics to get more involved with basketball. Rick Pitino was at Sachem when he – and the rest of the nation – recruited Jeff Ruland in the late 1970s. Though Atkinson didn't start coaching with the Red, Black & Gold until the early-1980's, there was already a connection.

Pitino, a Long Island native, was the head coach at Providence College and invited Atkinson to work at his camp in the late-80's, all while continuing his high school and college coaching career, which progressed from him being an assistant at Stony Brook University and the head coach at Suffolk County Community College West.

Eventually Pitino was the head coach of the New York Knicks and took the head job at the University of Kentucky in 1989.

He spoke to Pitino at a camp one day, expressing his interest to move up in the coaching world and Pitino offered him a volunteer assistant position on his staff at Kentucky in the summer of 1991. He checked with his wife, made the necessary arrangements and moved 765 miles out west to live the dream.

Atkinson, who took part in some scouting and film work, was in charge of individual instruction – something which Pitino is viewed as an innovator for creating.

"He would bring players in groups of two or three in the morning for 40 minutes and get dribbling and shooting in," Atkinson says, "and in the afternoon we had team drills. I did very little administrative work. It was all basketball."

Joining Atkinson on that year's staff was an all-star cast consisting of Florida head coach Billy Donovan, Arizona State head coach Herb Sendek and Bernadette Maddox, who was the first female Division I assistant coach in history and is an assistant with the Connecticut Sun of the WNBA.

On the roster that year besides Mashburn, who had a solid career in the NBA, was Travis Ford, who is the head coach at Oklahoma State, and John Pelphrey, who is at the helm of the basketball program at the University of Arkansas. It was a very cerebral program the year Atkinson was involved.

That season marked the first year Kentucky was eligible for the NCAA Tournament after coming off a three-year probation. The SEC was packed with surefire talent: Shaquille O'Neal was at LSU, Allan Houston was at Tennessee, Arkansas had Oliver Miller and Latrell Sprewell and Robert Horry were at Alabama.

Kentucky was a focused and fundamentally prepared team. Atkinson raddled off the tournament wins rapidly and proudly: "we beat Old Dominion, beat Iowa State, then we to Philly and beat John Calipari and UMass, then played Duke. It was a great ride."

         After the big dance, it was back to Sachem, where Atkinson regained his classes as a chemistry teacher became the head girls basketball coach and was fortunate to have Nicole Kaczmarski and some of the best teams in program history. He coached until the 2001-2002 season and became the head boys coach at North during the 2005-2006 school year.

There was a slim chance that Donovan or Sendek would get a head coaching position after the season, leaving a spot open on Pitino's staff, but it didn't work out.

As Kentucky cruises through the NCAA Tournament again this year as a No. 1 seed, Atkinson's story rings loud. Thankfully for Kentucky there is no Christian Laettner around to kill its spirits, but anyone can chuck up a prayer and make history, just like Atkinson did by jumping on board as a volunteer that year.


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