Quotables: Joe Hillock
Caught up one last time with Joe Hillock, who is leaving his post as UCLA men's basketball director of basketball operations for the head coaching gig at Stoneridge Prep, which will start with an entirely new squad. Gone is Enes Kanter, Scout.com's No. 1 center who is headed to Kentucky.
Hillock is in the midst of a complete overhaul: Scheduling, recruiting and evaluating, and he's bringing in some foreign players who will play immediately.
Here's what he had to say...
You've told me you've wanted to get back into coaching for a while; was the director of operations job a good one for you?
"It was really fulfilling. Coach Howland has done so much for me and my family, the people at UCLA are so special. It was a really tough decision to make this move. But in that regard, this is an opportunity for me to become a head coach again, and I needed to take this chance."
Talk about your role at UCLA, were you able to coach, or was it just the combination of administrator, assistant and coordinator?
"More than that, I helped administrate a lot of things to keep Howland's plate clean. That was really my job. Not a whole lot of coaching involved. That's what intrigued me about this position. That opportunity was unbelievable for me, but then this opportunity came up. I weighed long and hard, thought about it for a month and a half. I just think it's a chance here to build a legacy, build a program, something special for Stoneridge and me and Angela Hagen, the AD who hired me."
Talk about the difference between a prep school job and a high school job...
"It's much more than a high school job, it's a job where you're recruiting kids to come and we're going to get them where they want to be. I have to develop my own schedule, and today we got invited to the National Prep Classic in Mesa, Ariz. We'll play oither Prep schools, Findlay Prep, and other teams back east, and maybe some junior college teams that fit maybe more than high school kids do."
Will the hardest part for you be leaving UCLA or getting back into coaching?
"That will be a big change. I think that will satisfy my coaching addiction. The hard thing about it is that I have no assistant coaches yet, and basically its like when I started at Southern Utah. I'll have my hands in everything. That will be a hard thing to jump on right there. It's going to satisfy my craving to get back in to do the daily grind of individual work. We're going to do a lot of that to develop their skills. We're playing with some foreign kids and we're going to have to get them going fundamentally. It's the joy and reward of watching these kids grow."
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