A Penn State student contorted his body in the middle of the gym floor as his fellow students hollered their approval from the Rec Hall bleachers.
Patrick Chambers leaned against the side of those bleachers, just out of view, and watched, smiling. The breakdancing competition on the floor was only part of Hoops Madness, the sort of bouncy, fan-friendly event that ushers in the start of the college basketball season at so many schools around the country each year but has only been held sporadically on a campus that is typically consumed with football in early November.
This night was part of Chambers’ larger plan. So was donning a jersey and eye black to rally the student body before football games, driving through campus on a golf cart and making appearances at student dining halls. Chambers knew when he took over the Penn State men’s basketball program in early June that what his team accomplishes between the whistles this season will be what ultimately wins over a long-dormant fan, base but that a big part of his job was to build that fan base away from the floor.
The Nittany Lions will play Slippery Rock in a 4 p.m. exhibition game this afternoon in the Bryce Jordan Center, marking Chambers’ Penn State debut. He is the 12th coach in team history and the first in 28 years who wasn’t a onetime member of Bruce Parkhill’s staff. Parkhill and successors Jerry Dunn and Ed DeChellis were a combined 412-428 in 28 seasons, with a Big Ten conference record of 103-219.
Chambers is in his third year as a head coach. He went 42-28 in two seasons at Boston University, going 23-9 in the America East Conference. He has less than a decade of collegiate coaching experience but has enjoyed success at each stop. A fan base starved for a consistent winner is ready to embrace him but, like most fan bases, has finite patience. Chambers wants to bring them wins, but he has proven over the months since his hire that he wants to entertain them as well.
Later in the evening, before rapper Fabolous took the stage nearly two hours behind schedule, Chambers would show off a few dance moves of his own. During the breakdance competition, though, he was content to stay in the shadows, if only for a moment.
He doesn’t usually spend a lot of time there.
Getting to know you
Penn State is seven practices into the season, and Chambers’ voice is nearly gone already. The 40-year-old coach orders a cup of hot tea with his meal at lunch. It’s not a cold or flu that’s weakened his vocal cords. It’s overuse.
“We’re a team that’s learning how to play hard,” he says. “I’ve been using the term ‘Persistent intensity.’ Keep tapping the stone.”
A few weeks later, Penn State beat reporters get their first look at a Chambers practice. In past years under previous coaching regimes, upperclassmen would shout out instructions or chatter during drills or warmups. This practice is different.
Every player on the floor is talking — shouting, really — during every drill. Most of the time it’s basic basketball talk, like shouting for the ball during a post-up drill. But even as the players go through their warmup stretches, there’s persistent chatter. Most of it is unintelligible, but it continues as the players shift from drill to drill. It might be just a show for the assembled media, but after only a few weeks, it seems routine to the players.
Chambers moves them quickly from one drill to the next, always watching, always talking.
“He’s always ‘on,’” junior point guard Tim Frazier says. “When you first see him, you say, ‘Hey, maybe he’s just that way when he gives a speech.’ But he’s always like that. He’s always full of energy. He’s a great leader.”
Chambers made a point to visit each of his players in the few days after he took the job in early June. Because class was out for the summer, that meant flying all over the country and racking up more than 10,000 miles. He wanted to interact with the players face-to-face as soon as possible, and he continued that when they came back to campus for the fall semester. Chambers likes to meet with the players for what he calls “20-minute check-ins.” He asks them about their girlfriends, their families, their classes.
“You’re always learning about them,” Chambers says. “In this short time, when I’m not on the road, I’m with them.
“If you can have a different relationship other than on the court, that process might speed up a little bit. But it’s always a learning process. In four to five years, you’re going to learn something new every day about someone.”
Seen and heard
Allen Sheffield, a Penn State sophomore and a member of the student men’s basketball fan group, Nittany Nation, says the Nittany Lions’ new coach is a frequent visitor to campus. Chambers has visited the dining commons in East Halls, where the vast majority of Penn State freshmen live, and in West Halls, which are typically home to upperclassmen.
Sheffield says he likes Chambers’ attitude, his mind-set, and the mood he’s created on campus.
“There hasn’t been buzz about basketball around here for a long time,” Sheffield says.
Penn State senior Marin Galvin, an intern with the basketball marketing department, feels that buzz, too.
“I don’t know if that’s because we had a pretty good season last season, making it to the NCAAs,” Galvin says. “But I definitely think that people think Coach Chambers is a guy that can turn around the program. From our perspective, our No. 1 goal is to get people to come out to games and fill the sections and it seems like Chambers is going to redo the program and we’re going to get more students coming out and supporting him.”
Chambers, who has a marketing degree from Philadelphia University, has taken a hands-on approach with the marketing staff, blending his own ideas with those of the staff.
“He’s allowing us to do a lot more than we’ve been able to in the past,” Galvin said. “He is very enthusiastic about what we do in terms of getting people to come out to games. Having that support from the coaching staff means a lot to us, because it means that our jobs aren’t going unnoticed.”
If you build it ...
The Nittany Lions won 13 of their 18 games in the Bryce Jordan Center last season, defeating Michigan State, Illinois and Wisconsin there. Yet average paid attendance for those 18 games was 7,457, less than half the building’s basketball capacity and nearly a 9 percent decrease from the previous season.
Penn State has drawn an average of 7,931 fans during the last five seasons, and that figure hasn’t been higher than 8,150 since 2001. And yet, there are some fans who renew their season tickets every season, who make the drive up Route 322 from other parts of the state several nights each winter to watch the Nittany Lions.
Lonnie Dawes, who lives in Lancaster and has had season tickets since the 1980s, is one of those fans and is ready to see what sort of change Chambers can effect.
“Once they announced it and started hearing more about him, I got pretty excited about it,” Dawes says. “I’ve seen more energy from this guy in this short of a time than I saw from two previous coaches in their entire tenure added together.”
What might be the most fervent group of Penn State basketball junkies, though, comes together on PennStateHoops.com. The site, which creator and moderator Tim Beidel has been running, in various forms, for more than 15 years, has a core of about 500 fans, some of whom have been watching since the John Bach days.
“We’re like the Marines,” Beidel says. “The few, the proud.”
They haven’t been quite as few lately, though. The site drew 43 percent more visitors from April to October than it had over the same time frame the previous year, Beidel reported, and received 50 percent more page views.
During the last few years, posters who wanted a coaching change railed against DeChellis supporters. DeChellis’ departure and Chambers’ hire has halted most of the back-and-forth on the site — for now.
“I don’t think it’s going to be any different,” Beidel says. “We’ll lose two or three games in a row, and people will say we should have gotten Larry Brown. It’s a religious thing. People take a strong viewpoint on this.”
Beidel, a former newspaper reporter, liked DeChellis and sympathizes with the challenges he faced and that Chambers now faces. He likes the new guy’s marketing savvy and positive approach, though, and believes a lot of the posters on his site feel the same way.
“Fans just want to be all-in,” Beidel says. “They’re looking for things to latch onto, and they’ve seen a lot in Chambers that they like.”
Oh, brother
Chambers has 11 older siblings — eight brothers and three sisters. He had lunch with four of them last month in Philadelphia and marveled at how all five of them had to continually raise their voices throughout the meal just to be heard.
“Being away from them for two, now going on three years, I can finally talk on a normal level,” he says, grinning.
But listening to one of Chambers’ brothers is like listening to the coach himself. The demeanor isn’t much different, either.
“I think we’re all very much the same,” Chambers says. “We love being around each other. We all have strong personalities. We’re all very outgoing. And we do have that pitbull mentality that you might knock us down, but we’re not going to be down for long. And we rally around one another, good times and bad.”
Megan Chambers Flanagan, who met her husband Michael at Penn State and moved back to State College almost two decades ago, is one of three Penn State graduates among the siblings. She and Patrick are putting up many of the 60 members of the family who plan to be sitting behind the Penn State bench during next Saturday’s season opener against Hartford.
They’re all waiting, like many other Penn State fans, to see what the youngest Chambers brother is going to do next.
“There’s no one who loves this basketball program more than him and wants to change everything in a positive way,” Flanagan says. “I’m ecstatic. I can’t wait ’til the season starts.”
