The House That Jim and Others Built

[Guest BasketBull.]

Building a team can be a solitary detail

BRUCE LOWITT. St. Petersburg Times Nov 9, 1996

Midnight had long since come and gone. The only sound came from the occasional automobile whooshing along some distant avenue. It was a clear night, the moonlight throwing shadows of fence posts across the grass. The only other illumination came from the headlights of a parked car.

Jim Leavitt was watching concrete harden.

When he talks about building a football program from the ground up, believe him. He is the coach of a University of South Florida team that has yet to play a down - other than in a scrimmage against itself.

From the players to their uniforms, even to the concrete that holds the fence posts around the field where they practice, he is building that program himself.

Well, okay, that's not entirely accurate. USF athletic director Paul Griffin and his assistant, Bobby Paschal, are involved, along with other athletic department staff and his nine assistant coaches.

The Bulls are rushing toward 1997 and their debut in Division I-AA. Though the self-effacing coach would have us think otherwise, everything flows from him. "I'm pretty particular about how to do things," Leavitt said.

"I'm more hands-on than most coaches; that's fair to say. There's nothing too small. . . . Football, this is my life, probably a bigger part of my life than it should be."

In 1988 he was less than a year away from earning a Ph.D. at Iowa in sports psychology (his doctoral thesis: "Intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation and how it helps football coaches deal with stress"). Then he was invited to be a graduate assistant coach with the Hawkeyes.

So much for Dr. Leavitt.

At 39, the St. Petersburg native, a graduate of Dixie Hollins High School, is back home after six years as co-defensive coordinator at Kansas State.

"I got here on New Year's Day and walked into an empty trailer," he said. "No floor, no walls, just an empty shell. Ground zero. The command was, `Start football.' "

So he did.

He secured a second trailer and surrounded them with gravel walkways and turf. "Image is so important if you're going to have a first-class program." He designed their interiors. "It's important for the coaches to have their own space. If they feel comfortable about where their offices are and have a nice desk and a nice chair they'll be more effective on the field."

He shopped for those desks and chairs, and the phones, trash baskets, couches and a coffee table, too. He priced video equipment and talked Sharp Electronics into donating a copier. He went to Staples for a bookcase in which to stack videotapes. "I didn't want to pay the money for the other ones. This one looks just as good." He shopped Scotty's for other cabinets and shelving.

He met with companies selling uniforms, sportswear, shoulder pads, helmets and face masks. He ordered the washing machines to clean the uniforms and oversaw changes in the plumbing when existing pipes proved inadequate for the new equipment.

He wasn't sure which way he wanted the two practice fields so before deciding, he had one laid out north-south and the other east-west (he went with north-south). "It's for the videotape. You want the right lighting for quality tape."

Now about those practice fields . . . `A football field is your livelihood'

On weekends when softball was played at an adjoining field, parents and fans would park on the practice fields. His practice fields.

"I was so mad," Leavitt said. "I kept telling people, `You can't park here. Don't you realize you're on our 20-yard line?' I was getting distraught. I mean, a football field is your livelihood."

He negotiated with Burton Fence of St. Petersburg. He wanted a fence installed immediately and for that, Mike Caldwell of Burton Fence told him, he would have to use quick-drying cement for the fence posts.

"He told me it's just as good as the other stuff but you've got to watch it," Leavitt said. "Once you put the post in the hole you can't touch it for 24 hours. It was important for me that the fence was very straight."

Caldwell and Leavitt have known each other since they were kids. "I never knew what a perfectionist he was," Caldwell said, laughing. "Being friends is one thing, but on a business level he is one son of a b---- to work for.

"He called my house every night; usually started out with a joke but pretty soon he was telling me, `Listen, got to have this done right or it's going to ruin my whole football program.' I've never seen a man that wrapped up."

The concrete was poured and the posts lined up. Now came the tough part - waiting. "Mark told me, `You can't have any kids playing 'round here. They might screw the whole thing up,' " Leavitt said. "That got me nervous. I worried about it all day, hung around the field all day."

He couldn't sleep. At 11 p.m. he got dressed, drove back to the field and shone his lights on the fence. Nobody there. Still, it was only 11 p.m. Leavitt sat and watched for a while, drove to his office, did some paperwork, drove back, watched some more, strolled around the fields. Then back to the office, then back to the fence. He called it quits about 2:30 a.m.

Those fence posts are as straight as a column of Marines at attention. `Jim, it's Kansas State'

It's not like this is something new. "I've always been this way, everywhere I've been, 17 years in colleges," he said. "People call me redundant, always making sure."

His wife of 15 years calls him a lot more, albeit with affection. "He's an obsessive-compulsive person, but in a positive way," Denise Leavitt said.

"I'll tell you a story about what kind of a nut he is. It goes back to when he got the job at Kansas State. He was a graduate assistant at Iowa when he got the call from (Kansas State coach Bill) Snyder.

"Jim's jumping up and down and screaming. He thinks this is the greatest job in the world. Now, I grew up in Missouri so I was not impressed with Kansas State (which had had one winning season in the previous 19). I told him, `Jim, it's Kansas State; maybe we should think about this.'

"They told him to report in two or three weeks. It was March and there was this blizzard going on. He got the call at 3 in the afternoon. By 4:40 he was in the car." Jim kissed Denise goodbye and, with three stops to get the car out of snowbanks and ditches, drove the 500 miles straight through. `Let's go, let's go'

If the office is his command center, it is not his second home. Unlike some coaches, you will not find him sleeping on a cot, the better to get in more work. Leavitt is a night person. It is not unusual for him to work well past midnight, but he will always head home. Denise will make him a sandwich. They'll sit up and talk for half an hour. "He won't let me go to sleep," she said.

He'll be up by 7 the next morning. He doesn't eat breakfast, doesn't drink coffee. "He showers, puts on his clothes and he's out the door," Denise said. "Everything's quick. He can't stand to sit in a restaurant.

"Remember how when you were a kid you were finished eating and ready to go but your parents had to drink their coffee and talk and you couldn't stand it? That's Jim. He can't handle it. It's like, `Let's go, let's go, get the check.' It's always `Boom, boom, boom!' "

Denise Leavitt was a real estate agent in Kansas. Here, well, she recently spied a small building on St. Pete Beach "just crying out to be an espresso and sandwich shop," she said.

She is more free to consider her own business because there are no little Leavitts to complicate things. "It looks like kids are beginning to be ruled out," Denise said. "Not 100 percent, but maybe in a year or two it will be. I guess life sort of got away from us."

So for now, and maybe forever, Jim Leavitt's players will be his boys, and he doesn't take that role lightly.

"They mean a great deal to me," he said. "It's very traumatic for parents to turn a child over to a university knowing that the next four or five years of their life are going to have such a big impact on the next 60 years. That is a big responsibility and I want to do thevery best for those young men." Another day in paradise

Leavitt acknowledged that "everyone outside of our staff" probably thinks the Bulls will be winless, "and we have no business beating anybody." He will not dwell on that, on the possibility the Bulls could get whacked week after week.

"You never sit around preparing yourself for something like that; you just keep banging away," he said. "We'll win; we'll be successful; we just don't know how long it's going to take."

Leavitt has a five-year contract. His goal for USF is to make the jump to Division I-A and into a conference in less than a decade, then to make the Bulls the equal of FSU, Miami and Florida. "We have the city, the university, the stadium," he said. "Look around. It's just another day in paradise. All we need is the players.

"I can imagine a day when we're on a par with the other three (teams)," Leavitt said. "I grew up in this state in the early '70s when Miami wasn't very good, when Florida State wasn't very good. I saw those transitions. Will it happen to us in 10 years, 20, 30? I can't answer that - but why would I put my life on the line if I wasn't going to go out and do that job?"

Having watched concrete dry, having shopped 'til he dropped, the Redundant Mr. Leavitt can spend more time drawing up plays, and redrawing them and . . .

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USF coach looks forward to season

WES PLATT. St. Petersburg TimesNov 24, 1996

Jim Leavitt, head coach of the University of South Florida's fledgling football team, holds the best loss record among Florida coaches.

Zero.

"We've done a great job of keeping the losses down this season," joked Leavitt at Wednesday's meeting of the Land O'Lakes Chamber of Commerce. His team takes the field for the first time in Houlihan's Stadium in Tampa next fall.

The coach, who started the job in January, talked about taking nothing and hopefully turning it into something great.

"We've got 9 coaches. We've considered 750 potential players. We've sold 8,000 season tickets," Leavitt said. "It's tough to have to turn away anybody, but we've only got room for 90 players under NCAA rules."

The South Florida Bulls will play seven home games in Houlihan's Stadium in 1997. Season tickets are $72.

[ChiTownBull]

we all love our short history...but now it's time to move this program forward.

[smazza]

leavitt is accountable to fans for what he does now

[bulls96go]

is running out of cement and needs a few more levels