SportsApril 15, 2016
Saxony Lutheran girls basketball coach Sam Sides reflects on 38-year Hall of Fame career
It was March 8, 2014, and the Saxony Lutheran girls basketball team had just walked off the floor following a Class 3 quarterfinal victory over Lutheran St. Charles. The result sealed a first trip to state for the program, which had only been in existence since 2006. It was a good feeling, and the Crusaders were feeling good. Into the locker room they headed...
It was March 8, 2014, and the Saxony Lutheran girls basketball team had just walked off the floor following a Class 3 quarterfinal victory over Lutheran St. Charles. The result sealed a first trip to state for the program, which had only been in existence since 2006. It was a good feeling; the Crusaders were feeling good. Into the locker room they headed.
"So we were going to state and making history," recalls Brianna Mueller, now a senior, "and we go down into the locker room and Coach Sides starts to dance. He did the worm. He got down on the ground and did the worm, and we're all like, 'What is happening right now?'"
On Saturday, Saxony girls basketball coach Sam Sides will be one of an 11-coach class inducted into the Missouri Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame following the 38th year of his coaching career. His basketball coaching resume has earned respect and accolades. His dancing?
"I'm not a very good dancer, but I get emotional," Sides says. "I get a lot more emotional as I get older. I get fired up on occasion, but I try not to do that in public.
"I really have a great relationship with the players, and I love them to death. Inhibitions go down sometimes in the locker room. That's a safe haven, for them and me. That's where we're out of the public eye, and it gets pretty emotional. I couldn't even tell you half the time what I do under those circumstances."
The locker room has proved a safe haven for Sides his entire life. As a child in Jackson, he would put in shifts at his father's gas station, spending more time shooting balls into trash cans than doing actual work. When he wasn't using trash cans at the station, he was setting up shop at City Park.
At Jackson High School, he was a three-sport athlete, participating in basketball, football and baseball. Those were the basic three offered for boys back then, and he partook of them all, though basketball was the only one he'd work on all year long, putting in time at City Park on his own in the offseason.
It was during that time that he was exposed to some of his earliest coaching influences, playing basketball for Jerry Suedekum and R.B. "Bob" Goodwin, baseball for Suedekum and football for Paul Webber, who was credited with building the program into a consistent contender and was posthumously inducted into the Missouri Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2009, 11 years after his death.
For Webber, Sides was an all-district lineman, helping the Indians to a state semifinal as a senior.
"He influenced me quite a bit, I think, because he was a different kind of guy," Sides says. "He was all business, but he was a good coach. He's passed now, but was a big influence."
Sides graduated from Jackson in 1973 and then headed to Southeast Missouri State for the next five years. When his father grew ill, Sides, whose brothers were away in Vietnam, picked up the bulk of the responsibility at the gas station. He wasn't sure exactly what his future held for him, but he was sure of one thing -- he did not want it to be the family gas station.
"I'd go to school in the morning and then go there, open up the station until closing," Sides says. "I did that until we basically ran out of inventory and then closed it up. I thought, 'Well, I need a job, but all I want to do is sports.'"
You might say things have worked out OK for Sides in the ensuing 38 years, 25 of which were as a head coach. He has won more than 300 games on the basketball court alone, to go with his time coaching baseball and football and anything else someone might have needed help with. He has won gobs of district titles, been to nine final fours -- two as a head coach -- and spun a web of influence that would be impossible to fully trace.
"I would definitely say that has been my favorite memory from high school -- all the days in the gym with him," current Saxony senior Grace Mirly says. "Even the days outside the gym, when you see him walking through the halls. He will always give you a hug, he will always say something to you that will brighten your day. I am so, so, so thankful that people have finally recognized all the work he has put into it, and I know he feels blessed and humbled to be in that position. He likes to give credit to other people, but it's him -- he did it. I can speak for the rest of our team when I say that we could not be happier that they chose Coach Sides to be in the Hall of Fame."
Sides, too, is happy. Not for the pat on the back, but because hearing the words "Hall of Fame" provides an excuse to relive some of the relationships he's built during the last four decades while reaching a milestone of which young coaches dream.
"As a professional coach, that's where you want to get," Sides says. "You want to be a state champion -- I haven't got that done yet -- but in the coaching profession, there's not much of a higher honor they can give you than that. It feels pretty special. ... People keep telling me I deserve it. I don't know if I deserve it or not, but I'll take it. To me, it's very gratifying.
"I've had a lot of my ex-players congratulate me, and that means more to me than the actual award. Just that they think enough of me to congratulate me and the relationships I've had with them, that's been great. It's just kind of icing on the cake of a 38-year-career and still going. It's very special and it feels good."
The recognition. The relationships. The dancing in the locker room. They feel good. Of course, not every moment of a 38-year career can be that way.
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Sides still has sleepless nights. It is the curse of coaching for many, and Sides is no exception.
On any given evening, he tosses and turns, back out on the hardwood. He relives games -- not the results, but the minutia. Did he switch up defenses as soon as he should have? Should he have pulled the trigger on a substitution at the 26th minute instead of the 28th? Did he put the wrong guard pairing together for a minute in the fourth quarter?
"I can't remember where I put my keys, but I can remember that at the 2-minute mark I should have taken this player out and put this player in or we should have run this play or that play or changed defenses," Sides says. "That stuff bothers me a lot. I cannot sleep. Some days are worse than others.
"It would probably be easier if you weren't very good. If you knew you weren't very good and weren't going to be very successful, then you could probably sleep like a baby. But when you've got high expectations and you've got good kids and good players and you think you ought to do better and you don't, or don't play as well as you think you should, that's when I have a hard time. You start thinking about stuff before you go to bed. That's a bad plan. You need to go to bed not thinking about anything, and that's hard to do."
That's where the notepad comes in. It sits next to his bed, waiting in the darkness for inspiration -- or frustration -- to hit.
"I get up and turn my flashlight on so I don't wake my wife up, and I write down an idea for what I want to do -- a scheme or a play or a drill -- and I'll take notes," Sides says. "In the morning I can't read them, but I do that a lot. That's just the way I'm wired."
In the beginning, Sides had bags under his eyes.
Fresh out of college, Sides jumped in head first. He applied for the boys basketball head coaching gig at Leopold and, despite a blank resume, principal Greg Nenninger and superintendent G.H. Cook gave him a shot.
"A little school like that, you don't get that many applicants, I don't think," Sides said. "In fact, there was another guy who interviewed the same time I did and they were going to hire him because he had a little bit better pedigree than I had as far as teaching experience. I talked to him and he said, 'Well I don't think I'm going to take it if they offer it to me.' So, I don't think I was their first choice. But they chose me anyway, and I was grateful for the opportunity and I think I grew as both a teacher and a coach out there."
He cut his teeth in a hurry, teaching everything from physical education to science to driver's ed to health, with a coaching schedule just as varied.
Success at a small school like Leopold is an illusive target (Sides reminisces about a baseball player who had more siblings at home than he had kids at his cafeteria table); that much was clear from the start, when the sleepless nights started.
"I remember the first game I coached. I got beat 104-52. I won't forget that game," Sides says. "I couldn't sleep. I told my wife, 'If it's going to be like this, I can't do this.' It just ate me up. We got through that and pushed through that and got where I could concentrate on competing. I didn't worry about the outcome so much as I worried about the process."
Sides remained at Leopold for six seasons, and the Wildcats found ways to be competitive but never won a district title. It's a milestone the program is still trying to reach. But he learned ways to not lose, and that was a lesson he has carried with him since and still carries fond memories of his time with the school.
He then moved on to Meadow Heights, where he led baseball and boys basketball for seven years. There, he led the Panthers to a 24-7 record and a district title in 1989-90 -- something that has only ever happened under Sides' watch. In fact, it wasn't until January of 2002 that the program again crested the .500 mark.
"They hadn't won one and they still haven't won [another] one," Sides said. "A good group of kids went through there. We got second a few times and just couldn't quite get over the hump, and then finally won a district championship. At that time, you had another round off the playoffs -- a sectional and a regional, they called it. We beat Naylor in the next round and then we had to play Scott County to go to the quarterfinals, and they beat us bad -- they had Marcus Timmons, who ended up playing professionally. They crushed us. But that was probably the first really, really good team I'd got."
It allowed Sides to vault himself to a higher level, as well as head back home while earning more money. The Jackson native hooked up with the Indians and began as an assistant coach under Hall-of-Fame coach Ron Cook with the girls basketball team, a role he filled for the next 13 years. They were years that included a whopping seven trips to the final four.
"Andrea Siemer -- Miss Missouri Basketball that year -- she was a senior my first year, and she went on to play for Mizzou," Sides says. "I think we were seeded fourth in the Farmington Tournament and went on to finish fourth in the state that year.
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"Learning from Coach Cook and being around those good players, that kind of inspires you to work a little harder and get more involved and be a better student of the game. I was constantly trying to learn as much as I could about basketball, and I didn't do that with other sports as much. Just having a little success whets your appetite, and you want to do more. You want to keep going. One of the players up there said, 'Well, we won a district championship, a quarterfinal, what do we do now?' And we said, 'Well, we do it again.'"
Sides was also coaching on the football staff and leading the baseball team, but he stepped away from that when Cook retired and Sides stepped into his role. Rather than feel pressure to meet high expectations, he relished the challenge and recognized that Jackson provided him with all the resources necessary to continue winning.
He did. Taking over in 2003-04, Sides won at least 22 games in each of his first three seasons as head coach and posted winning records all five campaigns.
The Jackson native was happy in his hometown, but after three decades teaching and coaching, he wasn't necessarily enamored with every aspect of the job in the classroom, where he enjoyed the actual student interaction, but wasn't in love with the paperwork and preparation.
"I'd been in the classroom for 30 years and it gets to the point in the public-school retirement system, if you retire and draw your retirement, compare that to working full-time and there's not much difference in pay," Sides said. "I could not work and make the same amount of money as working full-time, and, well, that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The classroom, I enjoyed of it, but you get tired of the meetings you have to go to and grading papers and class preparation. I was ready for another step.
"I wanted to stay at Jackson and just coach -- coach junior high football and girls basketball and not teach anything, but they didn't want to do that."
So Sides retired. But that didn't end his career. Sides nearly took a job at a public school in the Columbia area, but instead he moved to Saxony, allowing him to remain in Jackson, pull his retirement and continue doing the only thing he knew -- coaching.
Saxony athletic director Larry Cleair came calling and brought Sides on board to coach the Crusaders' boys basketball program and take over his role as AD. He led that group to a 44-34 record in three seasons, including a district title.
Then he made a change and entered the most recent, and arguably most successful, chapter of his career.
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The Saxony girls basketball program, started by Cleair and first coach Steven Fritzler, played its inaugural varsity season in 2006-07. In the ensuing years, coaching stability was hard to come by and, as the athletic director, Sides knew it was going to be tough to fill a vacancy for a girls basketball coach. He recognized, however, that he had someone qualified for the job sitting right at his desk. And so in 2011-12, he stepped away from the boys and took up the reins of the girls team. His impact was immediate.
"The program's relatively new; the whole school has only been here since 2000. The girls had struggled to even have a team and be successful and win games, and I thought I could help them and thought I was a good fit," Sides said.
"I think we were seeded seventh in the district that first year I took over, and we got second. I knew we could compete with people in our class."
The Saxony girls won 11 games in the first season under Sides -- the most wins in a season in the program's short history. They also reached the district championship that year.
In Year 2, the program vaulted past that mark, going 25-3 and winning a Class 3 District 3 championship while welcoming in a freshman group that built the foundation for the four years since.
In Year 3, the Crusaders went 24-6 and reached the state semifinals -- the first time Sides did it as a head coach and the first time in school history.
"[As an assistant], you're just kind of there and you offer some suggestions, but you're not the one making the decisions. So it's not really on you," Sides said. "As a head coach, your decisions, it's on you. You've got to make the right one. You're more concerned about making a wrong one and costing your team a game than you are about winning. You're worried about causing us to get beat."
That fear came to life a year later, with a group that seemed destined for big things. Saxony went 29-0 and reached the state quarterfinals. That's when Park Hills Central got in the way, pulling off an overtime victory that left Sides sleepless again and the Crusaders short of goals they thought attainable.
Steeled for a final run for a core group of seniors, the team rallied for a 29-3 season and another run to state. This one was as satisfying as ever, with the Crusaders knocking off Park Hills Central in the quarterfinals to gain revenge.
"You can't take it for granted," Sides says. "Like I tell them, 'Count your blessings, because most people don't get to go once. And we got to go twice in the last four years.' A lot of good coaches -- better coaches than me -- never get that opportunity because of the way the chips fell. I feel very fortunate and blessed to be where I'm at with the kids I've gotten to coach. It's not all about you, it's about the players you get to coach. I'm very thankful for that.
"This quarterfinal game we won this year was about as emotional as I've ever been. Last year they beat us when we hadn't lost any games, and they beat us in overtime. That was really tough. Then to come back and play the same team -- minus a couple of players -- and being down in that game ... that's going to stay with me for a long time. That was an emotional one for me. To get to play two more games with [these girls] at state, that meant a lot to me. It was a great way to end that run with them. I was real fortunate and blessed to be able to do that."
Therein lies the heart of Sides' entire career.
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At 61 years of age, Sides isn't done yet. As his 2015-16 Crusaders pushed into the depths of their postseason run, he craved victory, not for victory's sake, but to prolong his time with his players -- time that can never be duplicated or recreated.
Throughout his career, Sides has been praised for his ability to get the most out of his players. He points out he's never started a boys basketball player taller than 6-foot-3, and he's never started a girl taller than 6-foot. He has motivated and pushed and, yes, had some talent, but he's always valued hard work and effort and the right attitude.
The key to squeezing out every ounce of juice until nothing is left but rind, is, he believes, about staying true to his own personality and embracing his love for his players and his love for the game.
"I think you've got to coach to your personality," Sides said. "I've always had a lot of passion, and just like everyone else some days, I'm better than other days. But a lot of times I'm tired or fatigued, and when practice starts, I enjoy practice. I enjoy practice more than I do the games most of the time. I think they feed of that a lot. ... I try to be myself and try to coach players to their nature -- don't try to make players do something they can't do. That's coaching, in my mind.
"Sometimes I could have coached my best and done about all we could do, and we didn't win many games. You've got to plug that much heart and out-think and outwork people if you don't have more talent. To me, those are challenges I enjoy. Try to figure out what we can do to turn things around and beat this team this time that beat us before."
Sides is at the point where he's seeing kids of his former players on the court. In some cases, he's seeing grandkids of people he knows. He's been around for a while, and he knows it. Two years ago he had a health scare that left him unable to do something as simple as climb a flight of stairs. He ended up going under the knife to get a type of heart procedure called cardiac ablation to correct atrial fibrillation -- what Sides refers to as "a misfiring engine."
The coach has been fine since, but it certainly puts things in perspective. Closing in on his fourth decade on the sidelines, there's always the question of what more Sides can accomplish and when he might decide to call it a day.
The opportunity to move north to Columbia and be close to his son and grandchildren is a tempting one, though Sides said he doesn't know if he and his wife will ultimately make that move, or when that would happen.
"I'm no spring chicken," Sides said. "As I get older and I still feel good and have the energy, that's what concerns me more than anything else -- if I don't have the energy that the kids deserve. If I'm just going and mailing it in and don't have that emotion, when I lose that it's not fair to them and it's time to do something else. Then I'll know it's time to quit."
Sides has spent his entire life sharing his passion with student-athletes in Southeast Missouri, and that, he believes, is what he has enjoyed most. His Hall of Fame induction might have a lot to do with his successes on the court, but those off the court are the ones he holds closest to him. Ultimately, they are probably impossible to separate.
"I [will most remember] his love for us and the game," Mirly says. "That's what it takes. You can't be coaching just to win. You have to love your players and love the game. That's what he did. He had a special place in his heart for each of us, and that's why I think he's so successful."
It sure beats a gas station.
"I always tell them it's better than any drug you can get -- you come in at the end of a game and you're completely exhausted and you don't have any energy and you come off the court victorious. There's not much better feeling than that," Sides says. "You're completely exhausted and you can't even raise your hand? For me, when I was playing, too, that's very euphoric. You don't get that every game or every week. Sometimes you don't know when it's going to hit you. The quarterfinal games and those kind of games, yeah, it affects me, no doubt. I don't know if I danced this time or not."
Seemingly at the peak of a 38-year hall-of-fame coaching career, Sides is definitely still dancing.
[Editor's note: Corrections were made to more accurately reflect the origins of the girls' basketball program at Saxony Lutheran.]
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