After Hurricane Katrina shut down his high school, Bernard Griffith resurfaced as a player development coach with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Two years later, as New Orleans’ Recovery School District re-opened another set of schools, Griffith is back home.

“Mostly, I missed the kids,” says Griffith, the former Head Boys’ Basketball Coach at St. Augustine High School and now a teacher and coach at Sarah T. Reed High School, both in New Orleans. “At the professional level, coaching is strictly about playing basketball because the athletes have already formulated their characters. But at the high school level, you’re trying to motivate kids to become successful individuals and basketball is a tool to help them accomplish a lot of different things.

“Coaching high school basketball is a longterm investment,” he continues. “For three or four years, you put your time and energy into a high school athlete’s development. But before you can see the final results, you have to wait for your investment to mature. When they go off to college, become successful, and come back to visit you, that’s when you get your reward.”

In 28 years at the all-boys’ St. Augustine High School, Griffith taught classes in business law, economics, geography, history, sociology, and world culture. Over that same time, he led the Purple Knights to four state championships, including an undefeated 1983 team with senior Avery Johnson, Head Coach of the Mavericks, on its roster. But when Katrina struck in August 2005, the roof of St. Aug’s gym was damaged, the floor was ruined, and the locker rooms were buried under five feet of water.

Overnight, Griffith lost his job and his home, located in New Orleans’ hard-hit Ninth Ward. From Dallas, Johnson invited Griffith to join the Mavs with responsibilities for working with players on basketball fundamentals. “The challenge in joining the Mavs was getting over the amazement of being in a room with all these athletes I’d seen on television,” says Griffith. “But once we started to work together, and once they saw I knew what I was talking about it, everything fell into place. They just want to be good at the game and they appreciate anyone who can help them.”

At the end of that first season, when Dallas won a franchise-tying 60 games, Griffith experienced the pride of seeing his former player named NBA Coach of the Year. Griffith continued to work on fundamentals with Mavs players through the end of the 2006-07 season, when he received an offer from the New Orleans Recovery School District to return for the upcoming academic year.

In the intervening time, his house has been rebuilt and his old job has disappeared—in 2006, St. Aug merged with two other Catholic high schools to form the MAX School of New Orleans. Griffith will continue to work for the Mavericks as a college scout, while spending most of his time helping to rebuild a high school.

“Having worked in the NBA might impress some of these youngsters for a little while, but it’s not going to change the way I approach the game,” says Griffith. “Hopefully, when the Mavericks come to town, some of the players will agree to speak with our kids. If we can show how basketball can open up other doors in their lives and how they can use their basketball skills to further their education, that would really catch their attention.

“But whatever our kids do in the future, education is going to be the key,” continues Griffith. “So I tell them the brain is the most important muscle in the body, and basketball is one way that they can develop that muscle.”

For an update o how Coach Griffith’s first months at Sarah T. Reed High school are going, please log on to www.AthleticManagement.com the week of November 5. Or visit the site’s blog section anytime after that.