Basketball a labor of 'love' for Duluth East’s Rhett McDonald

DULUTH — Late in the first half of a game against Superior last month at the Winter City Showdown, Duluth East tied the Spartans and coach Rhett McDonald wanted to get his players energized for the defensive stand.

“‘D’ up!” he yelled, calling on the bench players to follow his lead. Some of the players joined him in the chant, but the results were a little mixed for something that has become a calling card at Greyhound games under McDonald’s tenure.

That’s OK: It’s not the varsity squad McDonald is coaching today. These are fifth graders. It’s 10:30 on a Saturday morning. They’re still learning what it means to be a Greyhound.

Almost as soon as he started coaching Duluth East more than 12 years ago, McDonald started to organize a travel youth program, which became the East Basketball Association.

Thirty years ago, middle school basketball programs were the feeder programs for the varsity and junior varsity teams.

“Once the 2000s came around, we saw tons of budget cuts all over the place,” McDonald said.

One of the places that saw those cuts were middle school basketball programs. At the time McDonald took over the Greyhounds, the Duluth Area Youth Basketball Association was overseeing the youth basketball program.

McDonald saw a need to establish a “specific program at East as soon as we possibly could.”

Since starting with maybe 20 kids in the program, EBA has grown to include almost 100 kids — enough to run a day of games with several other local feeder programs.

“Even though we’re in the largest class, we’re not Wayzata, we’re not Eden Prairie,” McDonald said. “We don’t just get to show up and start coaching kids when they’re freshmen — we have to do things differently.”

The EBA teams try to use much of the same terminology they’ll hear when they move up into the high school program and makes McDonald the perfect guy to design it.

Fifth-grade Greyhounds will listen to the McDonald preach about “grit and grind” — the philosophy of a hard-nosed, working man’s brand of basketball made popular by the Memphis Grizzlies more than a decade ago. They’ll also hear McDonald use terms like the “Kobe move” or get the kids into a “‘D’ up” chant on the bench, something that will be second nature by the time they reach high school.

Sometimes, however, a few modifications are needed. 

“Alright, now let’s get a turkey,” McDonald yelled across the court after a defensive stop. 

A “turkey” — for those that haven’t been to a bowling alley lately — is when someone rolls three strikes in a row. That’s the EBA term for three consecutive stops, but the boys in high school get something a little different. 

“At the high school level, we actually call them kills, but we’re not going to be that violent at that level,” McDonald said. “So we think that if we can get a certain amount of turkeys in the game, it’s usually going to allow us to win.”

Still, the nomenclature is relatively consistent throughout the entire program.

“We talk Kobe move,” McDonald said. “Kobe move for us means you’re going to go one way, hard, until they stop you and then you counter. Kids at these ages just dribble, dribble, dribble because that’s what they see on TV, but they’ll hear Kobe move in third grade and they’ll hear Kobe move when they are seniors in high school.”

More importantly, McDonald is building relationships that will become instrumental as the boys grow into high school players. Those connections go both ways, according to Duluth East assistant Damien Paulson. His sons, Noah and Rocco, played their way through the EBA and the varsity program. Noah is currently a redshirt junior at Minnesota Duluth and Rocco is a sophomore at Wisconsin-Superior.

Paulson said a robust, streamlined youth program like the EBA is essential to a successful program. It creates a connection between varsity players — who are often working scoreboards or officiating the youth games — and the younger players. More importantly, it’s vital for the varsity coach to be as involved as he is.

“To me, that’s how a program is made — they should know each other,” Paulson said. “And the varsity coach shouldn’t be on this pedestal that nobody gets to know until they’re there. Rhett’s done a good job of breaking that barrier down as far as our youth.”

The idea behind it all is to nurture a love of basketball and competition and that practice is not a “chore,” McDonald said.

“It’s not that they’re already thinking about college basketball or stuff like that,” he said. “But if we can get them to generally love the experience of playing — whether they’re the best player or not — I think that’s the overall goal.”

Perhaps the biggest thing the youth program and varsity program have in common is the time McDonald spends on both.

On a Monday night in November, McDonald held his opening practice for the high school program for two hours at Duluth East. He went straight from the high school gym to Ordean East Middle School for a youth practice.

Each week, McDonald estimates he spends about 4.5 hours on youth basketball, in addition to daily varsity practices, two to three games a week — often requiring a significant road trip — and regular film sessions.

It does take a lot of time for a father of three that also teaches history full-time, but his wife, Kayelyn McDonald, encourages him to coach the younger kids.

“I think she knows I would be miserable if I wasn’t,” McDonald said.

McDonald loves coaching, but if there is anyone who can claim to have coaching in their blood, it’s someone with the last name McDonald. His grandfather, Bob McDonald, is the winningest high school coach in Minnesota history. His dad, Mike McDonald, and all five of Mike’s siblings, are or have spent significant time coaching.

His younger sister Kailee Olson is an assistant with the Duluth East girls team and his brother Kyle McDonald is the head coach at Forest Lake. Basketball is a way of life for the McDonalds.

“Back in the day before everything was on film, I remember countless times going scouting with my day,” he said.

While Mike, the head boys coach at Cambridge-Isanti, doesn’t remember “scouting” with his dad, spending time in the gym was a constant for his brother Paul McDonald and himself. They also made a tradition of getting a hotel room and going to the state boys basketball tournament.

“We did that with my dad growing up and we still continue that,” Mike said. “Last year, all of my kids and I stayed in a hotel down on University Avenue near Williams Arena where most of the tournament was at and we just hung out there as a family.”

Mike said he’s only missed a handful of tournaments over the years, all of them when he was coaching and teaching in South Dakota. His dad’s dedication to basketball — and including his kids in his passion — is reflected with McDonald’s relationship with his own children. Often Ganon, Dekker and McKinli can come to away games or even ride the bus on road trips.

“Those things we did together, it gives me a reminder of how to parent when you’re so immersed in your own coaching,” McDonald said. “I have to find ways to include my own kids as much as I can into our high school stuff.”

While it all takes a ton of time, “basketball is the hobby,” according to McDonald, and seeing kids learn and grow is what makes it all worth it.

“When you see kids working collectively to try to achieve a common goal at the fourth- and fifth-grade level, that’s really cool,” he said. “It makes the sacrifice of time a lot more enjoyable — and it’s fun. I don’t go golfing, I don’t go fishing, I don’t go hiking. Literally, this is my hobby and I love to do it.”