By Chris Wagner / The Post-Standard


Look over at the Le Moyne men’s basketball bench and you’ll see head coach Steve Evans, admitted perfectionist, a fanatic for detail, all born of a passion for basketball.

Look again and you’ll see his father, 71-year-old assistant coach Stan “Buddy” Evans, admitted perfectionist, a fanatic for detail, all born of a passion for basketball.

Put them together and you’ve got a winning formula, a duo that agrees on 95 percent of on-court issues; a tandem that helped guide the Dolphins into last year’s Northeast-10 championship game.

No problem there ... it’s just that matter of the 5 percent where they don’t agree.

Evans and Evans said they will go toe-to-toe to argue their points, sometimes revisiting an issue on-and-off for days. Call it stubbornness, born of a lifetime player-coach relationship that they have learned to accept.

“We’re cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways,” said Steve Evans, who will lead the Dolphins against Syracuse University in an exhibition game tonight in the Carrier Dome. “We agree on 95 percent of things, but man, that other 5 percent, you’d think it was 95 percent that we don’t agree on because we will fight about it.”

“I would say that he listens, but not immediately,” added the elder Evans, an SU graduate who played for the Orange in 1960-61. “If I say something, he’ll probably say just the opposite, but then maybe tomorrow or the next day he’ll say the same thing. We’re both looking at this thing the same way with the same thoughts.”

The core of their relationship dates to the days when Buddy Evans was a demanding basketball and baseball coach at Rome Free Academy for more than two decades. Steve was at his side and attending games and practices from the time he could walk. He participated in Harlem Globetrotter-style pre-game routines as a youth and then starred as a high-scoring point guard for the varsity in the late 1980s.

From that vantage point, he learned of his father’s meticulous preparation work. Stan still has binders of notes from every practice he ever conducted at RFA, including those from a double-session on Nov. 11, 1970 — the day Steve was born. (He still made it to the hospital in time for the birth).

“The preparation — the detail of a practice schedule, minute for minute — those are things I saw my father do every day, and I’ve kept it,” said Evans, who has his own file cabinet filled with nine years of practices at Le Moyne.

Meeting dad’s expectations in athletics, however, was never easy and praise was hard to come by, Evans said.

“My father is not the type that will pat you on the back all the time and say things are good,” he said. “He’ll say, ‘Why should I compliment you when you’re doing what you’re supposed to do? These five things you’re doing wrong, that’s what I’m going to tell you about.’ And that’s how he coaches and that’s how I was brought up.”

The elder Evans agrees he was tough.

“I was very intense. I was a perfectionist,” said Stan, who had a 241-198 basketball record at RFA from 1970-92. “Probably if you saw me coach and you didn’t know me, you’d say, how could my son ever play for him? But I had a type of relationship with the kids that once the practice was over, it was over. The next day we started at square one again.”

Stan Evans joined the Dolphins staff in 2007, when he found himself without a coaching job for the first time in 35 years. Stan, who followed his RFA days by working for 13 years as an assistant to Tom Murphy at Hamilton College and SUNY IT, lost his job a year after Murphy moved on to Northeastern.

With time on his hands, Evans said his father would show up at Le Moyne games and some practices, then present him with lists of 25 things that he didn’t think the Dolphins were doing correctly. Despite Evans’ insistence that his team was working on nearly everything his father pointed out, the lists continued.

“So, finally, I said, it’s more frustrating having him come and try to take a snap shot of the team every few weeks. I’d rather have him here every day,” Evans said.

Stan was brought on staff for $2,000 a year, barely enough to cover travel expenses to and from his home in Rome. For the son, it was a great bargain.

“If I were to find some young assistant coach and say, here’s two grand to be a college coach, I doubt that kid’s going to have the toughness to come to practice with the passion that my dad has for coaching,” Evans said. “And there are a lot of older coaches out there who would be good to have on the bench, but I don’t know if they’d have the passion he has to come to work here every day. He just doesn’t let people take possessions off. If he’s here, he’s coaching.”

Following three straight losing seasons, Le Moyne improved to 15-14 in 2007-08 and then to 20-11 last year, when the Dolphins won 13 of their last 15 contests. Evans gives props to his dad for helping develop such post players as NE-10 player of the year Laurence Ekperigin and Eduardo Archibold Brown.

He said the players affectionately call his father “Pops” and look past the verbal disagreements over basketball strategy that sometimes flare up between father and son and assistant coach Gallagher Driscoll during practice.

“Gallagher’s one of my best friends and my dad’s obviously my father,” Evans said. “Between them, I’ve got two guys who have no problem telling me where to stick it. It’s an interesting staff. It’s not personal and we laugh about it, but in that 5 percent toughness times, it’s not fun to be around.”

Asked for an example, Evans pointed to his father’s repeated requests to put in a flex offense, a patterned weave relying on precise cuts and screens.

“It’s got some merit, but I’ve got my logic as to why I don’t want to do it,” Evans said. “But he’ll bring it back into conversation maybe three weeks from now, and I’ll say no again. We’ll probably go into the last week of the season and he’ll say, ‘You know what would be a good wrinkle, putting in a flex-cut action.’ And the thing is now, I can’t do it because I’m stubborn, too.”

Stan showed his own mulish streak, saying, “See, he’s wrong. I just like the flex for a set play. I wouldn’t run it as a main offense. I keep mentioning it to him, but I guess he can do what he wants. I make suggestions, he makes decisions.”

While such honesty can be emotionally taxing, it’s not something either man hides from. They accept their relationship — one that Evans said has always been “player-coach based” — and the benefits it brings on court.

Father has even shown a softer side in his seventh decade, often telling his son to go easier on players than he ever did. And he has turned into a classic grandpa, frequently indulging Evans’ 4½-year-old son Trey with trips to the golf course.

“We’re working on a relationship the way any father and son work on their relationship all through their life,” Evans said. “We have good days and we have bad days. I’m not so much trying to please Dad anymore or live up to his expectations. I’m beyond that.

“I just feel like he’s got a lot to give somewhere and I would be cheating my program if I didn’t have him here. There is a respect for those 95 percent of things that we agree upon, and we keep coming back fighting for that other 5 percent.”