The rise of IPFW: Part 4

Dane Fife was just 25 years old when he was named the head coach at IPFW.

It was a huge story on campus, a big one in the city of Fort Wayne and even had national appeal due to his high profile playing career and his new claim to being the youngest men’s head coach in Division I. No matter how I felt then, how I feel now; I will always love the fact that we, the IPFW Communicator, broke the story.

Throughout the search, myself, Justin Kenny, Nick West and Tony Maurer were all over it. We asked anyone we could, any time we could. Talked to players to find out who interviewed, called candidates, and followed every last lead. The night before the announcement, we got confirmation: Dane Fife was to be the head coach. At the time, IPFW’s web presence was slight, but we had to break the story. We had to beat Sarah Trotto at the Journal Gazette, we had to beat everyone. Just after midnight, my story, with credit to my Communicator colleagues, went live on CollegeHoops.Net. Now, the site sits as an unupdated shell, but then it was one of the biggest hit-garnering websites for college basketball anywhere. And we broke the story. And I will always love that.

The press conference went off without a hitch and Dane Fife said all of the right things, all out of the script he seemed to have written for himself in his mind. Once and now again colleague Justin Kenny and I wrote contrasting columns in the first issue of the IPFW student paper, The Communicator, just days after the hiring. I think Justin was trying to play devil’s advocate in his. In my column, I was honest. The hiring was insane to me.

Looking back to almost nine years ago when the hire was made, I have now spent a lot of time around Dane Fife. Although it has been years, he was once one of the few people that I saw pretty much every single day. I have a greater respect for Dane as a person and as a coach than I could have imagined.

But in May 2005, I was appalled and pretty well thought that IPFW AD Mark Pope was out of his mind. Why? To sell tickets? So the Memorial Coliseum would echo just a little less? To motivate the players by giving them someone who could relate to them? Didn’t you just have the guy to relate to them? I kept my column tame; I kept a lot of questions hid internally.

Mark Pope opened the press conference with a phrase. I opened my news story for the front page of The Communicator quoting the same phrase: “Dane Fife is the right man at the right time for IPFW.”

I didn’t believe a word of it.

And before we could even see who was right and who was wrong, that darkness that began a year or so earlier engulfed the program. In one full swoop, walk-on Andrew Bourne and returning leading scorers Pete Campbell and Beau Bauer were gone, decisions made what we thought to be independently at the time. The next fall, in an interview I did with Campbell about the mass exodus over two years of athletes from the school, he was pretty clear that he left in part because the writing was on the wall. What writing? Within months of Fife’s hire, he cleaned house. While the squad lost Simon to graduation and the three others before school was out, Fife’s summer cleaning list was long: Byron Malone, Jason Malone, Charles Campbell, Quintin Butler. And all of the sudden, there stood the transfers, Scott and Pompey, with returners Justin Hawkins, Quintin Carouthers and Zeljko Egeric and it looked like an atomic bomb had been dropped on the program.

When 'Soup' left,
things looked fishy.

If I questioned the hiring before, I was mortified now. So, we don’t need any starters back? Seven players are just gone? The entire backcourt?

And then Dane grew on me. His personality, his friendship, his work ethic. He didn’t always do things the way that was expected. He, like Doug Noll, drew criticism. But he pressed on. Dane Fife did things Dane Fife’s way for his entire tenure. And it wasn’t just the right way, it was the only way. He let Scott shine, becoming then one of IPFW’s all-time great scorers. He brought it strong recruits like NJCAA All-American Jaraun Burrows and Kansas State transfer Deilvez Yearby. He recruited locally hard and while not landing a big local talent for years, he was persistent.

Furthermore, IPFW had never had a winning record in its D1 tenure, but Fife took them to 10 wins in his first season. The next it was 12 wins and the following season he was where some thought we needed Dement to get us: a conference.

Dane Fife’s win total always grew. 13 wins in the first season in the new Summit League (formerly the Mid-Continent Conference), 13 more in the second year, then 16. Then in 2010-2011, Dane Fife took the Mastodons of IPFW to 18-12, 11-7 in the conference. It was the first winning record in the program since Andy Piazza took them to their best record ever, 23-6 in the 1992-1993 season. Dane Fife was 13.

When looking at the grand landscape of the program, Dane Fife was the lynchpin. Not only was Dane the “right man at the right time for IPFW,” I now believe he was the only man for the job. That’s not to say that lighting a candle wouldn’t have ended the dark years, but Dane had the testicular fortitude to drop a bomb on the dark years and say, “it’s over, let’s move on.”

Losing Dane Fife to Michigan State in 2011 looked like it was going to be the biggest loss in the history of IPFW athletics.