Southwest Ohio coaches team up to fight cancer

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 11:38 PM Wednesday, August 31, 2011

CINCINNATI — It was five years ago. Delores Coles was finishing up her third bout with cancer, and her husband, Charlie — the Miami University basketball coach and the guy she’d married four decades earlier when he was a senior guard for the then-Redskins — was driving her to the hospital for one of her last chemotherapy treatments.

“I felt so bad because the chemotherapy was the most aggressive she’d ever gotten,” Coles said. “Finally I looked over at her, and I meant it when I said, ‘Delores, you know if I could do this for you, I would.’

“And she looks right at me and says, ‘Charlie, you couldn’t handle it!’

“Well, we both started laughing so hard and finally I told her, ‘You know what? You are right.’ She’s tougher than me, and I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got all the respect in the world for the way she’s handled it. I’ve never, ever heard her complain. I’ve heard her moan and groan, and I’ve seen her very, very sick, but I never once heard her say, ‘Why me?’

“I really look up to her for that.”

One by one, four college coaches from the area — Dayton’s Archie Miller, Xavier’s Chris Mack, Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin and Coles — sat side by side Wednesday afternoon at the American Cancer Society’s Musekamp Family Hope Lodge in Cincinnati and told some kind of cancer story.

Cronin lost his mother to cancer in 2005.

Miller talked of playing basketball at North Carolina State and being surrounded by the presence of Jim Valvano, the charismatic Wolfpack coach whose 1993 death from bone cancer launched the well-known V Foundation dedicated to finding a cure for cancer.

While at N.C. State, Miller said he also became friends with the school’s Hall of Fame women’s coach, Kay Yow, who died of breast cancer in 2009. “I’m not sure I’ve been part of a relationship that’s been any more inspirational than knowing her.”

It was Mack, though, who summed it up for everyone: “I don’t think there’s anyone out there who isn’t affected by the disease in some way or another, whether it’s with a neighbor, a parent, a relative or a co-worker.”

Wednesday was the official kickoff of the Southwest Ohio Coaches vs. Cancer group. It’s an offshoot of the national Coaches vs. Cancer organization that has forged a collaboration between the American Cancer Society and the National Association of Basketball Coaches in an effort to help with public awareness, fundraising and advocacy programs.

The Southwest Ohio group will put on a gala Tip-Off Breakfast that will feature popular Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli as the emcee and mix hoops talk and fundraising for corporate backers and everyday basketball fans at the Hyatt Regency Cincinnati on Nov. 2.

Within a year, Dave Heck, the American Cancer Society’s division director who orchestrated Wednesday’s event, sees the area teams getting invites to the national Coaches vs. Cancer tournament at Madison Square Garden. At the same time, Miller said he hopes to bring some kind of fundraiser activity to Dayton, too.

The only Southwest Ohio Division I coach and school that were missing Wednesday were Billy Donlon and Wright State University, and for that the Pennsylvania-based Heck apologized.

When he set this event up, he said he didn’t know WSU was a D-I school, nor was he sure where it was located.

“I’m truly embarrassed I missed that,” he said when informed of the omission. “I will reach out to them right away.”

And Donlon would be a good addition.

He has an emotional cancer story, as well. This Saturday, it will be one year since he lost his mother to cancer.

“This is why it’s good to have kids and grandkids, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers,” Coles said. “Every now and then we have to be reminded that we have to root for each other. Too often as coaches we get really involved with what we’re doing — maybe too much sometimes — and we need to pause and look at the things that are important, the things we can get involved in. And in my mind, the fight against cancer is probably No. 1.”

Miller agreed. “Sometimes you get so focused on your job and what you have to do to be in the mix or what you’re trying to prove and trying to accomplish, and you forget that you have an obligation to get into things like this where you can help.”

Like the rest, Mack is glad to be part of this. “To wear gym shoes during conference games in January or February, that just wasn’t enough for me, and I never really understood how that could really impact the fight against cancer.

“But to use our incredible platform we have as college coaches and to hopefully be able to find a cure at some point, that’s something as meaningful as anything I’ve ever done in my life.”

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