Hedric — the former head coach, who was a Miami player before that and an athletics administrator there after — is making his daily trek to his office, a small, out-of-the-way space whose door bears a poster of six Miami hoops standouts from the 1970s and early 80s — each of them an All-Mid-American Conference first team pick who played for him.
Three of them were Dayton Public Schools products: Dunbar’s Darrel Dunlap; Phil Lumpkin of Roth; and Ron Harper from Kiser High.
“I stay here until about noon every day and just do what I want,” Hedric said with a smile as he sat at his desk the other morning. “I don’t have any schedule, I don’t have any authority, and no responsibility. I really don’t do a lot.”
If you listen to Steele, that’s just not true:
“He still has a huge presence here at Miami. I’ve picked his brain. He’s helped me a lot during my time here. He’s an incredible human being.
“He helped lay the foundation of this basketball program and now a lot of the former players who are drawn back by what we’re doing bring up what he’s done for them.
“They tell how he helped them develop into very, very successful and responsible men.”
Hedric has been a lasting presence in many of their lives, none more so than with Harper — Miami’s all-time leading scorer and rebounder and a five-time NBA champion with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers — who made sure his old coach was at his side when he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters last weekend at Millett Hall before a game that drew the largest home crown in program history.
Hedric also has a special appreciation of the current team, which is one of the best in Miami history.
Coming into Saturday’s game at Marshall, the No. 23 RedHawks were 23-0 and 11-0 in MAC play. They’re not only off to the best start in program history, but the best start in MAC history, too.
The only other unbeaten team left in Division I basketball now is top-ranked Arizona.
Miami entered the national rankings a few weeks ago, something the RedHawks hadn’t done since 1999.
They lead the nation in field goal percentage (53.6) and scoring offense (92.8 ppg) and are eighth in Division I in three-point goal percentage (39.7)
The RedHawks have become must see basketball – they set school’s attendance records the past two home games when the crowd filled every Millett seat and spilled into the stairwells – and Hedric was part of each of those lovefests.
He goes to every home game but said he sits 10 to 15 rows up in the stands at about rim level. He wants to be far enough away from the team that he doesn’t become a distraction, but close enough that he can see some of the intricacies of the sideline chess game Steele and his assistants use.
“I still watch as a coach,” he said. “They’ve got a very good staff, and they’ve put together a very good team. They recruited well and play a good brand of basketball. And they play pretty good defense.
“Travis does a good job. He’s been very respectful to me. I think it helped that he was at Xavier. He knows Miami basketball. He appreciates the history here.”
For a long time that history was lost.
Before Steele’s team went 25-9 last season, the RedHawks had had just one winning season in the past 15 years. And that was a 12-11 campaign during COVID.
The glory days of many of Hedric’s teams were lost in the ether of season after season of failure.
During his 14 seasons as head coach (1970-84), Hedric won 216 games which remains second most in the program behind the late Charlie Coles, whose 266 wins came over 16 seasons.
No Miami coach though has taken as many teams to the NCAA Tournament — four — as has Hedric who also was named the MAC Coach of the Year three times.
In 1978, he guided Miami to its greatest victory in school history, a stunning 84-81 overtime upset of defending national champion Marquette in the NCAA Tournament at UD Arena.
Hedric’s accomplishments as a coach, as a 5-foot-8 guard (he was a four-year letterman and the team’s co-captain) and in administration all helped get his jersey retired and hung high above the Millett court alongside those of seven other Miami legends.
No person is more connected to Miami basketball than Hedric, who has spent 70 of his 92 years around the program.
He’s a magnet for former Miami players from different eras who are proud again to reconnect with the program
Two weeks ago, it was Harper who said he came to Miami from West Dayton because Hedric made his hardworking, single-parent mom, Gloreatha, feel comfortable to entrust her son to him.
In the past week or so it was 88-year-old Wayne Embry — the Tecumseh High big man who grew up in Springfield and had great success at Miami and in the NBA as a player and a front office pioneer with the Cleveland Cavaliers — who sought out Hedric.
Hedric had been a senior guard when the 6-foot-8, 240-pound Embry joined the Miami team as a freshman.
In later years in Cleveland when Embry had become the first African American team president in the NBA, he hired Hedric and Dayton Flyers coach Don Donoher as scouts for the team.
When Miami decided to erect a bigger-than-life statue of Embry in front of the south entrance to Millett Hall a few years ago, Hedric was made part of the planning team.
The statue is perfect. It shows the massive post player launching one of his patented hook shots.
“He was deadly with that hook shot and you weren’t ever going to get around that big body,” Hedric laughed.
When Embry came to Oxford this time, he went to dinner with Hedric and his wife Jan, the one-time Fairborn High cheerleader who Darrell first caught sight of on the Miami campus over 70 years ago.
“I feel there’s a real synergy taking place here now,” Steele said. “The guys who once wore the jersey are really proud of what they see now. They put a lot into this place, and they care very deeply about the school and the basketball program.
“Those guys from the past are tying into the current team and I think it will also carry over into the future when it comes to recruiting.
“People want to be part of this again.”
An affinity for Dayton
Hedric had a blue-collar upbringing in Franklin. His dad was a truck driver for Aeronca Aircraft in Middletown and his mom worked at the Maxwell Paper Company in town.
A two-sport star for the Wildcats, he said he was recruited by Dayton and Cincinnati but chose Miami because he fell in love with the school — both the books and hoops parts — and its postcard campus.
The Redskins, as they were called then, won two MAC championships and went to two NCAA Tournaments when Hedric played there.
After college he played for Akron’s Goodyear Wingfoots in the National Industrial Basketball League, a highly-competitive (think NBA G League) circuit for mill teams from across the country.
He then enlisted in the Navy and ended up on a destroyer that docked in New Zealand and patrolled Antarctica.
Once back in Ohio, Hedric briefly coached a junior high team in Chillicothe and then became the varsity coach at newly-opened Hamilton Taft High before joining Dick Shrider’s staff at Miami.
When Shrider moved to administration and Tates Locke came in from Army to take over, Hedric remained an assistant and finally became the head coach when Locke took the Clemson job in 1970.
Each season Hedric tried to beef up Miami’s nonconference schedule with heavyweights like Indiana, Kentucky, Purdue and several other teams.
The early-season schedules also included Dayton, Cincinnati and Xavier each year.
Hedric had a special affinity for the Dayton area.
He recruited several athletes from the Miami Valley and also was good friends with Donoher.
“What a class guy he was,” Hedric said quietly. “I miss him.”
Hedric said he liked bringing his teams into UD Arena, too, even if the big crowd was mostly cheering against him and his team:
“They pulled against us, but not really. We always had a lot of area kids and Dayton was a class act. It’s a shame that series hasn’t continued. There’s a lot of history there.
“I thought it was important to open up with a rough schedule rather than just play a bunch of schools from the Ohio Conference to get wins.
“When you’re in tough games, you find out what you really have and I always I wanted our team ready to play when we got into the MAC.”
‘I think I’ve aged pretty well’
As we sat in his office the other morning, you noticed the bulletin board on the wall behind him held a Wayne Embry mask fans had been given at one Millett promotion.
Above it was the burr-headed likeness of a young Hedric that fans had gotten.
There was a photo of Harper throwing down a one-handed dunk on some helpless defender and next to it was a big poster of this year’s team that included large pictures of Pete Suder and Antwone Woolfolk.
As we spoke, Hedric happened to look out the window at the piles of snow and notice flakes coming down again.
That got him talking about the Blizzard of 1978 and how the Miami players turned into a combination of Florence Nightingale and Otis the Town Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show.
When the story transpired 48 years ago, Hal McCoy wrote a colorful account of Miami’s harrowing adventures.
The other day Hedric added some details:
“We had won a game in Toledo and after we ate on the bus, we started back down I-75. It was raining, but by Wapakoneta the weather had changed to heavy snow and blowing wind and soon the bus could only inch slowly past jackknifed trucks and cars that had slid off the road.
“We couldn’t go any farther than Vandalia and the police and fire department put us up. A lot of us stayed in the jail and in my cell they had to roust two drunks so I had a place to sleep, too.
“Our players went off to help the police and fire department. They answered phones and delivered things.”
McCoy wrote how the team took over at an understaffed nursing home and emptied bedpans, bathed elderly people and comforted those who were afraid.
The bus driver suffered a heart attack and was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton and survived.
Finally, after two days, he said they were able to make their way to Oxford the last 20 miles behind a snowplow over uncleared roads. Those 20 miles took nearly three hours to travel.
“That trip we learned basketball isn’t that important,” Hedric told McCoy. “The functions of life are much more important.”
Sadly, that lesson was brought home again to Hedric and his wife a decade ago when their son Craig — he’d once been the manager for his dad’s basketball teams at Miami before graduating from the University of Toledo College of Law, becoming a lawyer and then a respected Butler County Common Pleas Judge — died unexpectedly in 2016 from an apparent heart attack. He was just 55.
Today, interspersed among all the basketball photos in Hedric’s office are several shots of Craig, some with the Hedric’s daughter Kim, as well.
Hedric said both of their children and all three grandchildren went to Miami.
“Why would you want to go any place else?” Hedric said with a grin. “The campus is beautiful, the academics are first-rate and the athletics are good, too.
“And for us, Oxford was a great place to raise a family:
His wife Jan was a longtime third grade teacher in town. (By the way, he was a teacher himself and taught a full load of biology classes at Taft.)
Early last season Steele marveled to Mike Lopresti, the veteran college basketball writer whose work is now found at NCAA.com, about Hedric’s daily regimen.
“This is a true story,” Steele told Lopresti. “He still drives here. He works out every day. He still lifts. He’s been awesome for me.”
Hedric amended that for me the other day:
“I had a regular 45-minute workout I did for years. I lifted weights and jogged.
“Now, I might do some of it a couple of days a week, but not like before.
“But you know what?
“I think I’ve aged pretty well.
“I’m doing better than some people would ever think.”
And now — thanks to Steele and his team — the same can be said about Miami basketball.
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