For Coach Joseph Price, the prized addition to his team is the charming 5-foot-8 freshman from Paris who has long dark hair, a beguiling French accent and some most impressive basketball genes.
It’s the Marauder he fondly refers to as “Daddy’s Little Girl.”
A former star guard at Notre Dame, a long-time pro in Europe and a college coach with five previous stops, Price is in his second season as the head coach at Central State.
And never in those 3 1/2 decades of basketball has he ever had a season like this one.
“I’ll tell you, every day when I wake up it’s like a dream come true,” he said. “It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.”
His only child, his 18-year-old daughter Naomi, who was raised by his former wife in France, has joined him at CSU this year.
Along with being an environmental engineering student who also performs as a banner girl with the school’s fabled band The Invincible Marching Marauders, she’s part of the men’s basketball program.
At other schools her positon is simply called student manager, but at Price’s insistence, those who hold the job at CSU are called staff assistants. And often their duties go far beyond those of their counterparts in other programs.
“We do all kinds of things,” Naomi said. “We might call hotels and make arrangements or call restaurants for our team meals (on the road).
“During games we give the players their towels and water and all that and afterward we put up the balls and clean the uniforms.
“But my main job is to film all the games.”
And an even more important task comes after a tough loss like the 69-60 setback to Clark Atlanta University on Thursday night at the Beacom Lewis Gym.
“It’s really frustrating for everyone. Sometimes I’m even more frustrated than my dad, but I try to comfort him a little bit afterward,” Naomi said. “And he always has faith and bounces back”.
Price said his daughter is a big reason for that:
“I’ll tell you what, even when you have a bad day as a coach and the players aren’t being coachable and you’re not playing good, how can you not smile when your daughter comes up and says, ‘Hey, Daddy’ and gives you a hug?
“That relaxes me and makes me realize what the big picture is.”
A father from afar
The second all-time leading scorer (1,492 points) at Marion High School in Indiana, Price went on to play for Digger Phelps at Notre Dame.
He started at point guard as a freshman, played alongside John Paxson and in the ensuing years found himself matched up with Roosevelt Chapman in some classic UD-Notre Dame battles.
Next to the late Len Bias, Chapman was the best player he ever went up against, Price said.
A seventh-round draft pick of the Washington Bullets, Price opted to play in Europe and had a 13-year career in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium.
While playing in France he met Nora Bensalem, who has Algerian roots. They married, Naomi was born and eventually they moved to Germany, where Price was a teammate of Dirk Nowitzki on the DJK Wurzburg team.
Price said he and his wife split up when Naomi was 5 and he returned to the States and began coaching. After a season at Manual High in Indianapolis, he joined Ron Hunter’s staff at IUPUI.
He later served as an assistant at Ball State and Morehead State, joined Pat Knight’s staff at Lamar University and finally became the head coach of the downtrodden Grambling State program.
Along the way he observed, first-hand, some coaches with some well-known family ties.
He watched Hunter develop his son R.J., who a year ago lifted his dad’s Georgia State team to a stunning victory over Baylor in the NCAA Tournament and now is a rookie with the Boston Celtics.
When he coached for Knight he witnessed Pat’s relationship with his dad, legendary coach Bob Knight.
Meanwhile, he had to be a father from afar.
He’d talk to Naomi regularly on the phone and each year she’d come to the States to visit him in the summer and over the Christmas holidays.
“It was rough being apart, but if you watched us when we were together, you wouldn’t know we only saw each other a month or two out of the year,” he said.
The two look a lot alike and have a similar outgoing personality.
When it comes to athleticism though, Naomi said her efforts are as a dancer.
“I have heard about my dad’s basketball career and I’ve seen some pictures,” she said with a giggle.
“Back then they had big Afros and big moustaches and their shorts were really short. It was different back then. A lot different.”
Emotional moment
Soon after Price took the Marauders’ job some 15 months ago, just days before preseason practice was to start, I visited him at his CSU office.
The late hiring meant he was trying to play catch-up on the court and had no time to decorate his new digs. The room was cluttered with unpacked boxes.
The absolute only adornment he’d put up was a photo of him and his daughter taken in Paris.
And at the time, that desktop display seemed as if it would be the only place of permanence she’d have on this campus.
That all changed last spring when she called her dad and told him she was considering coming to the U.S. for college. She said that move was supported by many of her friends and family members, even her mom, who she credits for her upbringing:
“I’m the product of all my mom’s efforts. She has put so much work into my education and development.”
Although she had thought of other schools, when Naomi visited her dad over the Christmas break a year ago, she was lobbied to come to CSU by school president Dr. Cynthia Jackson-Hammond.
And finally in late spring she made the call Price said he had been long awaiting:
“She said, ‘Daddy, I think I want to go to Central State and be with you.’ It brought tears to my eyes.
“But she was really worried that she’d come here and I’d be nowhere around, that I’d be busy with my coaching and wouldn’t have any time for her.
“And that’s when I said, ‘You know what? How about you work in my program as a staff assistant? You’ll see Daddy every day, see what I do and we’ll be able to spend time traveling together.’”
A few other young CSU women serve as staff assistants, as well, and Price has some ground rules for them and his players.
“All my coaches have daughters, too, so we look at the staff assistants as our daughters within the program,” he said. “We’re all a happy little family and our players understand we’re going to be straight ahead about this. There’ll be no dating or anything like that.
“The young ladies are our players’ little sisters and in turn the guys are the girls’ big brothers.”
Even so, Naomi said being the coach’s daughter can be “kind of hard,” too.
“It’s taken a while for the players to be comfortable with me,” she said. “Sometimes people don’t want to talk to you because they’re afraid it won’t be interpreted right.”
That’s why — even though it can cause her to have to fall behind in the classroom — she said she likes to take some of the road trips with the team: “You get to know the players better when you’re all together like that.”
In the process, Price has gotten to know his daughter a lot better, as well.
“I always knew she did well in school, but I didn’t know she was that bright and that hard of a worker,” he said. “Her mom gets that credit.
“Naomi is really proactive in taking care of her business at school as far as seeing her professors and the administrators and getting her work done.
“I’m like, ‘Wow, she gets it!’ ”
And with a smile, he added: “But I’ve always got to repeat it to my players about five times.”
As Naomi has settled in here, she also has stayed in touch with home. Her boyfriend is back in Paris and she regularly calls and Skypes with her mom and her younger half brother and sister.
When the terror attacks killed 130 people in Paris in mid-November, Naomi was especially shaken.
“It was really painful to see your nation hurt like that,” she said quietly. ”It also was pretty emotional to see the way everybody responded together. That was beautiful, too.”
She returned home over the Christmas break to see her family and soon found herself drawn to the downtown Paris areas that had been attacked.
“I took photos there to remember,” she said.
She made sure to fly back to Ohio last Wednesday night so she’d be able to handle her “staff” duties when the Marauders hosted Clark Atlanta on Thursday.
And when the game tipped off, there she was, five rows up in the top level of the gym, a camera mounted on a tripod in front of her.
The lead would change 15 times before CSU melted in the final minute and lost. After the final buzzer, Naomi quickly retreated to her dad’s office and downloaded the game tape on his and the other coaches’ computers.
Then she sought out her father and soon managed to get a big smile out of him.
As Price explained earlier:
“She’s part of the program, but because she’s not playing, she doesn’t get all the coaching and the hollerin’ and the yellin’ that the players get. So I’d say it’s much, much sweeter for her.”
And, in moments like this, for him, as well.
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