Leo Rautins is an ambassador of Canadian basketball. As a player, he appeared in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the NBA, and at the national level as a coach and a player.
He became the youngest player to dress for the men’s senior team at age 16. He was named MVP in the Big East tournament as a member of the Syracuse Orangemen and was the first Canadian ever to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft.
In September 2011, after losing the bid for the 2012 Olympics in London, Rautins resigned as head coach of Team Canada. He had held the post since 2005.
Dave Smart is among Canada’s winningest coaches in Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) play. With the Carleton program, Smart has tallied 337 wins, 30 losses, and is in the hunt for his eighth national championship.
The Charlatan (TC): How do you know Smart?
Leo Rautins (LR): When I got the job with Canada Basketball, Dave was in the mix as well. I think it’s good for the game in our country if someone is having the success that he’s having at the college [and] university level, to be involved in the national program. I was well aware [that] “technically” Dave’s [knowledge was] . . . very strong and very good. I had a meeting with Dave and we talked and that was it.
TC: In your opinion, is Smart a hard coach to play for?
LR: I’ll use the [example] of Ken Shields. Ken Shields, who, like Dave Smart, [at U Vic] had a run of national championships — it’s really been only the two of those guys who’ve had those kind of runs. Ken was very similar to Dave in that he was a perfectionist, it had to be his way, that was the only way. You have guys come to you for that period of time, the four, five years, and he kind of controlled them during that time. There’s not a lot of environments that are like that, but this is one of them.
All the kids who go to Carleton understand what kind of coach Dave is, how he coaches, what he expects — and he very much is a perfectionist. You know, it’s like I used to tell people when players went to Indiana to play for Bobby Knight or you go to Duke to play for Mike Krzyzewski: don’t complain about the screaming and the yelling and him grabbing your shirt. If you haven’t watched tape, if you haven’t seen him on TV and you haven’t read every book about him before you sign there, then you’re a fool.
So, I think that players that go to Carleton very well know what kind of coach Dave is and what to expect and he’s pretty straightforward. He’s not going to sugarcoat it when he recruits these kids, he’s gonna tell them. He’s pretty much going to lay it out what he’s going to do for these kids and he’s in a perfect environment to do so. Especially, unlike the NCAA, which has a tremendous amount of rules and restrictions on the coaches, the CIS doesn’t have that, [and] he can very much control his product, if you want to call it that.
TC: Should he be coaching at a higher level?
LR: I think he is the best coach — among the top three coaches in the CIS — no question about that. But you know, could he coach anywhere else? Sure, Why not? He could be a Div. I NCAA coach, there’s no question about that. [But] there are a lot of things that he does in the CIS that he could not do in the NCAA because of the rules and restrictions. That’s not saying he cant adapt — I’m just saying the environment of the CIS is very conducive to the type of coach he is.
He’s really able to take kids and develop them and work with them. I mean, you look at some of the players who have won championships for him. He’s taken — I wouldn’t say players of tremendous talent — I’d say players that are really willing to work hard and do whatever he wants them to do. He’s made them better players. They’re extremely well coached, and they’re well disciplined.
Dave Smart beats you because his players do exactly what he expects them to do. They don’t decide they’re going to go off on their own and try this or try that. Dave Smart’s teams will follow a game plan and they will exploit whatever they need to from you to win the game and they won’t vary from that. I don’t know if you can say that about any other program in Canada, where teams are that disciplined and that organized.
TC: What is Smart’s role in developing Canadian basketball?
LR: Again, I think [when] you have a successful program like [Dave’s], I think you need programs like that so kids will stay here. I really think Canada is missing the boat and the CIS is missing the boat in terms of our development in this country.
The CIS has the power, and the athletic directors of these schools have the power, to change the way — if you want to call it — the way we do business in this country, as far as basketball goes. They can make their own rules [and] they can adjust the country we live in and our problems here. They just haven’t chosen to do so.
There should be programs like Dave’s, UBC and other top programs in the country [and] St. FX. Call it Division I. Whether it’s 10, 12, 14 schools, they play each other in a Division I. You [also] give scholarships — you raise the level of the game in this country. You modify your rules where — if a kid goes to the States and it doesn’t work out he can come back. If a kid plays four years in the States and is a legitimate student and wants to work at his master’s, he can come back and play a fifth and sixth year in Canada.
If you want to raise the level in this country I think you have to change the way you do business. Even allowing a kid to play in a semi-pro kind of league in Canada and still play at the college level at the same time to raise the level of the game, I think they could allow those things to happen.
So then you’d have programs like Dave’s that could change the way the game is in this country, where kids would want to go to a top level program—a successful program, a winning program. You got to put all the schools like Carleton and all the coaches like Dave Smart into one pool and let them do their thing.
TC: Is it because we’re neighbours of the States that we feel we can’t compete with their programs?
LR: I don’t know; I think there are a whole bunch of issues. You can have some saying, “Well, I can’t compete,” which I think is an excuse and that’s garbage. I think you have some people saying, “Well jeez, if we’re going to do this then I’m going to be judged on my losses and I could get fired.” So I think there are people reluctant to step into that. Then [there’s] your school saying, “If we get scholarships we are going to have all kinds of problems.”
You control your product. If you want to do it, you find the right way to do it. Don’t use that as an excuse.
When I was coming out of high school I was recruited by everybody in the States. Name the school and they recruited me. I had one Canadian school go after me. One. And that was Simon Fraser, which played an NAIA U.S. schedule. Where’s the sense in that? I had schools in the States that had no business — Clarion State, Pennsylvania — have you ever heard of them? I didn’t. I never even knew what it was. But, here’s a school that said, “You’ll be the first player we fly in a private jet to bring in to recruit.”
They were competing against Kentucky and UCLA, or Syracuse. Why were they trying? Why doesn’t the Canadian coach have that same mentality in trying to keep the best Canadian [talent] here? I think that mentality has to change and a lot of these kids are obviously being told a lot of garbage and a lot of these kids . . . just to go south.
If the university next door to your house doesn’t bother to recruit you and all these other schools, that maybe you shouldn’t ever bother going to because it’s not good for you, are after you, what are you going to do?
TC: Is it a possibility to make top-ranked Canadian university programs a part of a Division I pool?
LR: I’m ready to wave the white flag on that one. My personal feeling is we’ve allowed an unchallenged level of mediocrity in the university system, where you can be a lifetime coach, but winning or losing doesn’t make a difference. Success in your program doesn’t really make a difference; you can still be the coach forever.
If you’re not willing to take the rules and modify them for the better of basketball in this country, realizing that we have a problem here, then you’re essentially saying ‘I don’t care.’ I kind of reached my point of frustration with that as head coach; I just didn’t really see enough people to care to change it.
