Coach Trower went from drill sergeant to pussycat

    If there existed a bible of high school sports in New Orleans, it would show that just two coaches in history have led their teams to a state basketball championship and an American Legion Little World Series title.
    They are G. Gernon Brown  and Kevin Trower. Both coached at Jesuit.
    While Brown did it in the magical calendar year of 1946 when Jesuit swept the state championships in the four major sports (you know what they are), Trower took his good old time.
    The Little World Series title came in 1960. The Class AA basketball title four years later.
    New Orleans has seen its share of coaches over the decades, but double victories like that are hard to come by, mainly because teachers at schools with large enrollments coach just one sport today.
    Trower’s credentials have been more substantive than just that. As a coach in an all-male school, he was demanding, precise, calculating. The goal was to win, and if his players listened carefully and applied his teaching to their execution, they would accomplish that end.
    But as the head basketball coach at Archbishop Chapelle many years later, Trower was a pussycat.
How things change
    “He was a coach of immense passion who brought a tough and mental approach to the games,” wrote former Jesuit football and baseball great Billy Fitzgerald, now the athletic director of Newman. “There was no talking on the bus to road games. His motto: ‘You can only talk to improve upon the silence.’
    “His practice and game preparation was legendary as if we were watching a general prepare for battle,” Billy Fitz wrote in a tribute book Trower received during a reception to honor the coach for his body of work that encompassed six decades.
    Today Trower, 78, teaches Latin at Ecole Classique School in Metairie.
    But while driving a Jesuit bus to one of the three local baseball stadiums (Kirsch-Rooney, Perry Roehm or Muny Park), Trower kept his players’ minds on their jobs by singling them out to orally test them with scenario after scenario. They dare not give an incorrect answer, noted former player Charlie Grey.
    More shocking for a player was to see Trower walking from car to car, shining a flashlight in the parking lot of Lenfant’s Restaurant to make sure his players weren’t applying their athletic skills to romancing.
    His 1964 basketball team is considered one of the greatest in Louisiana prep school history.
    Led by Peter Michell, Herbie and Fabian Mang, Joe Williamson and Fitzgerald, the Blue Jays went 30-2 and battered Fair Park, 89-67, in the Top 20 championship game. And when Trower left the next season for a brief career as an assistant at LSU, he left enough talent for his replacement, Dick Francis, to post a 28-1 record in 1965. And Jesuit three-peated in 1966.
    Trower had some lean years coaching at St. John Vianney, the archdiocesan seminary high school for boys interested in studying for the priesthood, and at Holy Cross. Trower eventually ended up at Archbishop Chapelle.
A change in modus operandi
    He quickly realized he wasn’t going to mold attitudes in a girls’ school. The attitude adjustment was going to be his own.
    “I loved those girls big time, and I wanted to give them so much in basketball. But what I had to give them, they were not interested in at all,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The first thing they told me when I was introduced to the team was, ‘Don’t schedule any games on Friday nights!’    
    “Friday is a big night for (boys’) basketball, and the girls wanted to go out on Fridays. So I scheduled the games on Monday and Thursday afternoons.”
    Trower’s practices had to contend with PTA meetings or choral concerts, and he would find the basketball court covered by hundreds of folding chairs.
    “I used to say, ‘Chapelle is a wonderful place to coach. And, man, if you like chairs, it’s a really great place,’” he recalled.
    He and the players would meticulously move enough chairs off the court to hold a half-court practice. After their session, they would put the chairs back in place.
    “And when there was a dance, a hundred girls would descend upon the gym, decorating and preparing for the dance, and practice was out of the question.
    “When I think about basketball practice at Jesuit or at Holy Cross, it was serious business,” he wrote. “Sacred time.” You never missed a practice. Never.
    “At Chapelle, the girls missed practice (and games) at a truly shocking rate for all kinds of reasons.”
    Trower kept practices simple, using a motion offense against all defenses.
    “Once, one of my best players asked me why we don’t have any plays. I said, ‘Plays? You have to practice to have plays.’”
    One year his junior varsity team won a semifinal round game in a tournament at Immaculata High. The finals were set for a Saturday afternoon.
    “Three of my best jayvee players, sophomores who were also on the varsity team, told me, matter-of-factly, that they weren’t coming to the finals because they had to get their hair done for a dance at Rummel that night,” he noted. “I didn’t even blink.”
    But he did write the Chipmunks fight song, which reads, in part:
 “Claw your way to victory; scratch, Chipmunks, bite. Bite! Bite! Bite!
    “First we will build our nest. Then we’ll gather nuts. Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!”
    When the prose was read during Trower’s tribute, it drew rave reviews.
    The greatest memory came from his recollection of the American Legion national title game when Trower was age 26.
    His Tulane Shirts defeated Billings, Montana, whose ace pitcher was the great Dave McNally, 8-3.
    At first McNally mowed the Shirts down like a rapier. Then Trower’s back-up catcher Dale Boudreaux, noticed the Billings catcher would tip off McNally’s curve ball with his glove.
    The word spread throughout the Shirts lineup. A 3-0 deficit was quickly erased, and   Trower’s boys sent the future Baltimore Orioles lefty to the shower early.
    “The writers had to change their vote for most Valuable Player from McNally to our pitcher, Dick Roniger,” Trower noted.
    “I always wanted to go to Cooperstown, not to see Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb or Joe DiMaggio, but to see Dick Roniger,”  he told the gathering.
    And Trower will. Members of his Tulane Shirts team and the Jesuit family presented him with a ticket to Cooperstown to say “thank you for the great memories.”
    Ron Brocato can be reached at rbrocato@clarionherald.org.