Nobody made a big deal out Don Eckerle’s 400th career win as girls basketball coach at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Sunday night.
And that came as no surprise to one of the men who’s watched him work his winning ways for 22 years as Chargers coach.
“It’s funny, but none of us are counters,” Michael McDonald, OLSH’s athletic director said Monday, a day after Eckerle’s team polished off Taylor Allderdice, 54-44, in the California University of Pennsylvania Tournament.
“We’ve all been at the school for a while and we have some long-tenured coaches. Not that I take our coaches for granted, but there is a comfort level – we’re used to having him there.
“Four hundred wins is a lot of wins, a lot of success, a lot of consistency. It’s especially telling when you don’t really know what you’re going to have each year. We don’t have a middle school program where you know who’s coming in as the freshman class. But every year he looks at who’s coming back and what new additions he can work with to make it what he needs it to be.”
Eckerle said his wife, Joan, who’s the team scorekeeper, mentioned to those running the game Sunday night that it was her husband’s 400th win, and they announced it after the game was over.
“The kids congratulated me,” Eckerle said of the OLSH players. “They had no idea. I don’t talk in those types of numbers.”
Eckerle knew he was approaching that milestone because he’d been asked before the season started how many career victories he had, and he totaled them. He remembered his 300th win – that was the Chargers’ 50-48 win over Brentwood in the WPIAL championship – and that came in the 2018-19 season.
“So I knew it was getting close. I just had no idea we’d get off to an 8-0 start and do it during 2024. That’s interesting.”
Eckerle got a bit of a late start in being a head coach at the high school level, as his first season at OLSH came when he was 50. He’d spent years in the game, though, coaching grade school teams and volunteering his services as an assistant at his alma mater, Langley, and was on the staff the year the Mustangs won the WPIAL title in 1983.
He attended Slippery Rock after graduating from Langley, then moved on to Community College of Allegheny County before finishing at what was then Point Park College. Eckerle said he took a little from each of his coaches – Mel Hankinson at Slippery Rock, Bill Shay at CCAC and Jerry Conboy at Point Park – and still utilizes some of those concepts or lessons today.
“Mel Hankinson was a defensive expert and I learned every defensive fundamental there is under him,” Eckerle said. “When I played for coach Shay, I learned a heckuva lot about motivating teams. And with Conboy, it was learning about offense.”
Eckerle doesn’t attend coaching clinics but he does watch a lot of basketball. “I pick and choose schemes I see that might be effective for our team, and they change from year to year based on the talent we have and the players we have. Right now, we have a very good player in Claudia (Ierullo, a Slippery Rock recruit). She’s the wheels that make our team go, and our schemes are built to her strengths.”
Eckerle also had a bit of unusual coaching stop before he started at OLSH. After helping at the high school level and coaching grade school teams, he coached the Pittsburgh Steelwheelers wheelchair basketball team during its initial season and retained the job for several years. “A friend of a friend asked if I could help him out,” he recalled. “The next thing I knew I had the job that I didn’t know I’d have.”
Although wheelchair basketball is a completely different game, Eckerle said he learned some valuable lessons. “If I took away one thing, it was the emphasis on creating mismatches,” he said.
Eckerle got into coaching girls when his daughters, Dana and Marissa, began to play at the grade school level. When the OLSH job opened, someone suggested that he apply, and he gave it a shot. He inherited a team that had gone 3-21 the previous season, and in his first season, the Chargers went 9-14.
That’s the only losing season he’s had in 21-plus seasons.
“The players I’d been coaching in grade school were better than the ones I had in high school,” he said of his first season at OLSH. “It was a matter of waiting a year. I knew a couple of kids in eighth grade were going to be coming to OLSH, so I knew things would turn around. But I didn’t know how quickly it would turn around.”
Eckerle said he’s made some adjustments over the years, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. For example, he emphasizes a team concept. “Very seldom have we had a super high scorer,” he said. “We’re into sharing the basketball and playing defense, which no one likes to hear, especially on the high school level. But we do have an emphasis on defense here. That hasn’t changed.”
Culturally, he finds himself able to still relate to girls who are several generations younger. “As I get older, I have to be able to stay with a whole new generation of kids,” he said. “Relating to them has changed, but I’m still able to do it.
“I’ve just been myself. I’m still a little old school in nature and I have changed in some respects, but I haven’t totally changed the whole setup. For me, I’ve just had to realize and continue to realize that there are changes and things are now different (culturally). Hopefully I’ve adapted well and continue to relate.”
Eckerle turns 72 in March, but he’s not thinking about hanging up his whistle – at least yet. “I don’t put any parameters on that,” he said. “It’s kind of open-ended at this juncture.”
McDonald said that at the end of each season in recent years, Eckerle usually has taken a little time and then has informed McDonald that he’d be returning.
“It’s been pretty consistent,” McDonald said. “The unspoken thing is, as long as he wants to coach and he’s bringing something to the table, he’s welcome to stay as long as he wants.”
McDonald said Eckerle’s biggest strength as a coach is, no matter what the talent level is each year, he seems to find a way to make his team competitive and be in every game they play.
“You don’t see us getting blown out,” he said. “If we win, we win. If we lose, we don’t get blown out. And I think that’s a testament to Don.
“He doesn’t just run one system. He likes to possess the ball and run the clock. And he definitely likes to play defense, no doubt. But depending on the personnel or what system he has for that personnel group, they’re always in a position to win games. That’s the most telling statistic for Don. He figures out a way to put kids in position to win games.”
McDonald doesn’t downplay Eckerle’s 400-win achievement and noted that boys coach Mike Rodriguez also has eclipsed that mark. “Part of it is, when you’ve been with a program for a pretty long time, you have a chance to do that,” he said. “But you still have to have some good coaching. You still have to make it happen. A lot of people who’ve been coaching for a while don’t have 400 wins.
“I know our coaches are cognizant of milestones and when they reach them, it’s a feather in their cap. But Don is more about winning games, trying to win championships and putting a good product on the floor. (The 400 wins) is a byproduct of doing those things.”
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