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M. Hoops head coach Fran Dunphy [Theodore Schweitz/The Daily Pennsylvanian]

Penn coach Fran Dunphy has a sweet corner office on the second floor of the Dunning Coaches' Center.

Three of the walls are covered with awards and pictures. These pictures are of Dunphy with other members of Philadelphia's college-basketball coaching fraternity, and pictures of the coach with his former teams and players. Right next to the door hang framed certificates from the Ivy League acknowledging each of the Dunphy's six conference titles.

There are two windows. The one behind the coach's desk looks out onto 33rd Street; from the other one -- off to his left -- you can see the Palestra.

The wall opposite that window is covered by a large wooden structure with enough space for a television and game tapes in the middle and cabinets below and on either side of the TV.

Instead of wood paneling, the cabinet doors are covered by white dry-erase boards which, in turn, are covered by all manner of notations and scribbling in blue marker. There's a breakdown by affiliation of next season's games -- 14 league, five city, and so on. Just under that, there's a strange list of words and numbers: "Fist," "Shirt," "4 up," "5 down," "10." All are shorthand for various offensive sets the Quakers run.

Dunphy uses the board to try to keep a handle on the busy schedule of a Division I basketball coach. He describes a typical day like this:

"It varies, with times of the year. For instance, this morning, we had a recruit on campus so it was spent with breakfast with the recruit. Then it goes to phone calls from our academic adviser on travel issues with our players, to meeting with our administrative guys to say what our are days going to be like when we go to Atlanta and Las Vegas and make sure that just about every portion of the day is planned out.

"Every detail has to be talked about. And then a little bit later on we'll try to tighten up everything we're going to do for practice today.

"Then we'll go back to the recruiting calls that you may make to a high school coach, or maybe to a parent who's trying to get ahold of you, some of those things. It's always something."

One shouldn't go so far as to say that looking at the board is like looking into the mind of the Quakers basketball coach, but it is a little like looking into his day planner. First, though, how did Dunphy get here?

"It wasn't a burning ambition that I had, like this was a passionate thing where I had to be a basketball coach from the age of 10 or one of those things," Dunphy says. "I didn't give it a whole lot of thought until my high school came to me and said, 'We would like you to take over the head-coaching basketball position at Malvern Prep.'"

Dunphy was just a couple years out of La Salle when that offer came. He was enrolled in grad school at Villanova and was trying to make ends meet by working construction and bartending. Dunphy had been on some great La Salle teams.

"Most notable was my junior year -- the '68-'69 season -- which is arguably the best team that La Salle has ever had," Dunphy says. "Many people might say it was as good a team as there's been in the city. I was kind of the first guard off the bench and I played, y'know, enough. I wish I'd played some more, but I was behind two guys that played professionally for a number of years."

The Explorers went 23-1 that year and were Big 5 champions. The next year Dunphy was a starter and captain, but the Explorers weren't as successful.

"I started and played just about every minute of my senior year on a team that wasn't quite as good," Dunphy says. "And all the games that we played at home my junior year, we played on the road my senior year. Things didn't fall into place quite as much."

During his first two years out of school Dunphy played a little basketball in the Eastern League for the Cherry Hill Rookies, who changed their name to the "Pros" after one season.

"It was crazy," Dunphy says. "It was absolutely crazy. It was certainly not as organized as the CBA is today... but it was minor league basketball at its best."

The team played weekends in places like Hartford and Trenton and Wilkes-Barre and Scranton and Allentown.

"It was 50 bucks a game when you were lucky enough to get paid," Dunphy says. "It was a crazy world at that time. You just did it on the weekends, occasionally you got paid. Nobody came to the games."

So, Dunphy took the job at Malvern Prep, and not too long after he got a job as an assistant at American University under Gary Williams.

"[Williams] had recruited one of my high school players for Boston College, where he was an assistant," Dunphy says. "He had an opening on his staff, and I chose to take that in addition to going back to school again for more education.

"It just kind of evolved after that, where I thought that this was maybe something that I really wanted to do, and I just got lucky going back to La Salle again. I got lucky coming here, and I got lucky getting the head coaching job."

Luck or not, Dunphy became the Quakers head coach 13 years ago. And this season Dunphy will try to lead his team back after one of the least successful seasons during his tenure. The Quakers started 0-8, and finished with a 12-17 overall record. Their 9-5 league mark tied them with Brown for second place.

"It was one of those years you don't want to have too many of, but the good part about it, or the part that you could live with, is that we were right there, in just about every game," Dunphy says. "The bad part is that we couldn't finish games, and that hurt.

"But I was proud of our guys. We [were] still going to Princeton the last game of the year with a chance to win our league. The way we played and performed last season, I don't know that we were deserving of that, to be quite honest with you."

Dunphy won't forget -- and doesn't want his players to forget -- what happened last year, but he doesn't want anybody dwelling on it either.

"You always learn from history, and that happened to us," Dunphy says. "I think our players that were with us last year were hurt by it, and I think they use it as a motivation rather than worrying about it."

Dunphy is standing now at one of the panels on the white board. He's diagramming Maryland's inbound pressure defense for a visitor, after the visitor had asked about some top-flight college basketball matchups written on the board. The notes were reminders to videotape the previous night's Arizona-Maryland and Temple-Florida games.

Dunphy does a little bit of everything on that board, from X's and O's to charting out a possible summer trip to Spain, and also, up at the top, the letters UCLA.

"We've made a call to them to try to get Koko Archibong home next year, as a senior, back to Southern California," Dunphy says. "So, we'd like to do that to get a game there. UCLA was a little reluctant, but we have made a call to Southern Cal as well."

These two things here, a possible trip to Spain and making sure a senior whose home is 3,000 miles away gets to play in front of his family and friends, say more about Dunphy's coaching philosophy than any number of diagrammed plays could. It's something he picked up from his days as a collegiate player.

"You remember what those days were like with great fondness," Dunphy says. "So, I think what I try to give to our guys is as many memories and experiences as I possibly can, and that is best served by playing the challenging schedule we have and taking them to all sorts of places -- be it Puerto Rico, California, Arizona, Kentucky, Kansas, Madison Square Garden, the MCI Center, Vegas...

"Whatever you can do to enhance their memories, because most of their life is going to be spent with fond memories of their basketball experiences here, but that's all they are, they're memories. I think that's what we coach as much as we coach the game, are those memories and experiences."

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