Gansey Right Man for the Job in Fort Wayne

On October 2, 2015, Steve Gansey was formally introduced as the new head coach of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants. As Gansey surveyed the crowd at his introductory press conference at Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, he felt right at home.

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Gansey may not be a Fort Wayne native, but his relationship with the city and the Mad Ants franchise dates back many years. The 30-year-old spent the majority of his professional life with the Mad Ants. He helped them win a championship, even got an early taste of life at the head of bench.

But none of that would have been possible if it wasn't for a well-timed email he fired off to the right person years ago.

Gansey grew up in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. From an early age, both he and his older brother, Mike, were drawn to basketball and, in particular, the NBA.

Mike, a little under three years Steve's senior, remembers the two of them flipping through channels at their grandparents' house, bouncing back and forth from local Cavaliers broadcasts to whatever other games they could find, from Hawks and Bulls games on TBS and WGN to the occasional national broadcast on NBC.

When there wasn't a game on TV, the two brothers would head out into the driveway for a little one-on-one. That usually didn't go well.

"I don't think we ever finished a game because it would end up in throwing balls, throwing punches and all that," Steve recalled.

Still, the two brothers fueled each other with their mutual love for the game. As a freshman in high school, Steve got the chance to play on the varsity team with Mike at Olmsted Falls High School. Mike was one of the best players in the entire state – in fact, he finished runner-up in Mr. Basketball voting to a much-ballyhooed sophomore named LeBron James.

Mike would go on to a prolific college career, starting at St. Bonaventure before transferring to West Virginia, where he teamed with Tyrone Sally and Kevin Pittsnogle to lead the Mountaineers on a memorable run to the Elite Eight as a seven seed in 2005.

But Steve was no slouch himself.

"Mike was a better overall player, but I was a better overall shooter," Gansey said.

That sweet shooting stroke served Steve well for many years. He was a two-time conference player of the year in high school. He played two years at Cleveland State before transferring to Division II Ashland University, where he averaged 11.4 points per game as a senior.

After college, Steve had offers to continue playing professionally in Europe, but decided against it. He was determined, however, to stay involved in the game he loved.

Gansey took an internship out of school with Priority Sports and Entertainment in Chicago, working in basketball operations. When the internship ended, he moved back to Cleveland. He made up his mind that he wanted to try coaching, but with no real experience he knew he would need to work his way up the ranks.

One morning, Gansey wrote up an email to Joey Meyer, then the head coach of the Mad Ants, and Jeff Potter, the team president and GM. His pitch was simple: He didn't need to be paid, he would pitch in wherever needed, and promised to work as hard as he possibly could. All he wanted was to get his foot in the door.

The pitch must have been pretty good.

"I sent it at like nine in the morning and Joey called me at like 11:00 that same day, in two hours, and he said, 'When can you be here?'" Gansey remembered. "And I said 'I'll be there tomorrow.'"

Gansey spent the 2009-10 season as an intern with the Mad Ants, but he was allowed to travel with the team, where he roomed with assistant coach and former NBA player Vitaly Potapenko. When Potapenko left before the next season to take a job as an assistant with the Pacers, Gansey was elevated to Meyer's lead assistant.

At just 26, Gansey gained invaluable experience when he was appointed interim head coach of the Mad Ants.

The Mad Ants sputtered out of the gates at the beginning of the 2011-12 season. After a 5-10 start, Meyer was fired. Gansey, just 26, was named interim head coach, barely a couple years into his coaching career.

To say he was thrown to the fire is an understatement. Gansey found himself coaching a team that featured several players his age or older, including some with NBA experience.

But Gansey had earned the trust and respect of the majority of the roster through "sweat equity." He had worked with a few of the players the previous season and actually spent every day the previous summer working out a handful of them, so they at least knew his work ethic.

Still, Gansey's first few months as a head coach provided all sorts of new challenges. He still remembers the rush of adrenaline from the first time he called a timeout in a game and had to draw up a play. Each game, there was a new scenario or new challenge to tackle.

"You don't want to make the same mistake twice, so that was my thinking in that year," Gansey said.

Though the Mad Ants missed the playoffs, Gansey took away many valuable lessons from his time as the interim.

"The thing that I really learned about that year was being able to talk to your players differently," Gansey said. "It's not just one certain way that you can just tell a team. You have to be demanding in certain spots. You can't just be always on everyone all the time. You have to pick your spots. You have to be demanding at certain points and that was the thing I really learned that year."

With that knowledge in his back pocket, Gansey moved back into an assistant coach role for the next two seasons, serving under Duane Ticknor the first year and Conner Henry the next. Gansey credited both coaches with giving him "more of a voice" in practices and in the locker room.

In the summer of 2013, Gansey got another valuable experience when Pacers assistant coach Dan Burke invited him to join his staff at the Orlando Summer League. In Orlando, Gansey helped coach a team that included Solomon Hill, Orlando Johnson, Miles Plumlee, and Donald Sloan, but more importantly, he made connections with the Pacers coaching staff and front office that would pay off down the road.

After helping Henry lead the Mad Ants to a D-League championship in 2014, Gansey decided to spread his wings, taking a job with the Canton Charge as an associate head coach under Jordi Fernandez.

In Canton, Steve was reunited with his brother Mike, who had moved into the Charge's front office after retiring from a professional career overseas and in the D-League.

But while the brotherly reunion made it easier for the Gansey family to keep track of both Steve and Mike, the biggest draw of the job for Steve wasn't the chance to work with his brother or move back closer to his hometown.

The Charge have been the single affiliate of the Cleveland Cavaliers since the Cavs purchased the team back in 2011. That single-affiliate relationship was very different from Steve's experience in Fort Wayne, where the Mad Ants were an independent organization with loose affiliation to several different NBA franchises.

When the Pacers or the Pistons or another NBA team assigned a player to Fort Wayne in years past, that player would have to learn an entirely new set of plays and system from what he had been running in the NBA. On the flip side, players with the Mad Ants could never be sure how much playing time they were going to get, as any of the organization's many affiliates could assign a player or two to the D-League at any given time.

In Canton, the single-affiliate relationship streamlined everything. The Charge ran the same system as the Cavaliers. Gansey and Fernandez and the rest of the D-League staff spent all of training camp in Cleveland, working hand-in-hand with head coach David Blatt. Cavaliers rookie Joe Harris spent much of the year on assignment in Canton, gaining valuable game experience running the same plays that LeBron and Kyrie Irving were running an hour north of him.

Working directly with an NBA organization opened lots of new doors for Gansey. The Cavs' run to the NBA Finals even provided another unexpected opportunity in June.

Mike recalled that when it came time for the Cavs to start working out prospects for the upcoming NBA Draft, Fernandez and Steve wound up essentially running the workouts themselves, since all of Cleveland's coaches were busy with the Finals.

Both Steve Gansey (left) and big brother Mike (right) have carved out a career in the game they grew up loving.

After helping coach the Cavaliers in Summer League (where he worked with draft pick Rakeem Christmas, who would eventually be traded to the Pacers in late July), Gansey started to get calls from Indiana.

The Pacers were purchasing the Mad Ants and becoming Fort Wayne's sole affiliate. Henry had resigned from his position as head coach in June, eventually taking a position as an assistant with the Orlando Magic, which created a need for the Pacers to identify a new person to run the ship in Fort Wayne.

Gansey was a natural fit, given both his years on the sidelines in Fort Wayne and his experience working in a single-affiliate relationship while in Canton. The Pacers were very involved in the interview process, as Gansey met with not only new Mad Ants general manager Brian Levy (hired by the Pacers a few weeks earlier), but also Pacers GM Kevin Pritchard, head coach Frank Vogel, and Burke.

Gansey impressed during interviews – it helped that he'd built a relationship with the franchise while working under Burke at the 2013 Summer League – and got the job. He was officially introduced on Oct. 2, 15 days before his 30th birthday.

"Steve has built a reputation as a smart, hard working, energetic coach," Levy said when announcing Gansey's hiring. "He has a strong development background, but also brings with him a winning, championship pedigree. His history and familiarity with Fort Wayne will only serve to strengthen ties within the community."

Gansey spent all of training camp with the Pacers, attending every practice and coaches meeting. He found himself having even more of a voice with the team than he had expected.

The Cavaliers have a larger coaching staff, with six assistants under Blatt, so Gansey was mostly just an observer when he attended Cleveland's 2014 training camp while with the Charge.

The Pacers, on the other hand, have just three assistants on their staff, which meant Gansey could take on a much more active role in practices.

"They treated me like I was an assistant coach with the Pacers," Gansey said. "That's the way I looked at it. Whether it's talking to rookie Rakeem Christmas or sitting there telling George Hill what to do, they gave me that confidence and that voice to say something about what I saw."

Talking has always been a particular strength for Gansey, no matter the setting.

"He was the best man at my wedding," brother Mike recalled. "Someone like him, he didn't have a script, he didn't have note cards. He can go into a room and talk to people. Whatever it is, whether it's motivating someone, whether it's being a standup comic…he's got his way with words."

So when Gansey got a chance to talk to the Pacers players, he quickly earned their respect. Even Vogel leaned on Gansey's experience at times.

The Pacers made a much-publicized shift in philosophy over the offseason, opting to play at a faster pace and implement smaller lineups than they had in the past. Since the Mad Ants had utilized "small-ball" looks during their run to the 2014 championship, Vogel would often quiz Gansey about his experience using smaller lineups.

When NBA training camp ended, Gansey returned to Fort Wayne to prepare for his own season. The Mad Ants officially open the year on Saturday and they promise to mirror the Pacers in their style of play and overall philosophies.

Two Pacers players – Christmas and second-year forward Shayne Whittington – are on the Mad Ants' Opening Night roster. Three more – second-year wing C.J. Fair and rookies Kadeem Jack and Terran Petteway – spent time with the Pacers in the preseason.

As more and more D-League teams enter into one-to-one relationships with NBA franchises, the focus of the league is becoming more and more about developing players to prepare them for the next level. Though the "D" in D-League has always stood for Development, never has it been more true.

Player development is one of Gansey's calling cards. He has earned a reputation as a guy willing to put in extra time rebounding for a player or spending long hours breaking down tape in individual film sessions.

Like any coach, Gansey wants to win every game. But he insists that his primary goal with the Mad Ants isn't to win a championship, it's to instill the right values and principles in his players.

"I really feel like we have to set the bar how it's supposed to be set," Gansey said. "And if we do what we're supposed to do, then we will get to where we want to go."

It's a philosophy that's already carried Gansey on a rather meteoric rise through the coaching ranks. And if he keeps it up, he, too, will get wherever he wants to go.