When you have been doing something for almost 30 years you must be pretty good at it.
That is the case with Ontario basketball coach Joe Balogh, who starts his 29th year as the Warriors bench boss on Friday night when his team travels to Clear Fork to meet the Colts.
He is humble when it comes to his role in the success of the program saying that he has been blessed with a lot of good players over the years that have taken pride in the program, but his leadership has been the reason for the consistency.
Most coaches can take advantage of a situation when they have very good talent and last year the Warriors had excellent players and that is why they were AP poll champs in division two.
However, what is more impressive to me is when Ontario doesn’t have that kind of talent. The true mark of a basketball coach and his program is they don’t have peaks and valleys.
Every school will go through it. There will be cycles when you have kids that are really good and then some when they are not quite as good and even some when the talent really isn’t very good. Ontario goes through that just like everybody else, but the fact is they don’t stop winning.
When they have All-Ohio players they are going to win 20 games, conference titles, and compete in the tournament. When they don’t most schools will drop below .500 and enter a rebuilding phase, but Ontario doesn’t do that. Somehow they can still win 12 to 15 games in even in those down years.
I think that is because Ontario kids know from when they first start playing organized basketball that there are certain things that are expected of them.
I am not talking about shooting form or ball handling drills, I mean the mental approach to the game. When practice starts at 3:10 p.m., you are there at 3:00 p.m., in uniform and ready to go. When there is a scouting report handed to you, you study it so you can apply it to game situations.
In his 28 years at Ontario, Balogh has won 451 games and lost only 181, that a winning percentage of a little over 71 percent. That means Ontario has won seven out of their 10 games, or a little more, for almost 30 years.
Balogh has had his detractors who said that Ontario always wins because they are a big fish in a little pond. They were referring to the years when the Warriors were one of, if not the largest school in the former North Central Conference.
Last year, Ontario began play in the Northern Ohio League, where they were one of the smallest schools, and they still won, sharing the league title with Norwalk. They handed the Truckers their only loss of the season as Norwalk would win the division two state title.
Joe always has his kids prepared to be successful. They may not win every game they play, most schools don’t not matter what the season, but they are going to be put in the right position to give themselves a chance to win.
This year Ontario will again be one of the better teams in the NOL. I give them a good chance to win the league title again. If not they will be right there in the race.
