Franklin boys basketball: Young coach, old school

The young coach sits casually, legs crossed, pouring his old-time values into the damp air of a basement office. He has been about discipline from the start, ever since the day he arrived at Franklin High School, and at 26, took over one of the city's highest profile programs.

But Jason Kerr is loath to be labeled. He is not, he insists, a "disciplinarian," rather a "players' coach, with rules."

Listen to him talk, and a few things become clear. He is passionate and particular and unfailingly positive. He believes deeply in the power of hard work and perseverance. Above all, he respects accountability.

His is a world often devoid of middle ground. There is a right way, he says, and there is a wrong way. He knows both when he sees them. To play basketball in his program is to abide by established guidelines, to do things "The Franklin Way."

"The kids have choices. They can buy into it or not," says assistant coach Al Kawashima, who has known Kerr since the latter was in grade school. "We're very fortunate to have kids, especially in our senior class, who have bought into that."

In four seasons under Kerr, the Quakers have compiled a 75-26 record and qualified three times for the state tournament, finishing sixth in 2000. They entered this season as the state's top-ranked team, and when the Class 4A state boys basketball tournament begins tomorrow, they again will be favored. Franklin (21-2) plays Bethel (21-4) at 9 a.m. at the Tacoma Dome.

Getting his start

Jason Kerr doesn't pretend to have been a basketball star. He is a coach, after all, and has been since he traded in his sneakers for a whistle following his senior year at Bishop Blanchet.

"You know the saying," says Kerr, 30. "Those who can, play. Those who can't play, coach."

He landed his first job at 18, coaching an eighth-grade select team out of Sammamish. His older brother Todd, a standout football player and point guard at O'Dea, had agreed to help him but bailed at the last minute, leaving Kerr to do it on his own.

The results were predictable, given Kerr's inexperience and his team's lack of talent. His boys went winless, 0-18. In one game, they were beaten 94-6.

The experience only fueled Kerr's resolve.

"That was what pushed me to year two," he says. "I wasn't going out 0-18. That wasn't going to happen."

The next year, Kerr took a similar position coaching a team from Eastside Catholic, where Kawashima was the varsity head coach. One year later, he had impressed his boss enough to be hired as the Bellevue school's freshman coach.

"Jason did a great job — his attention to detail, stressing the things we wanted done in the program," Kawashima says.

Kawashima, citing burn out, stepped down at the end of the season and Kerr bolted for O'Dea, where he spent the next four years as an understudy to veteran coach Phil Lumpkin.

It would be Kerr's last stop as an assistant.

Focused on success

It is 4 o'clock on a recent afternoon and the gymnasium doors are locked.

Inside, Kerr patrols the sidelines wearing baggy, carpenter-style blue jeans. With closely cropped brown hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, he surveys the action, a black whistle wedged in the side of his mouth.

This is his classroom and he is constantly teaching and prodding, challenging junior Lyndale Burleson here, barking instructions to senior Kellen Williams there.

The scoreboard clock counts down the minutes remaining in a drill. The horn sounds, and then it's on to the next.

At Franklin, practices are not open affairs. Well-wishers and hangers-on tend to come out of the woodwork this time of year, so to limit outside distractions, Kerr maintains a season-long lockdown.

Even parents are asked to wait in the lobby until the team has finished its workout.

Regina Washington is one of the few outsiders to have found a way inside.

Her son, Ricky Washington, is a senior and one of the Quakers' resident success stories. During his first few years in the program, Regina sometimes watched practices through a window, or a crack in the door.

Finally, she got creative.

"How about if I'm the manager of the managers?" she asked Kerr.

Kerr assented, and these days, Regina has a front-row seat. It's a seat she earns by laundering the team's uniforms, operating the practice clock and doing other assorted tasks.

She believes strongly in Kerr's program, citing her son as proof of the good being accomplished.

When Ricky arrived from Cleveland High School three years ago, Regina says he was a C student with raw basketball talent. He will leave this spring as a B student with college aspirations and a firm grasp of the game's fundamentals.

"My son wasn't talking about college," Regina says. "Now, he wants to go to college. I think the program let him know that he can accomplish things."

Ricky says the most important thing Kerr taught him was the value of hard work.

"Right off the bat, he wanted me to work hard," he says. "I mean, I worked. But I didn't work to my maximum."

Taking over the role

The Franklin job opened in May 1999, following the resignation of Ron Drayton, who had led the Quakers to two state titles (1994 and '95) and seven state appearances in eight seasons.

Kerr says he walked into a winning situation on South Mount Baker Boulevard, and that he brought along the right people. Among them were Kawashima, whom Kerr had helped coax out of retirement a few years earlier to rejoin the staff at O'Dea, and Craig Jackson, a budding coach who had starred on Roosevelt's 1982 state-title team and gone on to play college ball at Oklahoma's Langston University.

Cliff Brown, who has a Master's degree in counseling and is sometimes referred to as the "team psychologist," also was in the mix.

"I didn't really see it as pressure," Kerr says. "The reality was, I knew I had great people around me. And as long as I surrounded myself with people who were better than I was, I knew I would be OK."

That first season, Kerr and his staff set about establishing their philosophical foundation. At its core, was a belief in hard work, a fact new players learned quickly on the first day of fall conditioning.

"He had us all come in and he gave us these killer workouts," says senior Jaxin Skyward. "He had us running. He had us stepping up on benches, jumping up and down. We were like, 'What is this? I thought we were playing basketball.' "

Blessed with such talented athletes as Alvin Snow and A.J. Brooks, the Quakers breezed to a 21-5 record and a sixth-place state finish.

A photo of that team at the Tacoma Dome remains one of the most prominent pictures displayed in Kerr's office. It sits on a window sill above him, and sometimes he finds himself gazing wistfully upward.

"I really loved that team, they just played so hard," he says, turning for another look.

Playing with class

Aaron Brooks remembers one of his first encounters with Jason Kerr.

It happened his freshman year during tryouts. Kerr wanted academic progress reports. Brooks just wanted to play.

But he didn't have the grades, and Kerr sent him home on the spot.

Brooks, now a senior All-American with a scholarship to Oregon, shakes his head when talking about the experience, which caused him to miss the first two months of his freshman season while he tended to his schoolwork.

"He just said, 'You have to go home,' " says Brooks, who has not been academically ineligible since.

"The first thing he says at tryouts," Jackson says, "is if you're not handling your business upstairs (in the classroom), don't even bother coming down here. I'm not even going to look at you."

The Franklin staff stresses a team concept. Players wear matching shoes and socks. Head bands, wristbands, outrageous hairstyles and other forms of individual expression are frowned upon. Jewelry cannot be worn at practice.

"I want them all to look the same," says Kerr, who does not have children but is engaged to be married. "I don't have a rule where it has to be this, that or the other thing. But I want them to understand and believe that they are one piece, and without every one of them being on the same page they are not going to accomplish their highest goals."

On road trips, Franklin players observe "quiet time" on the bus. There's no shouting, no laughing, no nonsense.

Upon arrival, every player thanks the bus driver for the ride.

All of this has become routine for this year's senior class, which Kerr credits for enforcing many of the rules.

"You build a player-run program," Kerr says. "Right now, our eight seniors ... their belief system is at a level where they are modeling the behavior. ... We're up there in fall conditioning and we're (running) lines and we've got seniors walking up and down telling a brand-new freshman to pull his shorts up or get the earring out of his ear — all of the those things that we have tried to instill in them."

Teaching a lesson

Earlier this season, the team found out just how far Kerr was willing to go to make his point.

After a 78-69 season-opening road victory over No. 3 Central Valley, seven players missed curfew while hanging out at the hotel with the Roosevelt girls team, which also was in Spokane for a game.

"We were in too good of a mood to be camped up in our rooms," Skyward says. "We were like, 'Man, he's not gonna trip.' We were so happy and we thought he was happy, too. But apparently not."

Kerr benched all seven, including Brooks, for the team's next game, which coincidentally was against Roosevelt.

Playing with five guys and a couple of junior-varsity call-ups, the Quakers lost 81-75 and started the season 0-1 in KingCo 4A Conference.

"He wasn't really too worried about whether we won or lost," Ricky Washington says. "He just wanted to prove a point. He told us not to leave that room, and we left the room."

There have been no major discipline problems since.

"If I don't hold those kids accountable, I'm not doing them a service," Kerr says. "If it was the night before the state finals, I'd do the same thing again."

Back in his office, Kerr is asked what his program expects of its players.

In essence, what is "The Franklin Way"?

It's simple, Kerr says.

"Do what we ask you to do with the understanding that the purpose is to make you better," he says. "Go to class, do your work, carry yourself in a classy manner, be a good teammate and work as hard as you possibly can every single day with a passion.

"I think if you do those things, the rest of it takes care of itself."

Matt Peterson: 206-515-5536 or mpeterson@seattletimes.com