Tommy Duane Collen

FAYETTEVILLE — Tom Collen can’t wait to get out of this place.

No, not Fayetteville. Collen says he would like to finish his career as the women’s basketball coach at the University of Arkansas. He wants to escape losing.

Last season, the UA women went 12-18. That marked the first losing season in Collen’s 12 seasons as a head coach and 16 seasons before that as an assistant. When he took the job in 2007, Collen said it would be a slow build, but in his mind he thought the Razorbacks could rapidly improve, the way his teams had done at Colorado State and Louisville.

Collen won his first 15 games at Arkansas, getting the team into the top 25 and looking like a miracle worker. Then his star player got seriously hurt, that first season collapsed, and it has been a struggle since.

“The greatest lesson you teach in coaching is that winners are the ones who get back up when they fall,” Collen says. “If you preach that your whole career, then the first time as a coach you fall down and you don’t get up, what does that say?”

Collen f irmly believes the Razorbacks will get better, and soon. Of course, every coach says this, but Collen’s resume suggests he knows the way back to winning.

Entering this season, Collen’s career record is 264-115. Among Division I women’s basketball coaches with more than 200 victories, just 25 have a higher winning percentage than Collen’s .697.

When he took over the Razorbacks program, Collen had won 20 or more games eight times in nine seasons as a head coach, and gone to the NCAA Tournament eight times. Before that, he had been an assistant coach whose skill at recruiting resulted in Final Four appearances at Purdue (1994) and Arkansas (1998).

One losing season won’t prompt Collen to throw away his beliefs. He isn’t going to start screaming at his players, or demand they start walking the ball up the court on every possession.

“I’ve had success and I feel like I know what I’m doing, but when you’re having a losing season, if there’s ever a time you’re going to question that, it would be now,” Collen says. “I’ve had a few restless nights thinking about, ‘Maybe I need to change.’

“But the bottom line is I don’t think I can. The way I’ve done things has always worked in the past, and just because you stumble and fall doesn’t mean your approach is wrong.”

A decade passed between Collen’s departure from Arkansas to take the head coaching position at Colorado State and his return to Fayetteville. During that time, it didn’t get any easier to win at the UA.

In recent years, several schools in the neighboring Big 12 Conference have risen to national prominence. Two made the Final Four last season, and Oklahoma and Baylor have risen to become perennial NCAA Championship contenders.

That’s bad news for Arkansas, which competes in the Southeastern Conference but resides in Big 12 country. It would be easy for Collen to declare the task of resurrecting the UA women’s program an impossible one, but he’s not one to make excuses.

Nor are the assistants who followed Collen to Arkansas. They knew the task facing them was sizable, but they believed then - and still believe today - it will be achieved, and the Razorbacks will be regulars in the NCAA women’s tournament.

“All of us came to Arkansas because of Tom, no doubt about it,” says one of those assistants, Zenarae Antoine. “We all believe in Tom and believe inhis vision.

“But more than that, Tom is a good man, a good person, and easy to work with.”

A MAN AMONG GIRLS

Collen gets asked all the time how he ended up coaching women’s basketball, rather than men’s.

He has two answers, one long and one short. The long one involves a high school gym, a group of girls getting kicked off the court on a summer day, and Collen being outraged over the slight.

The short one predates that story: There weren’t a lot of boys in his neighborhood.

“I grew up in a neighborhood of all girls,” Collen says. “At a very early age, I learned to identify with how they communicated and what they thought.”

The girls who were kicked off the court by boys who wanted it, all 12- to 14-year-olds, asked Collen to help coach their slow-pitch softball team. A few weeks later, the head coach quit, and the 20-year-old Collen took over.

He stuck with those girls for years, and after earning his bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, he took on more coaching responsibilities. He was a program director at the local YMCA, and then a substitute teacher, coaching basketball, baseball, football and track for middle-schoolers and high school freshmen in Logan, Ohio.

Collen coached boys and girls, but he eventually gravitated to girls, whom he found more eager to be coached.

“Women’s sports barely existed, so there was a shortage of women’s coaches,” Collen says. “What I discovered back then was that these girls were so hungry to be taught and compete like their peers, boys, that they would do anything you asked. They just had 100 percent faith in whatever you told them.”

Coaching fit Collen well because he had spent his childhood getting ready to coach.

He grew up in rural Ohio, a kid who was obsessed with basketball. His hoop was a discarded telephone pole with a backboard made of plywood, his court a patch of grass that was beaten down into hard dirt.

On frigid winter days, Collen would go outside and shovel off his court, then play until his fingers were cracked and bleeding. Though the results on the court never matched his efforts off it, Collen gained a great understanding of basketball from all those solitary hours.

“I was a very average player,” says Collen, a shooting guard during his playing days. “I was a kid that loved the game but grew up out in the country and never had anybody to teach me how to play.”

After coaching youth sports for more than half a decade, Collen moved into the collegiate ranks in 1981, becoming a graduate assistant at Miami of Ohio.

Two years later, Collen had a master’s degree in recreational education and health education. He headed to the University of Utah, where he was a full time assistant. Collen was at Utah for three seasons, and in his last year there, his recruiting class was ranked in the nation’s top 20.

It wasn’t a fluke. Collen’s next seven years were at Purdue, and in all seven, the Boilermakers’ recruiting class was ranked in the top 20. Five were in the top 10.

Those classes included his future wife, Nicki Collen. She says Collen’s easygoing style helped sell her on the school, where she was a member of its Final Four team in 1994.

“I just thought he was really easy to talk to,” Nicki Collen says of their chats during the recruiting process. “That’s why I married him, too.

“I felt like I knew him. I could get on the phone and talk with him about sports, about my boyfriend, anything, and it was really natural. I trusted him, and my parents did too.”

Collen had left Purdue by the time Nicki arrived; they would be reunited when she joined his coaching staff at Colorado State. Before then, though, she would play professionally in Greece, while he was part of Coach Gary Blair’s staff at Arkansas.

Collen spent four seasons at Arkansas, 1993-97. He was the recruiting coordinator for all four and the assistant head coach the final two.

His final two recruiting classes at Arkansas were ranked in the top 20, and the 1996 class was ranked No. 5 nationally - a rank that is still the best in the program’s history.

Former Arkansas great Amber Shirey was just beginning her coaching career when Collen was at the UA as an assistant. After Collen was hired as head coach, Shirey wanted to stay with the program, in part because she admired him as a coach and a person.

“He taught me a lot about everything in the game, particularly recruiting, his philosophy and how he went about building relationships with kids,” says Shirey, today the executive director of basketball operations for the UA women. “I think he was and still is good with building those relationships.He was not just in for the quick sell. He actually got to know them and built that relationship with the kids he was recruiting.”

FINDING TIME

Collen didn’t realize it at the time, but he was learning something new from Blair: how to balance coaching and a family.

When he was an assistant, it was easy for Collen, then single, to log 80-hour workweeks. Blair, however,had a family, and Collen observed that Blair was careful to carve out time for them.

Today, Collen can’t spend his entire waking life on the job because he and Nicki have three young children.

“[Balancing work and family] is hard for everybody, but he would tell you that at his age, it’s harder,” Nicki says. “He wants to be there to watch Connor play soccer or Reese do gymnastics, and when he recruits on a Saturday, he can’t be there. That tugs at him.”

Collen smiles when he talks about being “the only 56-year-old coach in the country that’s trying to turn around a program with three kids under 5,” but the truth is, it’s exhausting. His parents are in failing health and arranging for their care consumes time every day, too.

Things were so much smoother at Colorado State. The Rams went 24-6 in his first season, and were ranked as high as No. 4 the next year, when they won 33 games and Collen was named national coach of the year by the Women’s Basketball Journal.

After five seasons and a 129-33 record, Collen left Colorado State for the Southeastern Conference, accepting a position as Vanderbilt’s head coach. He resigned a day later because of an academic discrepancy on his resume.

Although it proved to be a clerical error and Miami of Ohio said there was no wrongdoing on Collen’s part, the Vanderbilt job was gone by the time his name was cleared. So, too, was his old job at Colorado State.

He has no lingering bitterness over the matter, but it made for an extremely trying period.

“It was a very hard thing to understand,” he says. “You really just have to turn to God and say, ‘I don’t know what your plan is for me, but there will be something on the other side of this that’s going to be a positive thing in my life.’”

After spending the 2002-03 season working as a consultant and TV commentator, Collen was hired at Louisville. He spent four years there, setting a school record with 27 victories in his last year before being hired by Arkansas in 2007.

Longtime UA women’s Athletic Director Bev Lewis brought Collen on board. What she liked about him, beyond his outstanding record at Colorado State and Louisville, was how easy it had been to work with him when he was previously an assistant at Arkansas.

“I knew he was a good guy in addition to a good coach,” says Lewis, who became the executive associate athletic director and associate vice chancellor after the men’s and women’s athletic departments were merged in January 2008.

“He’s been successful every step of the way, and I fully expect he’ll be successful here. It’s a matter of really re-establishing his recruiting base, getting in his own kind of players, which I think takes a little time. But yes, I see us moving in the right direction.”

The Razorbacks were picked to finish eighth in the SEC this year, which would be a four-spot improvement from last season.

There are several highly sought-after recruits on the way, and the team will have a record number of games on TV this season, increasing its exposure and its chances of bringing more talent to Fayetteville.

It has been seven years since Arkansas made it to the NCAA Women’s Tournament. If Collen’s going to get them there on a regular basis, he’ll do it his way.

“I hate to use the phrase ‘player’s coach,’ but for millennial kids, today’s player, Tom is the perfect coach,” says Zenarae Antoine, the current assistant who played for Collen at Colorado State. “When you have a kid who dribbles the ball off her foot, some coaches might say, ‘What are you thinking?’ but Tom would say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll get a steal.’”SELF PORTRAIT Tommy Collen

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Dec. 21, 1953, Salem, Ohio.

THE COACHES I REALLY ADMIRE ARE The people I’ve worked for. I admire Elaine Elliot at Utah because she worked in the shadows of the great coaches in the country, but she’s right up there [with them]. I admire Coach [Gary] Blair. He’s a guy who started out just like me, as a high school coach.

A GOAL I HAVE FOR MYSELF IS Just to be a great dad and a great husband. As a coach, I want to be remembered by my players as somebody who cared about them as people.

MY FAVORITE ATHLETE AS A CHILD WAS John Havlicek.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Caring.