Long Beach Poly coaches carrying Jackrabbit tradition forward

When Long Beach Poly’s boys basketball team takes the floor for Saturday’s CIF State Division II state championship game in Sacramento, the Jackrabbits will have decades of history and a dozen CIF championships on the bench. Poly’s varsity coaching staff this year is made up entirely of alumni, all of whom won a CIF title while playing with the Jackrabbits.

Poly’s state championship game against San Mateo Serra will be televised live on Time Waer Sportsnet at 4 p.m., and streamed for free at TWCcommunity.com.

None of Poly’s head coaches are on staff at the school—they work full time year-round with the city’s youth for the LBUSD coaching stipend of $4,187.41 for varsity, and $3,140.56 for the lower levels. All of them have other full-time employment to help them create the time to do that.

Asked what his response would be if a school besides his alma mater would have made him the same offer to run its team, Poly’s head coach Shelton Diggs laughed and shook his head. “Ah, hell no,” he said. “This is the only place I’d do that for. It’s worth it though—somebody did it for me.”

That coection to the school’s history and dedication to passing it down to the next generation is part of what makes the Poly program so special. At the varsity level, Diggs graduated in 1998 and won a CIF title as a junior, his top assistant John Atkinson graduated in 1981 and won CIF as a senior (he’s also still the school record holder in the high jump), and Eaest Pettway graduated in 2011 and won a CIF title as a senior.

The lower level coaches are almost all alums, too—the sophomore coach, Viy Thoton, graduated in 1989, and JV coach Isamu Nichols graduated in 1997 and won a CIF title his senior year. Of the six coaches working with the Jackrabbits program this year, only freshman coach Art Perris didn’t graduate from Poly (he’s a Jordan alum).

With the LBUSD not hiring on-campus coaches, the team’s staff has had to be creative in order to dedicate so much time to the team. Diggs is a personal assistant for Snoop Dogg, and spends time in the offseason on tour with the rapper, while Atkinson is a supervisor in the LA County probation department, which lets him work moings and night shifts. Pettway is a recent grad of Villanova, where he played football, and is inteing with an accounting firm in Irvine, racing back up the 405 to make games.

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“It’s important to everyone here to keep this going,” said Atkinson. “When Shelton first got the job, he told me, ‘I’m not going to be the one, John. They won’t be talking about me at the barber shop and the grocery store as the one who let the program fall apart.’”

The Jackrabbits’ history is unparalleled, with the school’s first CIF title coming in 1921. Poly has won 20 CIF-SS championships, with at least one in every decade since the 1920s, but the Jackrabbits only have two state titles to their names, one in 1921, the second in 1984 under legendary coach Ron Palmer, who ran the program when most of the team’s current coaches were playing.

There is a downside to such a strong and well-known legacy, of course—namely, a lot of pressure.

“One thing about coaching here at Poly is I had to get out from under the shadow of coach Palmer,” said former Poly coach Sharrief Metoyer, who ran the team for ten years after Palmer retired, before passing the reigns to Diggs. “Shelton has had to do the same thing from me, I think—he’s doing a great job, and wiing a state title would be one way to separate himself from everybody else.”

Diggs is bringing plenty of coaching backup with him to Sacramento. In addition to the staff, Metoyer and longtime Palmer assistant Erroll Parker were on the bus headed north on Friday—at least one coach from every Poly team the last 40 years. After years of close misses and heartbreaking losses in the state touament, a win on Saturday would be sweet not just for Diggs and his team, but for the entire Poly family, going back generations.