An Episode For Your Weekend: Book Author Ben Kaplan

A non-journalist learns what it takes to do the job

I knew that after skipping a week that I wanted to come back with something that would give people a chance to get away from post-election coverage. This episode accomplishes that.

A few months ago, Ben Kaplan approached me with the suggestion that I do an interview with a non-journalist about their learning how to do a journalism-based project on the fly.

I had read the book that Ben co-authored with Danny Parkins - it’s about small college basketball players (specifically non-scholarship) in NCAA Division III who now work in important positions in the NBA - and enjoyed it. And I was happy to oblige.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. Hope you’ll give the podcast AND the book a try.

Can you take us through how the idea originated that someone with no book writing background , would write a book of this nature?

I think for the same reasons you were intrigued by the Division III world, that's what I was intrigued by as well. There's just so many unique and quirky and fun things that happen in Division III basketball that I was thought this is something I would love to share. It's such a great experience and it's so unique.

And I knew that there would be an audience in the people that lived it. There's a bunch of Division III basketball programs out there. There's a bunch of people that have gone through that and lived it, and I'm sure they would love to read about it, and there's nothing out there for them.

The other thing I noticed is, people I played with, people I played against, coaches that had coached me, they had moved into the NBA world. And not only had they moved into the NBA world, they were advancing pretty quickly as coaches, as in front office roles. So my thought was, hey, let's tell a D3 story and the hook will be this D3 life is something your team's coach or your team's GM led. Aren't you curious to learn more?

And we got some really good advice, which was that nobody cares about your experiences. They care about those people that you were just talking about. So we really focused and honed in on the D3 to NBA path, the people that had traveled that. And then once we started researching the data around it, we were, we were blown away on how widespread it was there were at the time we started working on the project, 12 out of the 30 NBA teams had a former Division III basketball player, either as head coach or general manager

What were some of the things that you ran into that were kind of like welcome to journalism moments for you?

So many.

I think the biggest was probably our experiences with team PR staffs. NBA PR staffs, some can be very helpful.

So we had some really good experiences with the Celtics and the Mavericks. Who do you need? When do you need them? Set it up for us. It was great. Then we had other team PR staffs who, they treat their organization like it's handling state secrets. And so it was really challenging.

The very first phone call I had for the book was a friend in the Oklahoma City Thunder organization. So I told him about the project. He got me set up with their PR guy. That was my first phone call. And immediately the PR guy asked, well, if we do this would we have control to review any quotes and say if we like it and look at the overall context that it's being told in.

And that was the moment when I had to say, am I going to be a journalist on this project or am I just going to be a cheerleader? And so I said, no, I don't, I don't think we're going to do that. I don't think we're going to give you full editorial control.

But it was moments like that where I was like, okay, this is actually happening and it's actually something where you gotta switch your hats a little bit and put on the journalist hat.

In every book, there are gems. These things that you get that are just perfect. What was the best gem that you got for this book?

The story we got that I'm most proud of is about (former head coaches) Jeff and Stan Van Gundy and we heard about how much they loved basketball because they grew up with it.

And the dad was this coach that everyone loved and revered. And he was always around coaches. So they wanted to be like their dad and his dad's friends. And their their mom loved basketball and they just always talked about basketball. But I had never seen how the Van Gundy family got into basketball.

So when we had the chance to speak with Jeff and Stan's dad, I asked him how he got into coaching and the story was fascinating. When he went to college, he had a friend whose dad ran a pharmacy and he said, if you go get your degree in chemistry, you can come back and work at my pharmacy.

So that's what he was going to do. He didn't really have any passion for it. And then it turns out he was color blind, which makes it really hard to do organic chemistry. So instead he said, well, I like sports. I'll do physical education and I'll try to become a basketball coach. And he, from there he became a basketball coach and, it was just one of those little turns of fate that created this phenomenon that we detailed in the book, and it was really cool to get two steps deeper than we thought we might.

How did you make decisions on what made it into the book and what didn't?

That was the hardest part of the writing process. Our final draft was maybe 85, 90,000 words. And the initial first draft was 130,000.

I was able to get some really good advice from a lot of people who had done this before. And one of the big strokes of luck of the many strokes of luck we had in this project was that while I was writing it, I started playing in a pickup basketball game with some guys in my neighborhood.

One of them was a guy named John Lombardo, who was a writer for the Sports Business Journal, and he wrote a book on Woody Hayes. There was a point where I was really struggling. I had the third chapter in our book. It was probably five times as long as it needed to be. And I got into way too many things that I found super interesting, but were not relevant necessarily to our story.

And he just kept saying to me,

you just focus on where you need to get. Anything that's not getting you there, just cut it out. One sentence leads to the next. I know you've got some great anecdotes and you've got some great stories, but just keep going, keep going straight ahead.

How did the experience of being a journalist for this project impact how you view journalism as a whole?

I think it just made me appreciate how much work goes into it. I've never been someone who doesn't appreciate journalists. I revere a lot of the journalism that happens in the world

Understanding that a 30 minute interview with someone, that's not 30 minutes.

That's the time you need to chase someone down and figure out how to contact them. The time actually pitching them and contacting them and following up with them and then doing all the research and then actually doing the 30 minute interview and then transcribing the 30 minute interview, which takes longer than 30 minutes.

And then and then going back and picking up the quotes that you want to use and refamiliarizing yourself with some of this. Even a short 500-word article in a newspaper, if they're talking to a handful of people, that takes a lot of work. You see the tip of the iceberg, but you really don't understand just how massive it is underneath the water.

It's so much work.

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Next week, we’ll be talking to a group of high school students that we met at the Journalism Education Association national convention in Philadelphia. Hope you’ll check it out!