Home Is Where the Hardwood Is : Knight Chose a Mortgage Over Wanderlust and Now He’s Settling In as Highland Coach

Tim Knight has won professional basketball championships in Kuwait, high school state championships in sports-mad Florida, been an assistant at an NCAA Division I university and coached against UCLA and Marquette.

Impressive resume. Exotic resume.

So what in the world is Tim Knight doing at Highland High?

Well, owning his own home, for one thing. Tired of renting, the globe-trotting, itinerant Knight brought his family to the Antelope Valley four years ago in search of affordable housing. He found it.

And after four years of teaching English and coaching golf at Littlerock High, Knight, 50, finally found a local basketball head-coaching job--at Highland.

He took it, and not surprisingly, immediate success followed. After a month on the job, his undersized Bulldogs are 10-3--with an upset of traditional power Pasadena Muir in the season opener--and strutting into their Golden League opener at 7:30 tonight against Palmdale at Highland.

“I think he’s a real good coach,” said senior forward Jamal Dedeaux, who leads the team in scoring with 21.6 points a game. “He’s calm and he knows exactly what he wants to do. He’s got a lot of experience, and I like his poise as a coach.”

Knight is no Bobby of Indiana. Instead of bluster, he exudes politeness. Instead of tirades, he’ll quote Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Watching a Knight-run practice is a relaxing experience. There are no whistles. No temper tantrums. No intimidation. In fact, he seems too nice.

“He never yells, unless he gets real, real mad in a game,” Dedeaux said. “If he gets disappointed in us, he calmly tells us to get on the line and run lines. But he doesn’t lose his cool.”

Knight can recall only one time in his 20-year coaching career when he lost his cool, in a game in Kuwait, where he coached the Qadsia Club in 1982-83.

After a referee made a call that outraged him, Knight threw a plastic water bottle against the wooden bench. The bottle exploded, drenching his assistant. Knight then charged out on the floor, so angry that he wanted the referee to assess him a technical foul. But the referee would not acknowledge Knight, even when he started poking him in the stomach.

“At that point I see, out of the corner of my eye, three Kuwaiti policemen coming toward me shoulder to shoulder carrying nightsticks,” Knight said.

So Knight, envisioning a protracted stay in a Kuwaiti jail cell, patted the referee on the back and said, “You’re doing a great job.” He beat a hasty retreat to the team bench and watched the rest of the game with his hand cupped over his brow so the policemen couldn’t make eye contact.

“I’ve still never gotten a technical foul,” he said.

But what his laid-back style has consistently brought is victories. The Chicago-suburb native who served as team manager for the Ara Parseghian-coached Notre Dame football squad in 1965 worked as an English teacher in the Midwest until his first basketball-coaching job in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1974.

Nearly a decade later, he coached Qadsia’s senior team--which subsequently was coached by former UCLA Coach Larry Farmer--to national and Arabian Gulf League titles in his only season there. 1214586984uard win boys’ and girls’ state championships in the same season, believed to be the first time a large school in the United States had done so.

After Kuwait, Knight spent a year as an assistant at U.S. International University in San Diego, an NCAA Division I school, and coached against UCLA and Marquette, among others.

In 1985, he went to Korea with the idea of getting involved in the 1988 Olympics. Instead, he taught English, met his wife-to-be, Sung-Hae, and moved to Southern California in 1986. After a season as an assistant at Alhambra and three as head coach at San Gabriel, he moved in 1990 to Littlerock.

He spent four years away from basketball, and wanted back in. He was preparing to be an assistant at Quartz Hill this season, but a head-coaching job opened at Highland when Tom Mahan moved to Antelope Valley. Knight became the Bulldogs’ man.

“For us in the valley to get someone with his credentials is a great thing,” said Paul Arnold, Highland vice principal.

Said Mahan: “He’s a class act.”

And a consistent winner. But Knight said his coaching philosophy has changed over the course of his career.

He used to treat people as a means to an end--winning--and ramrodding his own agenda onto them. Now he says he treats people as ends themselves, giving them reasons for behaving the way he wants them to and leaving the choice up to them.

“I don’t know how effective that is in terms of wins and losses, but it’s the right way to treat people,” he said.

Knight still worries about his team’s performance. His offense revolves around Dedeaux, a smooth swingman, and forward John Burrell, a 6-foot-2 leaper who averages 21.5 points and leads the team in rebounding.

But the Bulldogs have no center. Dedeaux, at 6-3 1/2, is his tallest player.

And he still hasn’t filmed a game because his 13- and 14-hour days-- spent working and with his wife and two young daughters-- leave no time to watch films.

But he’s coaching basketball. He’s settled down. And he’s happy.

“We were reading Emerson’s ‘Nature’ in English class recently,” Knight said. “And Emerson was saying when you go out in nature, you’re rejuvenated. And I think basketball is a bit like getting out in nature. As someone who is older, even though you have both feet on the ground, it’s still nice to get that feeling.”