“This has gone beyond what anybody could have hoped for,” FHS athletic director Mark Harden said. “His first team went 9-12, and I was thinking, ‘We’re already making progress.’ Then to go 12-11 and now 21-5, those are quantum leaps. It’s just been phenomenal what he’s done.”
The key to Austing’s success depends on whom you ask.
Senior guard Jeff Woods said it comes down to preparation.
“He prepares us better than any coach I’ve ever had,” Woods said. “When we step out on the floor, it’s like we’ve already played that team five times.”
Assistant coach Everett Hibbard attributes much of Austing’s success to his adaptability.
“He does a good job of scouting and having us ready to play, but he’s really good at making on-the-fly adjustments,” Hibbard said. “He has this really good ability to recognize during the game what’s not working and get us into what we need to do.”
And according to Elder coach Joe Schoenfeld, whom Austing played for as a senior captain in Schoenfeld’s first season as head coach, it simply comes down to the “it” factor.
“He’s just one of those guys who have all of the intangibles,” Schoenfeld said. “He and his older brother Danny were a lot alike in that they were smarty, heady players who see things most people don’t see. They were always thinking steps ahead of what was going on out on the floor.
“Everything he does, he’s just really good at it,” Schoenfeld said.
Austing himself will tell you the reason for his success are the three reasons listed above, namely Woods and the rest of the players, Hibbard and the rest of the assistants and Schoenfeld and the rest of his mentors.
“We have great kids and the best staff you could ever ask for, a bunch of really unselfish smart guys,” Austing said, referring to Jeff Sims, John Cecere, Adam Reed, Steve Kessler and Hibbard.
By the time he was in fifth grade, Austing said he already knew coaching and teaching were what he wanted to do with his life. And at Elder, he learned from some of the best.
“When I was at Elder, Dan Fleming was the freshman coach, Joe Schoenfeld was the JV coach, Mike Gergen was the varsity assistant and Hans Frey was the varsity head,” he said. “You’re looking at like eight state titles among that group there.
“And when I was in football, the freshman coach was Scott Dattilo, the sophomore coach was Doug Ramsey and the varsity coach was Tom Grippa. That’s like seven or eight of the best high school names you can think of in Cincinnati, and I played for all of them.
“If you can’t learn something from that group, you’re probably not very smart.”
After graduating from Elder in 1992, Austing played football at Georgetown College in Kentucky. But he gave up the game after his freshman year, transferred to Northern Kentucky and joined Gergen’s basketball staff at Purcell Marian.
Two years later, he reunited with Schoenfeld and Grippa at Elder. When Grippa took the job at Fairfield in 1997, Austing came with him and coached as a varsity assistant until 2003, when he was promoted to defensive coordinator in 2004 under Dattilo.
Then when Dattilo left for Sycamore after the 2005 season, Austing went with him. But the contacts he made at Fairfield served him well when he applied for the FHS basketball job in 2009.
“A big reason I came here is because I knew all these people and they knew me,” Austing said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be awkward getting to know everyone. I had coached Everett in football and I had taught with Sims. One day into it, we were all hanging out and having fun.”
And they still are.
And if Fairfield can pull off two more victories this weekend, Austing will have the whole community joining in the fun with a celebration the city hasn’t seen in a long time.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2193 or jmorrison@coxohio.com.
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