AD Dana Skinner, Women’s Basketball Coach Tom Garrick Both Got the Call to Play in Pros
Image by Ed Brennen
06/22/2018
By Ed Brennen
Dana Skinner got the call while he was at work selling sneakers and ice skates at a North Andover sporting goods store. When the phone rang at Tom Garrick’s home in West Warwick, R.I., he wasn’t even there. Unable to bear the scene of family and friends gathered to celebrate the potential news, he’d snuck out the back door and headed to Burger King with his best friend.
For college basketball players hoping to play professionally in the NBA, getting the phone call on draft day from their agent or a team executive saying they’ve been chosen is a pinnacle of their young careers. Only the best of the best are drafted – and two are members of the university’s athletic department.
Skinner, the director of athletics, was selected by the Boston Celtics in the third round (50th overall) of the 1978 NBA draft. Garrick, the new head coach of the women’s basketball team, was drafted a decade later by the Los Angeles Clippers in the second round (45th overall) of the 1988 NBA draft.
“That’s why Tom came here: I needed somebody who was a higher draft pick than me,” Skinner joked recently as he sat down with Garrick at the Tsongas Center to reminisce about their respective draft experiences.
‘I can be an All-Star’
“When I got the call from my agent, I was stunned,” recalls Skinner, who had heard rumblings that the Milwaukee Bucks might be interested in him but was unaware that he was on the hometown team’s radar. (Most of the attention was on the Celtics’ first-round pick that year, Larry Bird.)
Skinner, a sharpshooting 6-foot-3 guard from Danvers, enjoyed a standout career at Division II Merrimack College, averaging 25.1 points and 5.9 rebounds a game during his All-American senior season. Even though he didn’t play for a big-time Division I program, Skinner achieved his goal of being the top player drafted from New England.
“Back then, D-II guys didn’t get drafted a lot, so it was a big deal to be able to say you got drafted by the hometown team,” says Skinner, who was taken ahead of eventual NBA notables Michael Cooper (60th to the Los Angeles Lakers) and Gerald Henderson (64th to the San Antonio Spurs).
Image by Ed Brennen
In high school, Skinner and his teammates would pay an usher $1 each to let them sneak in a side door at the old Boston Garden to watch Celtics games. Skinner swiped media notes from the scorer’s table after the games – until team owner Red Auerbach caught him in the act. “He told me to get the hell away from the table,” Skinner recalls with a grin.
Skinner’s excitement of being drafted by Auerbach was quickly tempered by the reality of trying to make a Celtics backcourt loaded with talents like Don Chaney, Jo Jo White, Nate Archibald, Earl Tatum and Dave Bing.
“What kind of a chance do I have of cracking that lineup?” Skinner thought to himself. So he worked out “from 6 a.m. to midnight” every day, jumping rope for 90 minutes, running 5 miles and lifting weights.
“If I was going to get cut, it wasn’t going to be because I didn’t try hard enough,” says Skinner, who went into the Celtics’ rookie/free agent camp in the “best shape of my life.” And it showed on the court.
“Five days in I called my father and said, ‘Dad, I’ve got to tell you, I think I can be an All-Star in this league. I’m playing really well here,’” Skinner recalls.
Heading into training camp a few weeks later, Skinner signed a three-year contract with escalating salaries of $65,000, $75,000 and $85,000. “I thought it was all the money in the world,” he says with a laugh. “I was going to be rich!”
But playing against the bigger and faster veterans in camp, Skinner quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be easy to take someone’s roster spot.
“I called my father back and said, ‘I don’t know where the heck these guys came from, but this is not the same group I went up against a couple of weeks ago,’” says Skinner, whose chances of making the team were all but derailed when he broke a bone in his foot during practice.
Skinner didn’t say anything to the trainers and played through the pain, but he lost his quickness. On Sept. 20, 1978, three weeks after signing his non-guaranteed contract, Skinner was waived. His small fortune was gone, and so too was his shot at the NBA.
Would he have made the team had he not hurt his foot?
“No. They were just better. I can look back on my Celtics experience comforted by the fact that I wasn’t good enough,” says Skinner, who caught on for half a season with the Maine Lumberjacks of the Continental Basketball Association. He endured road trips from Orono to Allentown, Pa., and Rochester, N.Y., in the team Winnebago before hanging up his high tops for good.
“The hardest reality for me was, I was the best player I had ever been in my life and nobody wanted me anymore,” says Skinner, who went on to a successful coaching career and was inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004. “That is a cold reality, but everybody gets to that point.”
The Pride of Rhode Island
Garrick, who was hired by Skinner in April as the women’s basketball coach, got to that point a little later in his playing career.
As a 6-foot-2 point guard for the University of Rhode Island, Garrick gained national attention his senior year when he helped lead the 11th-seeded Rams to a surprising run to the Sweet 16 of the 1988 NCAA tournament. (They narrowly lost to second-seeded Duke, 73-72.)
“I had no idea I could get drafted until the last month of my senior year of college, which I think helped me because I could be free to play and not overthink the situation,” says Garrick, who averaged 20.5 points, 4.1 assists and 2.4 steals per game his senior year.
Image by Bob Ellis
As a youngster, Garrick didn’t want his parents, Tom Sr. and Beatrice, to attend his games. “I wanted them to be so proud of me, and I felt that if they came to a game and stunk it up, the people in the stands would say, ‘This kid is horrible.’ I didn’t want to bear that,” Garrick says.
When his family hosted the draft-day party at their home, Garrick wanted no part of it. “Once I realized there were people there expecting to hear my name called, I snuck out the back door,” he recalls. “I came back maybe 45 minutes later, and my mom and dad said, ‘Where did you go? Elgin Baylor (the Clippers’ general manager and NBA Hall of Famer) called for you.’ I was like, ‘Great.’”
Perennial doormats of the NBA, the Clippers had two first-round picks that year; they took Danny Manning with the No. 1 overall pick and got the third overall pick, Charles Smith, via a trade for their sixth pick.
“It was a really talented but young and immature team,” Garrick says. “I think that’s one of the reasons I was able to go out there and make the team. I had no preconceptions of what it was going to be. It was just basketball to me.”
The bigger challenge was for the East Coast kid to get used to the LA lifestyle.
“That’s a different world,” he says. “It’s easy to get caught up for people that aren’t grounded or don’t have a moral compass. But my mom and dad took care of that my whole life. They gave me a foundation, so I knew which doors to walk into and which doors to stay away from.
“Even with that, when the season ended, I couldn’t get home to Rhode Island fast enough,” he says. “I needed to be around people who would shoot me straight.”
On the court, Garrick suddenly found himself going up against legends like Michael Jordan.
“Obviously he was the best player, but I never thought about it that way,” Garrick says. “To me, he was just another player who was wearing 23 and was on the scouting report. If, for one second, I switched my mind to think ‘It’s Michael Jordan,’ I wouldn’t have been in the league. I couldn’t be a fan. I knew that right away.”
Garrick played three seasons for the Clippers, averaging 5.8 points and 3.4 assists in 20 minutes per game. He played for three teams – the San Antonio Spurs, Minnesota Timberwolves and Dallas Mavericks – in his final NBA season in 1991-92. He then played six more seasons in Germany, Turkey and Spain before moving into coaching.
“The only way I made it is because I was always physically prepared. I hated the thought that there might be somebody out there doing what I wasn’t willing to do,” Garrick says. “It takes a toll – my knees are shot, my back is shot. But it was worth it.”
While dozens of River Hawk hockey and baseball players have been drafted to play professionally, the only basketball player to be drafted was Hank Brown, who was taken by the Celtics in the ninth round of the 1967 NBA draft.
While Skinner and Garrick would of course love to see future River Hawks playing basketball in the NBA or WNBA, that’s not their focus.
“We ask our student-athletes to get everything they can out of college academically and personally,” says Skinner, who has been the university’s AD since 1995. “If you do that, the opportunities will present themselves.”
“I think getting drafted puts a cap on it,” Garrick adds. “If you don’t succeed with that, are you a failure now? No.
“My job is to help these young people maximize their potential,” Garrick says. “If we can do that, who knows, we might have No. 1 draft picks. But that’s not the only way you can be successful. How are you prepared to live your best life going forward? That will be a success.”