Why coach Sam Kirby calls his Cosumnes River College women’s basketball team ‘The Great 8’
He is unyielding in his game approach, imploring and applauding defensive effort and simple fundamentals such as not leaking out on the fast break until you at least have the ball.
But Sam Kirby can be too nice to a fault, all rooted in gentlemanly good manners. He is the second-year women’s basketball coach at Cosumnes River College, 20 years years removed from his CIF state championship season as a Bee All-Metro guard and the lead horse for those Foothill Mustangs of north Sacramento.
Some 18 months after salvaging CRC from the scrap heap as low player numbers and an abrupt coaching change placed the Hawks on the brink, Kirby is in the midst of his best basketball season yet, excelling in a role he never saw coming. Shorthanded yet spirited, talented and tenacious, CRC sported a 15-1 record entering Monday.
That’s the best start in program history, making for one of the more intriguing stories on the state junior college front. On Wednesday, CRC defeated a Sierra College program boasting a conference and state championship pedigree, 68-60. It was the Hawks’ first-ever victory over the Placer County program. CRC players giddily doused their leader with water as he bounded into the visiting locker room to celebrate.
On Saturday night, CRC topped another longtime powerhouse for the first time, defeating Santa Rosa, 59-52, to emerge as the only unbeaten team in the Big 8 Conference, the best league in Northern California.
“I call our team ‘The Great 8’ because we only have eight players,” Kirby said during a recent practice. “It’s junior college sports. Things happen. We’ve lost players for every reason, but the girls we have give us everything.”
Against Santa Rosa, CRC was down to the Super 7 but will be whole again at eight soon, Kirby said.
Kirby is a JuCo product who has been where each of his players aspire to go: a four-year program to play, to study, to graduate, to kick-start the rest of their lives. Kirby starred at Delta College in Stockton as an all-state guard who keyed a 30-2 season in 2005. He was a starter at Seattle University, helping the program to its first NCAA Division II playoff showing in 38 years, and that is where he got his coaching start.
But nowhere along this path did Kirby expect to coach women’s basketball. Now, he’s hooked.
“I’m still having to adjust to coaching women,” Kirby said. “I was raised to treat women the right way, so I catch myself offering to carry bags and backpacks of the girls. I treat them as women first and basketball players second. I needed a woman to help me coach and to balance this out.”
Kirby tapped into his immediate resources and brought his cousin, Brittany Shine, into the coaching fold. He calls her “Shine.”
Shine was The Bee’s 2010 Player of the Year at Sacramento High School who later played guard for the Florida Gators, the Cal Golden Bears and professionally across the globe. The 5-foot-10 Shine still runs the floor in practice because it’s hard to replicate game situations with just eight able bodies.
“First thing Shine told me was, ‘No! You have to be hard on these players, just like guys, because they need to be coached up!’” Kirby said.
Said Shine: “Basketball is basketball. The ball does the same thing. We tie our shoes the same way as the men’s players, so you have to coach women the same way as you coach men. Sam’s always been the super nice guy and he doesn’t have a mean side.”
But Kirby can lower the boom. When CRC headed to a San Diego tournament before Christmas, he grew tired of player gripes, like a father warding off the “Are we there yet?” queries from the back.
“The drive is too long. Where are we staying? When are we eating?” Kirby recalled with a laugh. “At the hotel the next morning, I had them run two miles. I wanted them to be thankful.”
Kirby isn’t beyond accountability, either. He was hit with a technical foul in a Big 8 Conference game against Modesto Junior College, a game the gritty Hawks won 51-50 at home, where they own a 9-0 record this winter. On New Year’s Day, in the middle of practice, Kirby ran his share of suicide drills, sprints forward and backward. He kept pace and never lost his breath.
“I’ve lost 30 pounds the last couple of years,” Kirby said, proud to be down to his college weight of 185. “I can still get after it.”
Starting from scratch
When Kirby and Shine took on this monstrous challenge, they had no players to work with. The roster had been cleaned out after a program collapse during two shutdown COVID seasons. When Kirby and Shine spotted anyone who looked like a player walking on campus, they convinced them to try out for the team. CRC grinded out a 9-18 season in 2022-23.
This season, the roster includes Bee All-Metro performers such as LaKayla Hale of Monterey Trail High School of the Elk Grove Unified School District and Saray White of powerhouse McClatchy High School. Because this is JC sports, students arrive from all over and from all walks of life. The roster includes two players from out of state in 5-foot-9 freshman forward Mikaela Whalen of Missouri and 5-8 sophomore guard Ashley Gonzalez of Texas.
Gonzalez heard about the Hawks through a coach who knew Kirby.
“They didn’t say come to Sacramento,” she said with a smile. “They said come check out California. I was interested. I wanted to make my parents proud. They’ve done everything for me and the least I could do is go to college, play and make them proud.”
Gonzalez and her parents packed her red Honda Accord to the brim with all of her belongings and drove west, arriving in Sacramento on Labor Day Weekend in 2022. She can handle the ball, score inside and out and defend. And that two-mile run around the hotel in San Diego?
“I was up at 5:30 that morning, waking up my teammates,” Gonzalez said with a laugh. “Everything coach Kirby has done is for the betterment of this team. I love this squad. We have a lot of heart and we don’t give up.”
The 6-foot White is all arms, legs and ability as she slithers and slices her way around defenders to get to the bucket. The daughter of 1991 Sacramento High Bee All-Metro guard Raymond White, a regular to all of her games, White averages 17.7 points, 6.3 rebounds and 5.1 assists. Hale, a tireless on-ball defender and guard who can score on runners and jumpers, averages 17.5 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.1 steals while maintaining perfect grades.
“She never gets tired,” Kirby said. “She leads us with her energy.”
Gonzalez is averaging 14.8 points and Whalen 12.8. Gonzalez had 19 points against Sierra. CRC is third in the state in scoring, averaging nearly 80 points per game, a remarkable feat for “The Great 8.” CRC plays hard and it plays fast.
CRC is mindful of playing tough defense without getting into foul trouble since the bench is so thin. When Hale was helped off the court against Modesto, wincing in agony over a turned ankle, everyone held their breath. She returned 10 minutes later, electing to ice the ankle later.
Calamar and Clark legacies live on
The spirit of never giving up describes Jeanne Calamar. She was the founding coach for CRC women’s basketball, starting the program from scratch in 1989. She remains a fixture on campus as the longtime associate athletic director, known for her courage and class.
When she assumed the CRC basketball post, Calamar walked across campus looking for anyone who looked like they could run and dribble at the same time. She could relate to what the current coaches had to do to get this up and running. CRC lost its first 26 games. Teams tried to score 100 on the overwhelmed Hawks in their formative years, pressing from start to finish.
Calamar eventually produced playoff teams but was floored in her 13th season by a breast cancer diagnosis. She tearfully stepped away from the sport, needing every bit of strength to get to the parking lot and get through the day. Calamar said she is proud of what Kirby has done to the program she founded. He regularly seeks her input and wisdom before and after games.
“Sam really is doing an amazing job, just incredible,” Calamar said. “When we hired him, he didn’t even have a team. I told him that he was starting brand new, like when I started the program. He’s out there coaching, recruiting, working hard, building a name for himself and our school. I think it’s great.”
Said CRC athletic director Collin Pregliasco: “It’s amazing what Sam and the girls have done. What a team.”
A Santa Barbara native and a JuCo product herself, Calamar’s best friend at CRC was Jim Clark, the classy men’s basketball coach from 1972-2003. The coaches shared the same bond of being Los Angeles Lakers fans, of having the same initials, the same passion to teach and coach.
And they shared cancer stories. Clark battled his own illness in his final seasons as coach. The pals spent many emotional hours trying to make sense of their plights, wondering how they were supposed to function without coaching.
Clark died in the summer of 2003 at 64, but only after he vowed to coach from his hospital bed if he had to. Calamar immediately went to work to get the gym floor named in his honor, and Clark Court sports a sparkling new floor this season. One of Clark’s former players, Jonathan James, is the longtime CRC men’s coach. One of Clark’s daughters, Dee Clark-Peeler, is the official scorekeeper for the men’s and women’s teams. She has kept the official book for the men’s program since the 1970s and has remained in this role because it is the CRC thing to do, the family thing to do.
“My dad would be so proud of what’s going on here, how well these teams have done, and the great coaching,” Clark-Peeler said.
Said Calamar: “I think of Jim every day and I still miss him every day. He was my bud. I know he’d be so proud of Sam and this team and he’d also be unbelievably proud of Jonathan James. Jonathan was Jim’s guy. Clark is smiling down on us. When I stepped down as coach, I was lost for two years. I didn’t know what normal people did with their lives. I’m so grateful to still be here, to be alive.”
Kings promised CRC a gym in 1985
In 1985, shortly after their arrival from Kansas City, the Sacramento Kings and CRC administrators held a news conference on campus to discuss the plans to build CRC a gym the NBA team would use as a practice facility. The new venue was to replace the school’s 250-seat bandbox gym that doubled as a sweat box since the school opened in 1970, then surrounded by open fields.
Then-CRC athletic director Skip Davis said in 1986 that a new gym would “catapult this college out of the dark ages into modern times.”
But for 15 years, it wasn’t a gym at all. It was a roofless, hulking mess planted in the heart of the otherwise pristine, tree-lined south Sacramento campus. Concrete walls, 45 feet high, were supported by rusty beams. The project stalled out due to finances. CRC faculty members called it “Stonehenge.” Coaches said the mess resembled a bombed-out building from another part of the world. Chain-link fencing did not hide the weeds.
“There was even a tree growing in the middle of it,” Calamar said. “It was about 10 feet high.”
The gym was completed in 2000. The two-story, 48,000-square-foot, 3,000-seat venue, which includes offices, locker rooms and a weight room, stands as a campus jewel. Within a short time and with Calamar pushing the tempo, two new soccer fields, a new baseball field and a new softball field came to life on campus. CRC suddenly wasn’t the forgotten “other “ JC behind American River, Sacramento City and Sierra. It had indeed stepped into modern times.
FC Republic soccer uses CRC to practice. The gym has hosted CIF volleyball championship matches and CIF basketball playoff games.
While the weeds grew before the gym’s completion, Calamar and Clark under the cloak of darkness used to sneak through holes in the fence once a month to snap photos and daydream. Clark finally got to use the venue in his final years as coach.
When Clark was posthumously inducted into the California Community College Sports Hall of Fame in 2006, his family asked Calamar to present him at the ceremony. She accepted. She gave a moving speech about the man’s class and dignity.
Calamar in 2018 was presented with a lifetime achievement award by her peers in the California Community College Athletic Directors Association.
“I love talking to Jeanne Calamar,” Kirby said. “She’s been great to me and this program.”
Kirby has learned on the fly how to balance the married and father life with coaching. It can all blur into a 24/7 grind. Kirby and his wife, Aspen, have an 8-year-old son, Sam Jr.
“I had to let her know that coaching will take up a lot of my time — games, recruiting, all that,” Kirby said. “It helped that I gave her a dog that she loves.”
There’s Kirby, the gentleman again.
