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Sports

How Did Hopkins Become Hoops Heaven?

After winning Class AAAA titles in both girls' and boys' basketball last year, Hopkins is poised once again to make a title run.

On Saturday, fans will again hear the sounds of squeaking shoes and bouncing balls as the boys basketball season kicks off with the Tip Off Classic at the Lindbergh Center. The girls will be at the event, too, but they’ve already got four wins under their belt—including an 80-point whooping of Minneapolis North to launch their season.

Fans have become accustomed to such successes with ' basketball programs. Last year, both boys and girls teams won the Class AAAA title, and many already have them pegged as this season’s teams to beat.

Hopkins has emerged as the preeminent basketball powerhouse of the past decade. The boys team is making a run at its fourth straight title and its seventh in eleven years. The girls have won three crowns since 2004. That level of dominance has fueled local pride at home and respect—and even envy—from the Royals’ competitors.

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With all that success, it’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been this way. The boys’ team but didn’t win another championship until 2002. So what changed?

 

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Consistent coaching

traces the success back to Ken Novak Sr., who was a Hopkins coach from 1954 to 1983 and whose son, Ken Novak Jr., started coaching at Hopkins in 1990. Ware played for Novak Jr. and coached alongside him before moving into the college ranks. also was an assistant coach under Novak Jr.

“They come from the same coaching philosophy, and it works,” Ware said, adding that it’s rare to have one coach at the same school for so many years.

But Novak Sr. said the program has reached another level in the past decade compared to when he was the head coach at Hopkins Eisenhower.  

“Those were the days that there were 13 teams in the Lake Conference,” he said. “We were always second, third or first. We lost to nine state champions because we had to play everyone in the same region. We never had a losing season. We (Lindbergh and Eisenhower) were the two smallest teams in the conference, but we always told our kids that you can only play five kids at a time, no matter how big of a school you are.”

Cosgriff also has plenty of praise for Novak Jr.: “He set the table here, and I was his assistant for eight years and followed his lead and brought his philosophy and work ethic, and it has really paid off. He has laid the foundation for all of Hopkins basketball.”

Novak Jr. is , but Novak Sr. said his son doesn’t receive the praise he deserves. Despite ESPN naming him the high school basketball coach of the year last season, Novak Jr. has never been chosen as the Minnesota coach of the year.

“He never says a word about winning and losing,” Novak Sr. said. “He likes practice. He likes competing. I’m biased, but he does more than win and lose ball games. I’m very proud of him.”

Novak Jr. certainly has the attention of rival coaches. David Flom, head coach of Eden Prairie boys basketball, led the only team to upset the Royals boys last year. The Eagles defeated Hopkins 75-71 on the road—snapping the Royals’ 38-game winning streak—but Hopkins avenged that loss in a second regular-season match. The Royals later beat Eden Prairie 64-52 in the state championship game.  

“I think (their success) is a combination that they always have great talent, they dwarf everyone by ten-fold in the number of Division I players that they have had, but they also have great coaching,” Flom said. “We certainly found that out last year. The first time, they didn’t have the kids’ attention, and the next two times, after we were fortunate enough to beat them, they got their guys focused. They have their kids play together and they play well together and that is a hard thing to do, no matter how much talent you’ve got.”

 

A wealth of talent

The talent issue can be a sore point for some rivals. Hopkins has had several players who weren’t originally from the Hopkins district emerge as standouts for the program, and opposing fans accuse Hopkins of recruiting its stars—despite the Royals losing players such as Aaron Anderson to Osseo and Riley Dearing to DeLaSalle.

“It used to really bother me, because it is just so untrue. And if you can find one kid that said we recruited him and that we even talked to him, I would want to talk to him,” Novak Jr. said. “I want to find out where this is coming from. It’s not true. I think far fewer people move in than everybody realizes. (2011 graduate) Joe Coleman has been here since second grade, and everyone assumes he came in. It doesn’t really bother me.”

A Star Tribune article after last year’s championship brushed aside the accusations.

“All that's left now are the inevitable e-mails and online comments accusing Hopkins of recruiting. Those are almost as predictable as Hopkins hoisting the big-school trophy at the end of a basketball season,” Michael Rand wrote, adding, “In a state tournament filled with transfer students playing significant roles, the Royals had zero, (Hopkins Athletic and Activities Director Dan) Johnson said. No players on the Hopkins team came to the school from a different school from ninth grade on.”

What can’t be denied is that Hopkins has had a disproportionate share of players go on to future success.

The 2009 boys team finished 31-0 and has eight current or future Division I basketball players. (“That was a special team. We had guys on the bench that were really good players,” Novak Jr. said.)

Kris Humphries, the 2003 Mr. Basketball winner, went on to the NBA. In all, the Royals have had four players named as Mr. Basketball—tied for the most with Minneapolis North—and Leslie Knight was named Miss Basketball in 2004.

“You can’t win without talent, but a lot of coaches can’t win with it,” Novak Sr. said. “We have been fortunate to not only have some good kids, but kids who believed in the program and our kids have been super. We wouldn’t trade our kids for anything. The community is so supportive.”

 

Putting in the effort

But winning games takes work, and Hopkins players and coaches are renowned for the effort they put in.

“I think that we have a good mentality,” Novak Jr. said. “Talent is something that you can develop and work on and get better at, and I think our kids believe that.”

Point Guard Siyani Chambers, who will play for Harvard next season, feels that work ethic is critical to the team’s success.

“We are always in the gym constantly,” Chambers said. “Always trying to make each other better and we are competitive. I think that being more competitive with your teammates makes everybody go harder, which in the end makes everyone better.”

That’s just as true for the girls team: “The girls outwork everybody,” Novak Jr. said. “They really do. They work their living tail off. The girls coaches do and the girls do.”

Novak Jr. says that he expects a lot of his team in practices, which he said he prefers over games. He thinks that’s why they typically play better at the end of the year when they have absorbed all the information. The players also benefit from working with alumni who return after making it to college or the pros—and who still continue to perfect their games.

“You come to our gym, and we might have the best pickup games in the cities every day,” Novak Jr. said. “Our kids have the ability to play against some of the best competition and can see what that best competition does. They concentrate very hard. They focus very hard. They really work on improving and getting better. It has been a constant culture that these kids have had. It is not just something that happened. It has developed over time.”

 

A ‘tradition of winning’

That culture is one aspect of the programs that coaches, players and rivals noted repeatedly.

“Obviously, there is a standard that has been set at the school with the tradition of winning,” Ware said. “It is like the Dukes or North Carolinas. There is such a tradition of winning that it perpetuates itself and people want to be a part of that. It draws a lot of attention and all the young student-athletes understand the tradition and want to keep it going.”

Ware’s comments almost exactly echoed those of Chris Carr—the Eden Prairie girls head coach, who, like his counterpart on the boys side, led the only team to defeat Hopkins last season. Carr also owns a Hopkins basketball- and volleyball-training facility called that —giving him a unique perspective on the Royals program.  

“(Hopkins has) been built as a basketball culture on both the boys and girls side,” Carr said. “They have had a lot of success in the last 15 years with both programs. Coach Cosgriff and Coach Novak have created a basketball environment and culture almost like college programs, like Duke on the boy’s side and UConn on the girl’s side. They have turned out a number of Division I athletes, which attracts younger players from far and wide to want to play for them. The staffs in both programs do an outstanding job of working with their kids and developing them.”

Said Novak Jr.: “We do want to create an individual greatness and a team greatness. For us, there is no second place. We are probably one of the few teams where that is the case. When we lose, people want to know what’s wrong. In some ways, there is an expectation that is created from the outside, from everybody else, but I think our kids handle it pretty well. I don’t think that they get dogged by it. They don’t get worried by it. I think they see it as fun.”

 

Pushing each other

Still, the fact that both boys and girls teams are perennial state championship contenders only ramps up the pressure. Of course, that pleases Novak Jr.— a former girls’ head coach.

“There was more pressure on us to win just because the girls won than there was for any other reason, he said. “We would have heard if the girls won and we didn’t, so there was a little bit of subtle pressure there.”

Similarly, Cosgriff said his program has high expectations both for itself and to live up to the boys program.

“You always want to do well as a coach,” Cosgriff said. “The problem is that the bar is set incredibly high, and with that comes an incredible amount of work.”

But the ties between the coaches ensure that this friendly rivalry stays friendly—each helping the other improve and each supporting the other through the season.

“The good part of it is that we have always got along really well,” Novak Jr. said. “In some ways, our programs are kind of intermixed because Brian (Cosgriff) has been part of the boy’s program. I think that we are good friends and he has spent a lot of years working the same things, doing the same things. I think that our boys are pretty close to the girls, too. When we can, we go to their games and visa-versa. It doesn’t surprise me that they have done well. They work really hard at it.”

 

The challengers

Perhaps a team’s competitors are the ones in the best position to understand a team’s success. Last year’s upsets by both Eden Prairie’s boys and girls teams—only to have both Hopkins teams avenge those lossed and defeat the Eagles again in the championship—has created chatter about the possibility of a new rivalry.

Not so fast, Flom said.

“I don’t know if it is a rivalry yet,” the Eden Prairie boys coach said. “Obviously, they are at the top of the class, best team in the state, year-in and year-out. We feel pretty good where we are at. I don’t know if we are their level yet. I don’t know if they would call it a rivalry. They are a team that we look to and are the benchmark, certainly.”

 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Hopkins won a championship in 1995. We regret the error.

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