By MARIO AGUIRRE | STAFF WRITER
When Mission Veterans Memorial’s boys basketball season came to a close in March, it was hardly the end of coach Romeo De La Garza’s affiliation with the sport until the following season.
In fact, for the past five years, De La Garza has taken part in coach Mike Krzyzewski’s youth camp in Durham, N.C., as a volunteer instructor. He’s one of about 60 coaches from high school and small colleges across the country who fly in for the six days to help at the camp.
When that’s done, he’ll try to fit in a trip to Las Vegas to attend the Pro Scouts School, as he did last year, which serves as an entry level course for aspiring NBA scouts.
And when that’s over with, he’ll focus the rest of his attention on his small business, a basketball skills development camp.
If summers provide ample vacationing opportunities, De La Garza could hardly tell, filling his time with as much self-help courses as his schedule allows.
“It’s just something I love to do,” De La Garza said. “I’m always looking to improve as a coach. You’ve got to keep yourself sharp. And I want to do what I can to grow professionally and bring some ideas back to my program at Veterans Memorial.”
In October 2009, De La Garza attended Krzyzewski’s coaching clinic. At the end of it, he approached one of the staff members about volunteering at the youth camp, and was instructed to e-mail Krzyzewski at the end of the season.
De La Garza submitted his resume and was told there weren’t any openings. But the following year, De La Garza followed the same steps and landed one of the available spots. He remembers being “excited” to receive the news, considering there isn’t much turnover year-to-year between the volunteers.
Since then, De La Garza has helped each summer, while taking his 12-year-old son, Elijah, with him.
Outside of the high school and colleges coaches in attendance are several current and former Duke players. De La Garza recalls his son asking then-Cleveland Cavaliers rookie Kyrie Irving, one year removed from Duke, for the Nike t-shirt he wore at the camp. At the end of the day, Irving gave the shirt to De La Garza, who stuffed it in a plastic bag and presented it to his son later that night.
“Just to see his eyes light up, it’s something I’ll always remember,” De La Garza said.
Other than “being able to say that for one week, your office is Cameron Stadium,” De La Garza said he cherishes the opportunities to “pick the brain of Coach K and the rest of his staff.”
“In this profession, it’s about learning and growing,” De La Garza said. “It’s one of those situations where you feel you need to learn something new, and that’s what I try to do. It’s not only beneficial to me but to my program.”
Caleb Villarreal, a 2010 graduate at Mission Veterans, can attest to that. During four years with the program, Villarreal noticed De La Garza come back each fall with a more refined approach to the game or an added wrinkle to their practices.
“That’s the thing that I take away from him,” said Villarreal, who is now a video coordinator for the men’s basketball team at Southern Mississippi. “He’s never satisfied. He never wants to be mediocre; he always wants to get better and better.”
At first, Villarreal saw De La Garza as an “old school” coach, who stressed defense above everything else and stuck with his approach. Gradually, however, Villarreal noticed a change. With each passing summer, he said saw De La Garza communicate better with his players and introduce different techniques to their training regimen.
“Right now, as part of a Division I program, that’s the thing I had an advantage with,” Villarreal said. “Since he played college ball and he had that defensive system that he had (at Mission Veterans), I didn’t skip a beat when I went to the collegiate level. I felt like he prepared us like a college program in high school. That’s how he approached everything, from the early practices to the weight room.”
Like Villarreal, who started as a student manager at Texas Tech before landing a graduate assistant role at Southern Mississippi, De La Garza has aspirations of moving up the ranks, as well.
Last year, he attended a two-day seminar in Las Vegas that provided an inside look into the art of scouting professional basketball. De La Garza said he learned how to better analyze players and develop scouting reports. As part of the training process, he was assigned several games to scout throughout the year, picking apart players’ strengths and weaknesses. The reports were then graded by pro scouts.
De La Garza, who said he got “some very good reviews from my reports,” hopes to go back again later this month.
“A lot of coaches, once they reach what he’s reached (with more than 300 coaching wins), they just take it easy and they know they’re going to be OK with the job,” Villarreal said. “But he wants to continue to get better, and that’s what amazes me about him.”
Ideally, he’d like to coach in the NBA, whether on a team’s staff or as a skills development coach. And each summer, he adds more camps, clinics and seminars to his schedule to try to enhance that probability.
“I love what I do. I love my job at Veterans Memorial,” said De La Garza, who just completed his 13th year. “But, you never know, this may open doors for myself and my family. Being able to get your foot in the door is the first step, and from there it’s showing what you could do and improving yourself. That’s what it’s about.
“That’s what I think I’ve gotten an opportunity to see in these camps. When you get your opportunity, you’ve got to demonstrate your knowledge and try to get noticed. You’re networking with people, just trying to open doors down the road. And you never know what can happen from there.”