plus 1, Wake's new coach has had tough jobs before - CharlotteObserver.com

Wake's new coach has had tough jobs before - CharlotteObserver.com

Posted: 18 Jun 2010 01:26 AM PDT

WINSTON-SALEM A pattern quickly emerges when you analyze Jeff Bzdelik's career.

In his previous job at Colorado, the Wake Forest basketball coach inherited a 7-20 team. Before that, in his first college head coaching job, he ushered Maryland-Baltimore County from Division II into Division I in 1986.

And as a scout and assistant coach for Pat Riley with the New York Knicks and Miami Heat, Bzdelik labored for one of the hardest workers and intense competitors in basketball.

"It almost seems like I've taken tough jobs," Bzdelik said this week, two months after being hired to coach the Deacons.

Even by Bzdelik's standards, though, the Wake Forest job is challenging. His predecessor, Dino Gaudio, went 61-31 over the past three seasons, with two NCAA tournament appearances, but that wasn't enough to keep him from getting fired.

And Wake Forest lost likely top-10 NBA draft pick Al-Farouq Aminu and No.2 school career assist man Ish Smith off the team that lost to Kentucky in the second round of the 2010 NCAA tournament.

The Deacons return just one starter, sophomore C.J. Harris, and they might have to start freshman Tony Chennault at point guard.

Bzdelik, 57, is renting a house about five minutes from campus until he gets settled and sells his house in Colorado. He joked that the Wake Forest fans might not keep him around long enough for him to buy a house.

But there's a quiet confidence about Bzdelik as he talks about winning championships - even in the ACC, even with college basketball superpowers in his neighborhood - without compromising the integrity of Wake Forest.

The Deacons have a couple of big men with potential in rising juniors Tony Woods and Ty Walker; promising sophomore wings in Harris and Ari Stewart, and a highly regarded freshman recruiting class entering this fall.

And in Bzdelik, they have a coach who has succeeded in difficult situations before.

Work ethic

In 1998, Sports Illustrated named Bzdelik the best advance scout in the NBA after a survey of league general managers. He said no secret or divine basketball truth made him successful.

He would just study countless hours of film, and then when he didn't think he could stand watching any more, he said, he'd watch one more game.

That's what it took to work for Riley, who valued Bzdelik's work so much that he once declined to let him out of his contract to take an assistant coaching job with the Charlotte Hornets under Paul Silas.

One of his first assistant coaching jobs was at Northwestern in the early 1980s, a traditional Big Ten doormat. During his tenure there, the team reached its first National Invitation Tournament in 1983, and Bzdelik caught the eye of current Wake Forest athletics director Ron Wellman, who was coaching baseball at Northwestern at the time.

Davidson also was struggling when Bzdelik was hired as an assistant there in 1978, his first college job. He joined Bob McKillop and Rick Barnes on Eddie Biedenbach's staff.

McKillop was impressed with how Bzdelik delivered a pointed, consistent message to players while rarely raising his voice.

"Jeff was like a sponge for things," said McKillop, Davidson's head coach since 1989. "You just knew he was going to get better and better. There was a quiet poise to what he did."

Bzdelik's career highlight thus far probably is coaching the Denver Nuggets to a 43-39 record in 2003-04, one season after they won just 17 games. It appears that team will provide the hopeful framework for Bzdelik's first team at Wake Forest.

Guarded optimism

Because he hasn't seen his players on the floor as a group yet, Bzdelik is reserving the right to change his mind. But he has approached his staff with the idea of modeling his 2010-11 Wake Forest team after the 2003-04 Nuggets.

The Nuggets turned turnovers into fast break points.

They also had something the 2010-11 Wake Forest team probably won't - a scorer in Carmelo Anthony who could take over games as a rookie. But Bzdelik is optimistic the Deacons can surprise people if the players band together and a team leader emerges.

He still has a difficult job because he needs to win over fans with a team that's rebuilding even though it has totaled 44 wins over the past two seasons.

But he has not shied away from difficult jobs in his career.

"I really think if it's done right, they'll be supportive," Bzdelik said. "That's what I think. Don't you?"

Subscribe to The Charlotte Observer.

Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Oregon college graduates struggle to launch careers in grim job market - Oregonian

Posted: 13 Jun 2010 11:34 AM PDT

Published: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 10:00 AM Updated: Sunday, June 13, 2010, 7:47 AM

They have worked four years, often longer, juggling jobs and classes, cramming for finals, studying abroad working internships — all with the hope of finding a career foothold despite the worst job market since the Great Depression.

More than 11,000 members of the Class of 2010 from Oregon's seven public universities capped their hard work with commencement ceremonies this week and last.

Now, they move on either to graduate school or to join more than 212,000 other Oregonians looking for work, including untold thousands of last year's graduates still searching for jobs.

Many from the Class of 2009 are living with their parents and working part-time retail jobs they could have landed without a degree. Others are taking more college classes to put off paying back student loans, which average more than $20,000. Many say they've lost self-confidence. Still, none of the 18 students from the Classes of 2009 and 2010 interviewed by The Oregonian expressed regret about going to college.

Job prospects for the Class of 2010, which number about 18,000 students in Oregon when you include those who graduated last fall and winter, are slightly brighter because of a recent increase in employers hiring college graduates, said Edwin W. Koc, research director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers. What's more, recruiters will focus on the Class of 2010, he said.

"If you come out of the Class of 2009, you are going to be treated as someone who has been in the job market for a year," he said. Employers want to see some experience, he said.

After a yearlong search, Jackie Mroz, 22, of Oregon City, is about to get some experience, but at a cost.

She put everything she had into her studies at the University of Oregon, graduating in 2009 with degrees in international studies and sociology and a double minor in nonprofit administration and African studies. She studied abroad in Senegal, took challenging courses, earned a 3.8 grade point average and raced through college in three years.

"It has gotten me pretty much nowhere," she said.

When she graduated, Mroz figured she would quickly land a job with an international nonprofit. After two months, she took on a catering job as she broadened her search. Still living with her parents in Oregon City, she sent out more than 70 carefully prepared job applications and resumes.

"I never got a single interview, except for the catering company," she said.

By March, she had added three more catering jobs.

"I have gone through weeks when I completely doubted myself," she said. "What am I doing wrong? It is a question I ask everyday. ....After a year of getting basically no response, you start giving up."

Mroz recently drove cross-country for a 3-month unpaid internship that she started last week with a nonprofit agency in Baltimore. The agency helps refugee immigrants settle in the United States. After that internship ends, she will pay her way to Kenya for a community development internship through the San Francisco-based Foundation for Sustainable Development.

If those experiences don't lead to jobs, Mroz said, she'll consider graduate school.

Of course some graduates are landing jobs, particularly those with specific technical skills such as John Yeier, 24, who graduated from the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls on Saturday. He's the sole member of his class with a degree in embedded engineering , which integrates computer software and hardware in cell phones, cars and other machines. He will work on small plane navigation system software for Garmin AT in Salem.

OIT Class of 2009 graduates also have been unusually successful because they study for technical jobs such as nursing, medical imaging, mechanical engineering and dental hygiene. A survey of the class, with 58 percent responding, found that 71 percent have found jobs related to their degrees and another 21 percent are working.

A recent national survey of more than 13,000 graduates in the Class of 2010 shows that about one in four who applied for jobs will have one waiting for them after they graduate. That's up from one in five students who landed jobs last year, but far below the one in two graduates who found work in 2007.

The Oregon Employment Department's job bank lists 14,373 job openings, but they are most prevalent in low-paying occupations that don't require college degrees such as retail sales, trucking and housekeeping.

Audra Armen-Van Horn, 23, Portland, worked for Victoria's Secret while earning her psychology degree from the University of Oregon. Now, a year after graduating in 2009 and applying for more than 100 jobs, she's still working part time for the store while hoping to get a job with the American Cancer Society.

"I have a bachelor's degree, and I'm making $8.50 an hour," she said. "It is pretty depressing. .¤.¤. But it is a job. I'm happy I have a job."

Malcolm Staudinger, 22, a 2009 graduate in environmental science from Portland State University, lives at home with his parents in Vancouver, Wash., and is now looking to Montana and Alaska for a job related to geographic information systems.

"I apply probably for half a dozen jobs a week and have gotten maybe three or four interviews in the past year," he said. "It is tough because it makes you doubt yourself. You feel like you have these great skills and worked hard and you are constantly getting passed over again and again and again."

This year the college majors delivering the best job prospects are accounting, business administration, computer science, engineering and mathematics, said Koc of the Association of Colleges and Employers. The major with the dimmest prospects -teaching. "This is the worst I've seen for education majors," he said.

Mindy Lary, 27, Beaverton, can testify to that. She graduated in 2009 with a Master of Art in elementary school teaching from the University of Portland and has been substitute teaching since.

"I applied for 75 teaching jobs, anything within an hour's drive of the Portland area, and I didn't even get an interview," she said.

Some recent graduates are trying to create their own jobs. Lisa Anderson, 23, a 2009 journalism graduate from the University of Oregon and receptionist for a Portland law firm, has joined five other journalism graduates in starting a men's clothing magazine and website.

"We printed our first issue in March," she said. "It is definitely a labor of love."

Linda Williams Favero, assistant director of the University of Oregon's career center in Portland, said the job market for college graduates is improving. She helps students and recent graduates polish their job hunting in a 6-session, 3-week seminar. By the time participants finish her class, half have a job or prospects for one, she said.

One day last month, Favero advised nine recent graduates taking her seminar to treat their job search as though it were a full-time job. Tap social networks for job contacts, she advised, and organize information interviews with potential employers, prepare a 30-second elevator job pitch, polish your resume and keep positive.

Matt Petryni, 24, a 2009 UO graduate, said the seminar has helped him regain hope after a discouraging year of rejections from the world of urban planning where he hopes to work. He's heartened by seeing other graduates land jobs, he said.

"So it is not impossible," he said. "That is good to hear right now."

-- Bill Graves

Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.