WESTMINSTER – Beads of sweat are forming atop C.J. Hollingsworth’s head.
It’s the final day of summer practice, and for whatever reason, the air conditioning in Hollingsworth’s office is on the fritz. Just the other week, the white-walled, carpeted room cooled to a crisp 60 degrees. Today, it’s a sweltering 83. Hollingsworth is keeping his door open, enticing a breeze inside.
Westminster High’s new boys basketball coach is still making the office his own. His desk arrived last week, but even it isn’t where it’ll likely be in the fall, when the school year begins and practices resume.
Hollingsworth is a career assistant, so excuse the mess. Opened boxes of jerseys lie on the floor near basketballs and plastic disc cones of all colors. The stopwatch hanging upside down from his medicine ball rack keeps beeping.
“Last summer,” he said, “I think was when I felt ready to be a head coach, when I felt comfortable enough to run my own show. … I have a passion for basketball. Always have. I figured that if I couldn’t play anymore, I’d coach. You know the saying, ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ It was something like that.
“I’ve lost my first step, I can’t run like I used to, but I love the game, and I’m staying involved in it.”
Hollingsworth is well-traveled. Excluding tenures at multiple club programs, he has coached basketball at Chapman, Laguna Hills, Servite, Villa Park and now Westminster. With that experience, it was only a matter of time until a school in need of a varsity coach gave him a shot at running its program.
“Soon as I stopped playing, and knew I wasn’t going overseas (to play),” he said, “I figured I’d start coaching. I was always a team captain, so I got used to being in that role: telling people what they should be doing, telling them how to do it.
“I’ve been teaching the game as long as I’ve been playing.”
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Born and raised in Fairfax, Va., Hollingsworth grew up a basketball fan and a baseball player.
His family moved to Pasadena in 1985, then to Moreno Valley two years later. Because his father worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, Hollingsworth saw the true value of discipline and accountability. The oldest of three sons, he also learned at an early age how to command respect.
Hollingsworth began playing basketball in middle school, after getting snubbed for an all-star baseball team he felt he should’ve made. He took to basketball seemingly overnight, joining local leagues at city rec centers. It wasn’t until his junior year at Moreno Valley High, however, that he joined Team Inland, his maiden club team and a collection of Inland Empire’s greatest under-18 talent.
Prior to his senior year, Hollingsworth transferred to Riverside’s Notre Dame High, where he teamed with his neighbor and childhood friend Pat Freeman. Together, Hollingsworth and Freeman comprised one of the area’s deadliest backcourts, and in 1998, Notre Dame won the coveted Riverside Press-Enterprise Invitational, the Skyline League championship, and later set the school record for wins in a single season.
“The first time we met, I knew C.J. was no joke,” recalled Rob Morrow, who coached Notre Dame that year to the CIF-SS Division IIIAA quarterfinals. “He’s probably the best point guard I’ve ever had, and I’ve been coaching for 20 years. … He was a pit-bull, man. His focus was tremendous. … When he locked in, it was curtains for his competition.
“We’d play somebody really tough, and you could see that it enhanced his whole aura,” Morrow continued. “He loved competition, and as a coach, you want that in a competitor you have on the floor. No situation was too much for him.”
Hollingsworth continued his academic and athletic careers at Illinois’ Monmouth College, his father’s alma mater. He played basketball in the winter for local legend Terry Glasgow – the program’s winningest coach and the sage for which his father lettered once upon a time. In the spring, he ran track for longtime Scots coach Roger Haynes.
In 2002, Hollingsworth became Monmouth’s first long jump conference champion in years. But his influence on teammates transcended athletics.
“Coach Glasgow and myself, we’re old-school hard liners in terms of expectations,” said Haynes, a Monmouth alum and 1997 inductee into the school’s hall of fame. “The best thing C.J. did was maintain a positive attitude when things were difficult.
“What he learned here was that coaching’s not always the reason why you win, and coaching’s not always the reason why you lose. He was able to take what we taught him and go with it.”
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After receiving his bachelor’s degree in public relations, Hollingsworth took a job at Monmouth as a college admissions counselor; high school coaches hoping to send their kids to the school on scholarship went through Hollingsworth’s office. During that time, he assisted Glasgow at his alma mater while also coaching at the local high school.
In 2005, Hollingsworth moved to Orange County to begin a similar admissions job at Chapman. There, he joined the staff of longtime women’s coach Carol Jue, then a recent hire. Hollingsworth began coaching youth and club basketball locally while at Chapman, and after three-plus years on University Drive, he took a lower-level coaching job at Laguna Hills when his Chapman colleague Brian Wood received the varsity gig.
“It’s taxing teaching freshmen, teaching sophomores,” Hollingsworth said. “I learned a lot about myself being a coach, about how to speak to 14- and 15-year-olds. You have to make sure they know what you’re talking about, that what I’m saying isn’t going over their heads. You learn how to illustrate and demonstrate.
“Varsity kids, you tell them what to do and they do it. With freshmen and sophomores, you tell them, then you show them, then you show them again. It requires patience, and a lot of experimenting.”
Hollingsworth coached Servite’s fall team in 2011 before the school hired John Morris in the winter to be its varsity coach. When Morris assembled his staff, Hollingsworth opted to spend the ensuing season coaching club exclusively. In 2012, longtime Villa Park coach Kevin Reynolds, who knew Hollingsworth from Chapman, brought him on-board.
In successive years, Hollingsworth coached the program’s freshmen and junior varsity teams to Century League championships, prompting a promotion to varsity assistant this past season. Villa Park went 11-17 this winter, Reynolds’ first losing season since 2010. But it won a playoff game – against Westminster, incidentally – for the sixth consecutive year.
“Our junior varsity and varsity practice together every day,” Reynolds said, “and C.J.’s teams always played so hard. The kids liked him, he paid attention to detail, and he maintained our standards. …
“He wanted to be a head coach from the day I brought him on staff. So with him, I made sure I gave him a little more responsibility every day.”
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Hollingsworth applied to multiple head coaching positions this summer, but his long relationship with a former Westminster girls assistant coach got his foot in the door. He accepted Westminster’s offer early in June.
As new coaches tend to do, Hollingsworth spent his first week on the job meeting with returning players and locating light switches and levers. He called the janitor to open doors daily, and he let parents know he was Jesse Miramontez’s successor.
Hollingsworth recently acknowledged that transportation was an issue for his kids all summer. Most players required rides to and from games, and crazy as it sounds, the coach joked, trying to get a dozen teenaged boys from one gym to another is easier said than done. But every kid that came out to play this summer put forth his full effort.
“These kids work,” Hollingsworth said. “They want to be better, and we’re teaching them how to play the right way. Most young kids these days know what they know about basketball from playing video games.
“At Villa Park, I had kids 6-foot-10, 6-foot-11 who could dunk easily. I come here and ask how many kids can dunk and I hear crickets,” he continued. “We may not have the most talented athletes, but we’ll be disciplined. If my kids do what I need them to do when I need them to do it, we’ll be fine.”
Westminster has won consecutive Golden West League championships. It last missed the playoffs in 2009, and as recently as two years ago, the Lions won 18 games. Though Westminster graduated All-Orange County forward Tyler Burch in the spring, volume scorer Buddy Alton has returned to school for his senior year.
Hollingsworth, 35, is versed in all offensive and defensive systems. At Notre Dame, he piloted a fluid, up-tempo, high-scoring offense. At Monmouth, defense was king. Westminster this winter will ideally exhibit a stylistic hybrid of the two, and it’ll play hard. “He’s gonna win some games this year just because his team will be really tough to play against,” Reynolds said.
Hollingsworth will finalize his 2015-16 schedule soon, and in three short weeks, he’ll return to the court for fall practice.
The season opener can’t come soon enough.
“I’m excited,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s awesome. I don’t care where we play at, who we’re playing. I’m sure I’ll be more excited than my boys.”
Contact the writer: 714-704-3790 or bwhitehead@ocregister.com
