After losses to Grayslake Central and Grayslake North earlier this month, Hampshire coach Bob Barnett realized he has been a step behind strategically in games and decided this lack of focus couldn’t continue to happen.
So Barnett, 54, revealed Monday he will retire from coaching effective at the end of this season. He announced the decision to his players at practice Monday.
“Thirty-one years doing this is a long time,” said Barnett, a former All-State player at Oregon and a head coach at Franklin Center, McHenry, Hinckley-Big Rock and at Hampshire for the last 13 seasons.
Hampshire is 14-11 this season and seeded first in the Class 3A Burlington Central Regional next week, but the Whip-Purs started the year 12-2 and have lost nine of their last 11.
Barnett suffered a heart attack as the 2012-13 season was about to unfold and missed six games. He said he has been thinking of retiring ever since the heart attack and is putting too much pressure on himself during seasons. It’s led to mental, if not physical, fatigue.
“The last couple years I am not coaching to the level of my expectations, which is difficult to swallow,” he said. “I don’t do mediocre. If I’m not at my best, then somebody else should be.”
Barnett indicated basketball has led to sleepless nights, and it shouldn’t. The result: he feels he is off his game.
“I’ve been watching the ball instead of making adjustments,” Barnett said. “And that’s not me. That’s not my basketball mind.”
Barnett planned to retire from teaching in about five years and said he was thinking he’d coach four or five more years but came to the realization he wouldn’t be able to do it.
He decided to reveal his plans Monday to his team rather than when the state playoffs end because he thought his players might believe they were somehow to blame after a possible season-ending loss.
“I don’t want them to think it’s them,” he said. “They have nothing to do with this.”
Barnett was an All-State player and played in a state all-star game at Bradley Uniersity’s Robertson Memorial Fieldhouse with Terry Cummings and Isaiah Thomas after he had signed a baseball contract as a pitcher with the Philadelphia Phillies organization. He played two years in Class A, then went into coaching after graduating college.
Barnett has been a head basketball coach for 28 seasons with a record of 456-302 and was inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2013. He is 218-133 at Hampshire. At Hinckley-Big Rock, his teams won regionals from 1998-2000, and at Hampshire his third team in 2004-05 won the school’s first and only regional title since 1974.
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Hampshire won or shared Big Northern East titles under Barnett in 2003-04, 2008-09, 2010-11 and then shared the Fox Valley Fox title with Crystal Lake Central in 2012-13, the first Fox Valley title in a team sport for Hampshire. His 2003-04 Big Northern East champs were the school’s first boys conference champions since 1995-96.
“A lot of memories, some good, a few not so good,” he said.
Barnett noted he’ll get to spend more time with his wife Marcie, describing her as, “a goddess,” for putting up with basketball all these years, and he’ll spend more time at their summer home in Galena. He described it as a “basketball-free zone.”
“I’ve never not done basketball in my career, so it will be change,” he said. “But I think it’s a change for the good, to be honest.
“It’s time for some younger guy to come in and lose hair and get all the accolades.”