He’s bald.

Well, actually, that’s not fair.

He’s balding.

His mother insists – after talking to her church friends with similar-aged sons – that it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s mid-February now, and he is on the verge of his 500th career game as a Division I head coach. The bags below his eyes have grown a little deeper. A little darker. That’s what tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of hours of watching game film will do.

Many would kill to see what his eyes have seen. To think how he thinks.

To trace the origins of this coach, you must go back to a few years before his own birth.

It was then that his father, a local teacher, gets a gig coaching high-school basketball.

A native of blue-collared Pittsburgh, ASU men’s basketball coach Herb Sendek, 45, knows the definition of work ethic.

By the time he could think on his own, his father had since moved on to a local junior college, where he will remain for 32 years.

Growing up, Sendek was like most kids on the block. He liked playing with toy trucks, matchbox cars and was always looking for a pickup game of basketball. Herb’s father – also named Herb – would bring him to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates and to go see games at Duquesne University.

He had a little sister, Mary Beth, with whom he shared a typical relationship. But they did a good job of keeping the squabbling to a minimum and staying out of each other’s business.

“He was a good boy,” Herb’s mother Janet says. “We never really had any problems with him [growing up].”

But there was something a little different about little Herb. He loved school.

“He was always conscientious about his studies,” Janet says.

Herb’s father noticed it too.

“If the teacher gave an assignment, he did it in its entirety, he did it comprehensively,” Herb senior says. “He worked at a day at a time and I think those kinds of things pay dividends if you approach it that way.”

That sounds about right.

Little Herb has since blossomed into one of the premier coaches in all of college basketball, with the same attitude to this day.

As a kid, Herb would attend the local five-star basketball camp. It was here as a camper that where Sendek would first hear the great orations of some fellow named Rick Pitino.

“He was mesmerizing when he spoke,” Herb remembers.

Herb was also tagging along with his father wherever he went. Practices, games, road trips, recruiting trips, you name it and the two Herbs were there together.

By age 12, his father guesses, Herb had already chosen his career path. He was going to be a coach just like his dad.

“I never drove him to coach,” Herb Sr. says. “I never drove him to study a great deal. I think just being around people who had that kind of philosophy just wore off.”

Eventually, Herb started working at the five-star basketball camps nearby. By his estimations, though, he wasn’t that good of a player.

“He was terrible,” ASU senior forward Jeff Pendergraph says. “I’m just repeating what he says. He’s like, ‘I’m probably the worst basketball player on the planet, but nobody can outwork me, outhustle me, play with more energy than me.’ You can have zero talent, but if you play hard, things are going to happen.”

At least Sendek had hair. There’s photographic proof.

Living inside a computer on campus, there’s a picture of a young Sendek holding a basketball with a big smile in his face.

“He had a big old head of hair it’s insane,” Pendergraph says. “His legs were like this big. He had freakin’ tree trunks for legs. Short shorts and everything.”

Despite Sendek’s assessment of his own talent, he was able to earn a spot on the nearby Carnegie Mellon University basketball team under coach Dave Maloney, with whom he still speaks to this day.

In fact, Maloney came to Tempe to watch ASU’s contests against the Washington schools a couple of weeks ago.

Though Maloney recruited Sendek, he was replaced by another coach named Larry Anderson before Herb’s junior year.

About a week into Herb’s senior season, Anderson pulled Sendek and two of his teammates into the coach’s office.

The three players got cut.

“It was bone-crushing,” Sendek says. “Devastating.”

In reality, it was a blessing in disguise.

Through his father’s connection with the Pittsburgh high school basketball scene, where “everyone knew everyone,” Herb was quickly offered a couple of jobs at nearby schools.

Sendek latched on with Central Catholic High School as a volunteer assistant under coach Chuck Crummie.

“I hadn’t known him that long at that time,” Sendek said. “But I obviously knew who he was. He’s still coaching today and is still one of the best coaches I’ve ever been around.”

Along with coaching, Sendek was still killing it in the classroom. He followed up his 4.0 GPA high school Valedictorian performance by graduating Summa Cum Laude with a 3.95 from CMU.

For those who don’t know, Summa Cum Laude translates to “with highest honor.” Herb was the smartest of the smart.

Upon graduation in 1985, his life hit a crossroads. The business world or the basketball world?

Westinghouse, a local company that dealt with government contracts, offered Sendek what Herb Sr. called a “lucrative” job out of college.

Around the same time, Pitino — then an assistant with the New York Knicks — was hired to the head-coaching job at Providence College in Rhode Island.

As it turns out, the director of the five-star camp Howard Garfinkle, called coach Pitino and told him he absolutely needed to offer Herb a job as an assistant.

Pitino did.

Westinghouse told Sendek he had 30 days to make up his mind.

Sorry, but coach had bigger and better things planned.

He took the unpaid position with Pitino at Providence as a graduate assistant and so began one of the nation’s most prolific coaching careers.

“It really wasn’t that hard at that time,” Sendek says. “I decided that I wanted to give coaching a whirl. I was prepared to go into the business world if I didn’t get a job offer in coaching. I was just fortunate that I landed a spot.”

Though Janet is very proud to see her son now, those first few days without little Herb in the house were tough. After all, he had spent his entire life in Pittsburgh up to that point.

“When Herb’s father and I took him that summer up to Providence, it was very traumatic,” Janet says. “There’s your son just out of college, I mean he’s still a very young person and we took him four- or five-hundred miles away and left him. It was not easy coming home and not having him here any longer.”

Janet says she and her son talked as much as they could and that she and her husband went to Providence every now and then to catch a few games.

Meanwhile, Sendek was learning from one of the best.

“It was obvious [Pitino] was a cut above,” Sendek says. “He was brilliant.”

It was at Providence that Sendek made his first trip to the Final Four as a coach.

In 1987, led by a point guard named Billy Donovan, the Providence Friars lost in the NCAA semi-final to Syracuse by a score of 77-63.

Pitino kept Herb busy for a couple of years before heading back to the pro ranks in 1987 to become head coach of the Knicks. Sendek kept plugging away for a couple of seasons, until Pitino came back to the NCAA by way of the University of Kentucky.

When asled about what it was like to reunite with Pitino at Kentucky in ‘89, a huge grin spreads across Sendek’s face.

“That was terrific,” Sendek says. “Kentucky was an awesome place to be, I met my wife there.”

Herb and Melanie now have three daughters: Kristin, Catherine and Kelly. Grandma says they’re growing up too fast, now between the ages of eight and 13.

While at Kentucky, Sendek was on the sidelines for one of the greatest games in basketball history.

It was 1992, and Kentucky was playing Duke for the right to go to the Final Four. Duke’s Christian Laettner hit an epic buzzer-beater to give his team a 104-103 lead.

“It was a tremendous honor and a great privilege to be a very small part of that,” Sendek says. “ Just to be there and witness one of the great games of all time. To be in the locker room with those guys after the game, with the emotion and the brotherhood that existed at that moment, the unity was indescribable.”

A year later, Pitino, Sendek and Donovan – now Sendek’s fellow assistant – returned to the Final Four only to be beat by Michigan’s Fab Five.

Sendek stayed at Kentucky for four years before receiving his first head-coaching job at the ripe age of 30.

In his first year at the University of Miami, Ohio, Sendek guided his team to a 19-11 record and an NIT berth. The next season, he led the RedHawks to a Mid-American Conference title and to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. He was named MAC Coach of the Year for his efforts.

Sendek took over at North Carolina State in 1996 where he stayed for a decade.

Larry Hunter, now head coach at Western Carolina, was an assistant under Sendek for four seasons. Hunter says the biggest thing he took away from their time, was his sincere care for his players beyond the court. Hunter says Sendek prepares his players for the arena of life as well as basketball.

“[Sendek] knows where he’s headed, he’s got the vision,” Hunter says. “That enables him to be very effective. He’s very articulate, he gets everybody on the same page.”

Hunter also says that Sendek’s sense of humor – though not on display most of the time – can be a joy to be around.

“He can let his hair down a little bit and have some fun,” Hunter says.
Sendek truly holds a unique place in college basketball.

He’s coached under Rick Pitino, coached with the likes of Donovan and Tubby Smith. Now Sendek is growing his own network of former assistants who have gone on to take head-coaching jobs at Division I programs.

When Mark Phelps became the head man at Drake University this season, he brought the total of Sendek disciples to eight.

In 2006, Sendek headed out west to the desert for a reclamation project. ASU athletic director Lisa Love said Sendek had to beat out a tough field of candidates, but that he quickly became the standard after their first meeting.

Sendek’s first impression certainly helped.

“The first thing [Sendek] said to me was, ‘My family is from a town in Pennsylvania close to [ASU football coaching legend] Frank Kush and we know the heritage of Frank Kush,” Love says.

As for her take on the coach’s sense of humor, Love had this to say.

“It’s a very, very smart sense of humor,” Love says. “It can be subtle. He’ll set you up perfectly then hit you with the zinger.”

Love’s decision to hire Sendek has proved to be fruitful.

But it wasn’t always easy.

In fact, Pendergraph said he considered transferring after his freshman year once he heard former ASU coach Rob Evans had been fired.

“I knew jack-diddly squat about coach Sendek before he came over here,” Pendergraph says. “I started talking to some of my people and I heard he was a braniac kind of a dude.”

Pendergraph found out quickly that Sendek was indeed a knowledgeable coach.

“He’s the smartest person in the history of mankind,” Pendergraph says. “This is the only team I’ve played on where I need to keep a thesaurus on me in practice.”

ASU went 8-22 in Sendek’s first year on the job, but now looks like a legitimate Pac-10 Conference title contender.

Turns out Mr. Braniac knows what he’s doing.

Most of that success, associate head coach Dedrique Taylor suggests, can be attributed to Sendek’s meticulous attention to detail.

If history holds true, Taylor will probably Sendek disciple No. 9. Something almost unfathomable to Taylor three years ago.

During the first few weeks of Sendek’s reign in Tempe, Taylor and Phelps happened to run into each other a few days in a row while out recruiting. One thing led to another, and Taylor was brought on as an assistant.

Before the start of this season, Taylor was promoted to associate head coach.

“It’s a huge honor for me,” Taylor says of the promotion. “Simply because I walked into the job not knowing coach Sendek at all. I had no relationship with him at all. So to be able to earn his respect was really, really significant to me.”

As for coach Sendek, he’s still the same old Herb. Humble as ever.

Sure, he’s the second-youngest-active coach to reach 300 wins behind Donovan, but don’t tell him that. One of his favorite phrases is, “The only game I can hardly remember is this one.”

But he knows how lucky he is.

From his beginnings as a tagalong to college basketball’s biggest stage, Sendek has seen it all.

“I feel blessed,” he says. “Very blessed.”

Reach the reporter at alex.espinoza@asu.edu.