Tom Archdeacon: New Wright State coach a man of the world

It was the Dating Game with a twist.

Instead of simply sending verbal hearts and flowers back and forth to each other, they were thinking about somebody else.

“It was back when we were dating — on Christmas Eve, I believe — and I told him, ‘I’ve always wanted to adopt a child,’ ” Jamie Nagy recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, me too.’ ”

This wasn’t just some kind of Cupid-inspired fantasy between Jamie and Scott Nagy, it was heartfelt conversation born in fact.

“I’m adopted myself,” Jamie said. “And while he wasn’t adopted in the traditional sense, his best friend’s family took him in in high school and raised him when his parents were kind of shifting around. So he was on the receiving end of someone willing to bring him into their home and make life easier for him.”

Nagy, the new Wright State basketball coach, explained that “shifting around” scenario in more detail Friday:

“When I was a freshman in high school, my parents got divorced and I ended up living with my mom. But my junior year she was going to remarry and I was going to have to move. And if I went to live with my dad, I’d have to go to a different high school, too. So it was either move or ‘Where else can I stay?’ ”

The parents of his best friend — Kyle Herges, a fellow athlete at Champaign Central High School in Illinois — invited him to live permanently with them, even though they already had seven kids of the their own and a grandmother living with them, too.

“We had to go through the whole process of my mom giving up legal guardianship, so I was ‘adopted’ by the Herges family,” Nagy said. “The experience was such a positive influence in my life that I never forgot it.”

But once he and Jamie married, he began forging his college coaching career while they had four kids — Nick, Tyler, AJ and Natalie.

“Four kids and Jamie had four C-sections,” Nagy said. “The doctors said, ‘That’s it.’ ”

He said the adoption plan had been on the back burner and moved to the fore thanks to another couple at their church who had adopted two children from Haiti.

They kept receiving photos of other kids from an orphanage there who needed a home and one day they showed the Nagys a picture of a little girl named Naika, who was originally from Petion-Ville, just outside of Port-au-Prince.

“Once I saw the picture of Naika I just knew,” Jamie said.

“The way I understand it, mothers bring their children to the orphanage, sometimes to just to be raised there and other times to be adopted.”

Naika’s situation was the latter, but the Nagys soon found a long tangle of red tape and delay.

Eventually, Scott and his dad, Dick Nagy — a longtime college basketball coach himself — decided to go to Haiti to facilitate the process and meet the little girl their family only knew through a photo.

For a first-time visitor to Haiti — with the crush of people, the poverty, the overtaxed or non-existent infrastructure, the language barriers and the unexpected sights, smells and concerns — the experience can be almost too much too handle.

“Going to Haiti is kind of like trying to get a drink out of a fire hose,” Nagy said with a smile.

“I remember going to the orphanage the first time. There were high stone walls with glass shards on top. There was really no security anywhere, no stable police force. It’s just kind of everyone for themselves.

“So they rolled back the driveway door and we walked in and there were two guys with shotguns. They’re armed guards protecting the food and the children. Inside there were 30 kids and it was wild, everyone kind of hanging on you.”

He and his dad met Naika and finally — after 10 months of struggle — the family was able to bring the then-2 ½-year-old to Brookings, S.D., where Nagy was the coach at South Dakota State University.

Today, that little girl is a beautiful, strongly independent 13-year-old. She and Natalie and AJ were at the Nutter Center press conference last Tuesday as their dad was introduced as the Raiders coach.

During that session much was made of Nagy’s accomplishments at SDSU — where he went 410-240 in 21 seasons and took the Jackrabbits to three NCAA Tournaments in the past five years — but nothing much was said about his life away from the basketball court.

It was no different in South Dakota, he said.

“Most people in South Dakota, if you asked them what they see of me, it’s the coaching,” he said. “They might say, ‘He’s not a real enjoyable guy. He’s intense and competitive.’

“But they really don’t know anything about me. They think the way I coach is the way I am all the time. They don’t know the other side.”

‘It broke my heart’

Everyone was affected when Naika joined the family, though not always in the way that was expected, Jamie said:

“I was adopted when I was seven days old and raised in a loving family. But as I watched this little brown body bounce around our house, it kind of triggered something in me. I realized I’m not genetically connected to my family either.

“Eventually I went to search for my birth family. I’d been told all my life, ‘Your birth parents loved you so much.’ So I thought when I found them, I was going to be loved.

“Instead it was devastating, I found my two birth parents, but they didn’t want — they vehemently didn’t want — anything to do with me. For one, I think the reaction comes out of pain and fear and for the other one, it’s out of anger.”

She found she had six siblings — three on each side — and while they initially seemed willing to embrace her, Scott said, that changed dramatically when Jamie’s birth dad “shut it all down.”

Jaime said: “I’m happy I searched, but it broke my heart.”

For Naika the story has been very different.

Thanks to the efforts of Jamie and Scott, she’s been able to maintain some semblance of contact — even with the challenges of the country’s frayed social fabric and then the devastating 2010 earthquake whose epicenter was near her home — with her birth mom over the years.

Partly because of what she has gone through in life, Naika has a different personality than the other Nagy kids, Jamie said:

“She’s more independent and not as attached to people.”

Scott agreed: “She almost always lives in the survival mode. It’s an attitude: ‘I can take care of myself.’ ”

Jamie said that goes back to the days in the orphanage: “Part of that is from having 60 rotating nannies and being with 30 other kids for two years of her life.

“So much of the brain research says that a lot of our personality — the way we think — is set by the time you are 3. And she lived in the orphanage from six months old until she was 2 ½.”

While he said Naika has been lovingly embraced in South Dakota, Scott thinks coming here will be good for her:

“We live in a community that isn’t very diverse and I think this change will be really positive for her.”

While joining the Nagy family has been good for Naika, her presence has enriched everyone else in return, he said:

“She’s impacted our lives as much as we have impacted hers.”

Expanded his efforts

Coaching so long in the Summit League, he got to know Ron Hunter, the Dayton-raised former coach of league rival Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

Back in 2008, Hunter — now the head coach at Georgia State — made a national splash at IUPUI for coaching a game barefoot to collect shoes and raise funds and awareness for Samaritan’s Feet, a charity that helped needy children in Africa.

After talking to Hunter, Nagy began an annual barefoot coaching effort with Samaritan’s Feet to help children in Haiti. Soon the South Dakota High School Coaches Association joined the barefoot venture in Naika’s honor.

Nagy then expanded his efforts and went with Samaritan’s Feet president Manny Ohonme to Zimbabwe in 2012 and Burundi two years later.

In Zimbabwe he ran basketball camps for barefoot kids on a crumbled asphalt court in the capital city of Harare and he helped build a school.

The Burundi trip was different. There he held a clinic for coaches who then went on to instruct the children.

“The president there is trying to build a national basketball presence in hopes that sports will help with reconciliation between the Hutus and Tutsis who have been killing each other,” he said.

Before Nagy went to Burundi, two of the coaches from there were sent to South Dakota to spend two weeks mirroring him and his staff.

“It was that same getting a drink of a water from a fire hose for them, too,” he said. “They were completely overwhelmed by the whole ordeal. I remember taking them to our house and almost being embarrassed by it. I guarantee you, my garage was bigger than where they lived.

“I was going to wash their clothes. (Back home) they wash theirs by going down to a creek and beating them against a rock. I put their stuff in our wash machine and they were amazed. They had never seen a wash machine before.

“I had one with the glass top and one of the guys just sat there looking at it. He couldn’t believe you could do all the laundry in an hour and a half.”

In 2013, Nagy took his SDSU team to Haiti, where the players were involved in various humanitarian efforts in areas still completely devastated by the earthquake.

While there — thanks to the help of Haitian security men who worked for Samaritan’s Feet— Nagy was able to meet up with Naika’s birth mother.

“She hung out with us a couple of days and when we got to a place where there was WiFi, she was able to FaceTime with Naika.

“It was good for her to see her daughter was flourishing and doing so well. Down there, there are so many stories, things like: ‘Americans take your kids and use their body parts, their organs,’ all kinds of stuff.”

He said it was beneficial for his team to be surrounded by the challenges of Haiti, as well:

“The tent communities, the sights and the smells, there is no sewage system at all, it was pretty overwhelming for them at first. But eventually the guys settled in and it really hit home. It’s the best thing I’ve done in coaching.

“Your team can go through tough periods in the season, but after that, you can say, ‘Remember Haiti? You might think things are bad here, but you KNOW what bad looks like.’

“As college athletes these guys are so well served. Everybody wants to know how they are doing and what they can do for them.

“But for most of them, basketball will be over soon and then people aren’t going to care. They’re not going to be served like they were. We want to teach them to be able to go out and serve other people.”

Nagy’s efforts have earned him numerous honors including an NABC Guardian of the Game Award. His family was presented the 2014 Angels of Adoption Award by the U.S. Congressional Coalition on Adoption. They were also featured on ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ABC Nightly News.

Now Nagy will bring some of those efforts to Wright State. He said he hopes to take the team to Haiti in the future.

In the meantime he’ll coach a barefoot game sometime in the coming season.

And when he does, he’ll draw on a lesson he’s learned along the way.

“When I get angry on the sidelines I’m known for stomping my feet,” he said with a laugh. “I’m a very, very loud foot stomper so I can get my players’ attention.

“But I’ve learned when you’re barefoot you don’t want to be doing that. There won’t be any foot stompin’ that game.”

After so much thinking about others, sometimes a guy’s just got to think about himself.

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