Think about it. How much of our hard-wiring in America, how much of what’s kept us moving forward and made us good, has come from our teachers? And not only them, but our coaches – our teachers in sport.
The people who meet us where we want to be, who drill us and push us, who get us to bend our knees and keep our eye on the ball. Some try to tell us winning is the only thing, but the successful ones strive foremost to keep our cups filled – fly, kids, fly, and don’t just fly, soar.
That’s why Wendale Farrow – you can call him Delly – is at USC, an assistant coach for the Trojans’ smash-hit women’s basketball team.
He’s the 6-foot-6 dude on Lindsay Gottlieb’s bench, the author of impeccable scouting reports and a can’t-miss cheerleader, the man with a special handshake for everyone who’s part of the nation’s No. 4-ranked team entering Selection Sunday this weekend.
He’s here, in L.A., because of a string of fairy god-coaches. More family tree than coaching tree, he thinks of them as uncles. One, his former boss, UCLA’s Cori Close, calls him her coaching son.
He’ll tell you: It wasn’t the game that saved his life, it was the people.
“The depth of the calling isn’t just basketball,” Farrow, 37, said recently, leaning into a Zoom call. “Basketball is a vehicle, it’s secondary. It’s really coaching, it’s teaching, it’s relationship-building, you know?
“I ask myself, ‘Who is a person that I needed when I was 18 or I was 21?’ And I try to provide that with our kids.”
A SAFE HAVEN IN HOOPS
For Farrow, basketball started as a safe way to kill a few hours. It turned into a way to cover his education, from American River Junior College to Eastern Michigan University, and revealed itself to really be his calling only after he’d graduated and finished his playing career (“proud of my little four-and-four,” he said of his 3.9-point, 3.9-rebound averages).
He found himself back home, mourning the loss of his mother, Wendy, and working at a bowling alley every night until 3 a.m., aimless. That’s when his college coach Charles Ramsey recruited him back to Eastern Michigan as a graduate assistant, setting in motion a career that would successfully veer into women’s basketball in a way that, as Gottlieb put it, “no one could have scripted.”
Perhaps not, but the ladies in his life did plant seeds.
It was Farrow’s big sister, Tahirah, who taught him to stick up for himself: “‘Don’t let anybody ever steal your pencil. Don’t let nobody take your pen,’” Farrow said. “The rule of the house was, ‘Don’t let nobody punk you.’” Listen to Gottlieb today; that sentiment is very much part of the lexicon at USC.
It was his cousin, Florenda, with whom he used to roller skate to the top of a hill in their neighborhood, where they’d tell each other: “We’re going to college. We’re going to get a degree. We’re gonna live in a house and not an apartment. I’m gonna have that car. I’m gonna have a career…”
And it was his mom, sick with lupus all his life, who was the family’s protector. His father in and out of jail, Wendale’s family lived in one- or two-bedroom apartments in a “rough-around-the-edges” North Highlands neighborhood. Whether it was the three of them, the four of them, or more of them – Wendy never turned away a cousin or niece – his mom always slept in the living room, as if standing guard.
“She was the person who gave you her last dollar,” he said. “Also, a hood chef. From the chicken to the gumbo to the greens, her bag was deep when it came to food. And if she had to be resourceful, she could open up a can of food and and make something last as well … a lot of my life values come from my mom, trying to serve others and extend my resources.”
She also filled him with a sense of discipline and an “understanding,” Farrow said, “that I can’t afford to get in trouble.”
RACKING UP ASSISTS
“He was just such a likable kid. He always treated people so nicely that a lot of people would go out of their way to really help him, and then he appreciated it so much,” said Doug Friedman, Farrow’s basketball coach at Mira Loma High School, and his middle-school wood shop teacher before that.
Friedman was also Farrow’s ride to the doctor. He’d feed him and invite him to tag along to high school games. He became his confidante, and to this day, includes Farrow on his family cell phone plan. “Everything I ever won in basketball,” Farrow said, “whether a ring or a framed jersey, it all goes to his house. Because he deserves it.”
“You just saw the desire to do the best he could,” Friedman said. “As a teacher or a coach, you look at kids who want to do well and want to work hard, and you tend to go out of your way to help them as much as you possibly can, and I wasn’t the only one.”
Another teacher took him to the dentist, Friedman recalls. And every birthday, Farrow’s AAU coach Mo Golshani bought him new sneakers – new Jordans. Teammates like Greg Palmer came through, too: “I was like, ‘Greg, y’all eat dinner every night?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you don’t?’ I’m like, ‘Not really.’ And then, ‘Y’all sit at the table?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you don’t?’ I’m like, ‘Not really.’ So I was like, cool, if I go to Greg’s house after practice, I get I can get a hot meal.”
Later, Friedman covered Farrow’s rent when Wendy died – four years after doctors gave her two years to live – until Ramsey called to get Farrow on the coaching track at Eastern Michigan and then, after Ramsey had a chance encounter with a UCLA assistant, in Close’s program.
Farrow initially interviewed for an administrative position with the Bruins, but Close called back to offer him a job as a video coordinator.
“It was his charisma, his willingness to hustle, and that he loves all different kinds of kids from very different backgrounds,” said Close of Farrow, who’s become such a part of her family that they hang a Christmas stocking for him every year.
“He has this gift to make everybody – including his head coach – feel really special.”
The night he accepted Close’s offer in 2013, Farrow ran celebratory laps around his apartment complex and then sold most everything he owned to the guys from the barbershop before making a beeline for L.A., where he arrived without anywhere to stay except for his car – worth it for what he knew was a life-changing opportunity.
DOING BIG THINGS
Close and Farrow joke that there are only two days a year they don’t talk – when USC and UCLA face off.
Conference tournament clashes will have pushed it to three days the past couple seasons – UCLA just reclaimed the nation’s No. 1 in ranking after beating the Trojans in the Big Ten Tournament championship – and, who knows? Maybe they’ll have to go a fourth day without speaking this season, if L.A.’s two women’s basketball powers get to tango again in the Big Dance.
Farrow went from UCLA to a full-time assistant gig with the Vanderbilt women’s team, and then to Cal, where Gottlieb was building something exciting and doing it just down the interstate from Sacramento.
He stayed at Cal when Gottlieb got a job as an assistant with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, but she said they communicated constantly. And when she took over at USC a couple years after that, Farrow decided to join her in her quest to return the Trojans to glory.
“I told myself, ‘I’m coming to recruit the best; I’m gonna help try to coach the best,’” he said. “And here we are, recruiting and coaching the best.”
You’d think it would be easy to get a coach to talk about that part, about conquering women’s basketball. About the Trojans’ goals, wanting to see JuJu Watkins and crew win a national title after they finished atop the Big Ten in regular-season play.
But Farrow preferred to focus on mentoring and teaching and hyping up all his players, how proud he is of them. About how determined he is, now that he can fill his fridge and gas tank without a worry, to keep paying it forward.
He’ll leave you with the sense that any set USC runs is only as important as, say, his shot-fake-shoulder-bump-followed-by-a-mock-fadeaway handshake with former Harvard Westlake standout-turned-Trojans star Kiki Iriafen.
That the real win is former Trojans guard Destiny Littleton – who also had a coach step up and help raise her – saying she thinks about that “goofball Delly” all the time as she’s navigated professional basketball in China.
“He did a really good job of showing that although basketball is really important,” Littleton said, “it’s also important to just shut it off sometimes and be a normal person, relax your mind, do a hobby, try something new.”
He’ll make you think the big moments on the court are possible because of what goes into them off of it – and afterward, too. Like when former Cal guard Recee Caldwell asked Farrow to walk her mom down the aisle when she married NBA star De’Aaron Fox.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s an honor,’” Farrow said. “And she’s like, ‘You helped raise me.’”