The professor rises from his seat, his face evolving from bright red to deep crimson as his gaze is transfixed on a group of teenagers 60 feet away.

Though his basketball team is still comfortably ahead in a game that means nothing in the standings, the play has gotten sloppy. And sloppy has no place in Tom McCracken's world.

The professor calls a time-out, makes a couple of minor adjustments, admonishes his charges — "do NOT let them back in this game" — then watches his team score 22 of the next 23 points and put away yet another overmatched opponent.

"I'm very demanding," said McCracken, the 66-year-old former men's coach at Southern Oregon University, who came out of retirement last summer to take the reins of the Ashland girls' program. "I want perfection out of the girls. I'm probably on them more than most coaches would be."

Watching McCracken put his team through a typical practice, one is struck by the precision, the attention to detail and the teaching of the game's fundamentals that takes place.

"He's taught me a lot," said senior Brenna Heater, who has reached the state tournament three times under three different head coaches in her four years. "He's improved all of our ability to play. He knows what he's doing. I trust him and I know the team trusts him."

Earning that trust was a key component that any new coach would have to master, taking over a team with an experienced core group of veterans including Heater and fellow All-Southern Sky Conference performers Kelsey McKinnis and Allison Gida.

"We needed to put someone in front of them that was knowledgeable," Ashland athletic director Karl Kemper said. "It wouldn't be a great group for an inexperienced coach to have a learning curve with."

With more than three decades of coaching experience at the high school, collegiate and professional level under his belt, McCracken was more than qualified.

"Tom is very intense and I think he has made an excellent adjustment in his coaching style to fit the needs of the girls," Kemper said. "Certainly he's had to make an adjustment from being primarily a college men's coach to being a high school girls' coach. It's a different animal."

McCracken, who will be the school's boys golf coach this spring, has put his stamp on a successful program, building on the success the team had last winter under popular head coach Steve Farley. Farley resigned to become an administrative assistant in the women's basketball program at the University of Utah. The team hasn't missed a beat under McCracken, going 19-6 and earning a return to the Class 5A state tournament, where it will meet Hillsboro in the quarterfinals on Thursday.

"They wanted somebody who would give them a chance. Somebody who wouldn't screw it up," he said. "They felt if everybody was healthy, this team had a chance to go a long way, maybe to win it all."

"I have a lot of respect for the job Steve did with them last year and the things that he taught them," McCracken said. "I think the administration was really concerned about bringing somebody in that might do things considerably different than Steve. The girls bought into the fact that I had 35 years of coaching experience and had had some success."

The first thing players noticed about McCracken was his intensity and attention to detail.

"Coach McCracken is used to coaching guys," said McKinnis, this season's Southern Sky Conference Player of the Year. "Right away, it was a lot of work, a lot of running, some very intense moments."

A coaching odessey

McCracken was a standout basketball player at Graceland College in Iowa — the same school that produced Olympic gold medal decathlete Bruce Jenner — and later this year will be inducted into the school's athletic Hall of Fame. His coaching career has included stops in Puerto Rico, South Korea, Iowa, Colorado and Utah. Among the thousands of players whom he has coached at the high school level is NBA All-Star Tom Chambers.

"I had my heart set on being a head coach at the (NCAA) Division I level," McCracken said. "What can I say? God had other plans."

Were it not for the fickle finger of fate, McCracken might have achieved that goal nearly three decades ago. McCracken, then at NAIA Southern Utah, had his bags packed and ready to take the head coaching job at Boise State. But when Lute Olson, fresh from a Final Four appearance at Iowa, took the head coaching job at the University of Arizona in 1980, it moved Bobby Dye — the Wildcats' second choice — to the front of the line for the Boise State job.

"Lute messed me over by half an hour," he said this week with a laugh. "They (Boise State) had offered the job to Bobby Dye. Bobby thinks he's going to get the Arizona job, cause he doesn't think Lute was going to take it. So he keeps putting Boise State off and then he takes it. And I go to Utah (as an assistant to Lynn Archibald) instead.

"Then I had a chance at the Weber (State) job. And then (former UCLA coach) Larry Farmer throws his name in the hat the last day and they go crazy. I took a Division II job and went back to Morningside College in Iowa and then came here from there."

McCracken moved cross country to take the men's head coaching position at SOU in 1990. He stayed for six years. And while his record (60-120) wasn't what he hoped, he had found his new home. Shortly after moving to Ashland in 1990, he met his future wife, Bonnie, a 22-year teaching veteran in the Ashland School District.

The two were married in 1992 and have four children and seven grandchildren. The youngest, six-year-old Riley, can often be seen at the end of the bench on game nights.

"I came here, I met Bonnie. It changed my life "¦ for the better," he says.

The softer side

Indeed it's Bonnie McCracken who may have cultivated a different side of his character and personality.

"When I was (at SOU), I was known as being very intense," he recalled. "I'm still intense, but it's toned down. But I do have a softer side and you can credit Bonnie for that.

"I also know how to show them some love, which is maybe a mature factor thing that I didn't have 10 years ago. I know when it's time to be tender and I know when it's time to kick a little butt. I think it's an advantage for me, showing tenderness and showing love, being a grandpa, rather than a guy who is 25 years old."

After leaving SOU, McCracken spent a year coaching a men's professional team in Pusan, South Korea. The team came within a game of winning the national championship, despite losing its best player to a calf injury at the start of the playoffs. But McCracken missed the companionship — "spending all day without anybody to talk to" — and returned to Oregon the following year. He got his certification to become an insurance agent, but quickly realized that teaching and coaching were still his passions. Not longer after, he accepted a position as a math teacher and girls coach at Eagle Point High School.

"We didn't win many games, but we were very competitive," he recalled of his first experience coaching girls.

Gender differences

"My personality needed to change a little bit," he said. "I was too intense for them at that time. It was different than coaching professional men or college men.

"The girls' personalities are totally different. Boys can have a knock-down, drag-out fight on the court and not have it effect the way they feel about each other. They can hate each other and still go out and play together. Girls can't do that. They're serious about it, but they get over losses quicker than guys. It's an important part of their lives, but it's not all-consuming."

McCracken has witnessed the evolution of the game, from the introduction of the 3-point line and shot clock to the way both male and female athletes train.

"Girls and women's basketball in the last 10 to 12 years has changed dramatically," he said. "You used to go to a high school girls game and there's a travel every couple of trips down the floor. The whistle blew all the time.

"The women play more of what the men played 15 years ago, as far as pattern basketball, the John Wooden style. There's a difference in that aspect of the game. Our girls lift (weights) twice a week. You never heard of that in girls' athletics 10 years ago."

Neither the Ashland basketball program nor McCracken has ever won a state championship. He's been close plenty of times, including a third-place finish with a team from Fairview High School in Boulder, Colo., that included Chambers.

"I would really, really like for that to happen "¦ for the girls," he said. "I've had my run. The important thing to me in coaching is the relationships I've developed with the players. When I first married Bonnie, she couldn't believe the amount of phone calls I get in a month from ex-players."

McCracken steadfastly avows he has no interest in returning to the college game, be it at SOU or anywhere else. This, he insists, will be his final coaching stop. While Kemper is on the record as wanting him back next season, he is undecided on a possible return.

"I'll have to sit down and evaluate it and think about it," he said. "The seniors have had three coaches in three years. With that in mind, I think there's a good chance I'll return.

"I've enjoyed the experience of being with the girls," he said. "That's been a real unique and real fun thing for me."