SEATTLE — As boys growing up in Snohomish, Paul Brockman and his younger brother Jon were both in love with basketball.
They began as backyard rivals and later became teammates at Snohomish High School. But as Jon Brockman’s abilities continued to soar, his brother’s playing career was ended by a severe knee injury, a broken foot and then a second knee injury. All in barely more than three years, and all requiring surgery.
Yet even a surgeon’s scalpel could not take away Paul Brockman’s love for basketball and his desire to stay in the game.
With the goal of becoming a college coach, he is spending this season as a volunteer manager for the Seattle University men’s team. His duties are varied and often menial, and include organizing and distributing equipment, preparing game films, fetching water for players, and even wiping puddles of sweat from the practice floor.
The payoff, he said, is the chance to receive a daily tutorial from first-year Redhawks head coach Cameron Dollar.
When Dollar addressed his managers before the season, “he told us that he can’t pay us, but he can give us knowledge,” said the 24-year-old Brockman. “And for me this opportunity is about learning.
“I’m just trying to be a sponge and soak up as much as I can. I come in every single day and learn something new.”
Including, it seems, occasional lessons in humility.
“I was told that it’s an ego check to wipe sweat off the floor,” he said. “But I’ll do anything they ask just so I can be around.”
Paul Brockman was born in June of 1985, while Jon was born in March of 1987. Though their age difference is almost 22 months, they were just one grade apart in school, with Paul graduating from Snohomish in 2004 and Jon the following year.
The 2003-2004 season at Snohomish was supposed to be a memorable one for the Brockman boys. Paul was a senior and Jon was a junior, and it was perhaps their final chance to be together on a basketball court. But in September of that school year, Paul tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in a workout. The injury and ensuing surgery caused him to miss the entire season.
In the fall of 2004 he walked on at Seattle Pacific University and continued to rehabilitate as a redshirt freshman, but then suffered a stress fracture in his right foot, resulting in another surgery.
He transferred to Bellevue Community College and missed the first half of the next season to give his foot additional time to mend. But early in his second season at Bellevue CC he tore his left ACL again. He tried to play with a knee brace for a few games, but by then, he said, “the knee was just gone.”
For the Brockman family, it was a time of triumph and disappointment. Even as Jon was flourishing at Washington — he was about to win the first of his three straight Pacific-10 Conference rebounding titles — Paul was forced to give up basketball.
“Your first thought,” Paul Brockman said, “is, ‘Why me?’ It’s miserable, dealing with the surgery. You just get so frustrated. This is the game you love and you’ve worked so hard, and then these things happen and they set you back so far.
“(Three surgeries) made the decision to be done with basketball a little easier,” said Brockman, who still has four pins in his left knee and 2-inch screw in his right foot. “And now I just look at it that it wasn’t in the cards for me.”
Had he not been hurt, “I would’ve been a pretty decent Division II player,” he said. “I loved playing and I would’ve kept playing as long as I could. … But there were a lot of unanswered questions about my game when I hurt my knee.”
He spent his final two years of college just being a student at Central Washington University, but also getting a taste of coaching as an assistant at Ellensburg High School. That experience led him to heed Jon’s advice and contact Dollar, a former UW assistant coach, about a manager’s position for this season.
“I really have a passion for basketball and for coaching that I developed through my injuries,” he said. “When I wasn’t playing, I was watching and seeing the game in a different way.
“Now I just love a different side of basketball. And it’s one that completely fills the non-playing (void). I’ve accepted that I’m done and I’m good with it. I like what I’m doing now.
“My ultimate dream is to get a head coaching job somewhere. That’s the goal. That’s what I want to do. I want to coach.”
Being a volunteer manager, then, is a step in the journey to a coaching career. A journey that will surely include other thankless moments — like wiping more sweat from the gym floor — along the way.
“But the beauty of this for him,” Dollar said, “is that no matter how it looks (to people) on the outside, it doesn’t look that way to him. This is an opportunity for him to do something that he loves in a setting where he can continue to grow and learn and develop.
“I think he said to himself, ‘(Coaching) is what I want to do, and I want to do it so much that I’ll do this job for free.’ And I think that speaks to the true passion he has for what he wants to be.”
And for Dollar, the opportunity to have another Brockman in his program is a blessing.
“With any kid (parents Becky and Gordy Brockman) ever have, I want them to be around me,” Dollar said. “Because they’re just a wonderful family.”
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