'This just checked every box'

Doug Whiteman has had two stints as an assistant coach for the Toledo St. John's Jesuit boys basketball team, and spent a decade with the program.He had the chance to coach under Hall of Famer Ed Heintschel, then he worked with Heintschel's successor, Mike Schoen. "Those guys mean a ton to me," Whiteman said Thursday. "It just was like an unbelievably special place. So, I would not leave St. John's for very many places."Liberty-Benton is one of those places.At a special board meeting Thursday, the Liberty-Benton School Board of Education voted to hire Whiteman as the next boys basketball coach.Whiteman replaces Ben Gerken, who retired from the position this spring after taking over the program in 2014."Doug has a keen understanding of our culture and the role athletics plays in our school community, making him a great fit for our program," Mark Kowalski, Liberty-Benton's superintendent, said in a release. "We are thrilled to have him join our team and look forward to seeing what the next chapter of L-B basketball will look like under his leadership."Whiteman said that culture is a big part of what appealed to him."Every single thing about Liberty-Benton makes me excited, but at 41 years old, and being enormously happy at St. John's, it was going to take something very special for me to leave," he said, "and this just checked every box."The overall culture of the school, the importance of the community," he said, "it reminds me a lot of a Berlin Hiland, back towards where I'm from. So, that's what spoke to me."Whiteman, a Zanesville native, also is aware of L-B's success – it won 18 games last season – and its tradition."Zanesville won a state title in 1995, Liberty-Benton won a state title in 1995," he said. "So I was very familiar with the program and the success, and names like A.J. Granger and Aaron Craft. It just felt very right."I have tremendous respect for the job that coach (Steve) Williman and coach Gerken have done, and so I'm gonna do everything in my power just to build on their successes," Whiteman said. "But, I'm an extremely energetic guy. It's obviously a little late in the summer, but I can't wait to get in and start working. My big focus is gonna be trying to stack good days on top of good days.This will be Whiteman's first time as a head boys basketball coach. He has been a head girls basketball coach twice, first at Bishop Rosecrans, and then at Nelsonville-York, where he was named the Tri-Valley Conference Coach of the Year in 2016.Whiteman has 16 years of coaching experience. While he was on the St. John's staff, the Titans won Three Rivers Athletic Conference titles in 2018 and 2021.Now, Whiteman will be trying to have that same kind of success with L-B."The biggest difference is that as the assistant coach, you're always, in most cases, the good guy," he said. "Now you have those tough situations with playing time and things, but I think that's where my strength is building relationships with players. It's cliché, but at the core of what I do, I'm very good at building relationships and then creating energy, and building a culture."