BY Managing Sports Editor
The past four years Head Coach Natasha Adair has stood at the helm and guided Delaware women’s basketball to winning seasons in three of her first four seasons in Newark. Every step of the way Associate Head Coach Bob Clark has stood alongside her.
The pair’s time as coaches together however, stretches back beyond the Blue Hens. In 1998, Adair and Clark met as assistant coaches under Patrick Knapp at Georgetown University.
Knapp — who recruited Adair during her time in high school and coached with Clark prior— wanted to add another assistant to his staff. He asked Clark to take Adair on a walk around campus to get to know her and report back on his thoughts.
“Natasha from that moment was the easiest person to talk to, and I was easy to talk to; and we kinda hit it off,” Clark said. “I came back and told [Knapp] ‘she’s a great person; hire her,’ and he did.”
Adair also described that the two “hit it off from day one.”
“It was like we knew each other for a long time,” Adair said. “We literally walked and talked like we had been friends forever.”
At the time Adair joined Clark on the Hoyas staff, both were in the beginning stages of building and continuing their careers. After graduating from South Florida, Adair worked at her college alma mater, before landing the assistant position at Georgetown. Clark served as an assistant coach in multiple college programs nationwide.
The pair also had started to begin their own personal endeavors into building their own family. Adair had her first son when she started with Georgetown and Clark had just gotten married.
Throughout their time together at Georgetown, Wake Forest, Charleston and Delaware, as Clark described, he and Adair have seen each other and their kids grow up.
“We’ve kind of literally grown as people, as coaches, as parents,” Adair said. “Every aspect of life, every milestone, every celebratory event we’ve been in each other’s lives.”
For both Adair and Clark, family played a significant role in their journey’s that found them sitting on the same or different benches. Adair began receiving head coaching calls from programs. She asked Clark if she were to get a job as a head coach if he would want to come with her, including when she landed the head coaching position at Charleston in 2012.
“I said sure,” Clark said. “When she got the job in Charleston, I came down with her, and I went down to be her associate head coach at Charleston.”
After Adair served as the head coach for the College of Charleston and Clark as her associate head coach in 2012 and 2013, Adair got the opportunity to take the position of head coach at Georgetown.
Adair found out about her acceptance after a win in the 2013 NIT Tournament. Adair wanted to bring Clark along, and they discussed the decision in the team hotel. At that time, Clark’s family had settled down in Charleston.
“My girls were younger and my wife had just started working, and it wasn’t a great time for me to be leaving Charleston so quick,” Clark said.
Adair even met with Clark’s wife to discuss the possibility of him taking a job alongside Adair back in the Washington area.
“I talked with Kristen about it, and we were just like ‘it’s not the right time for the children; it’s not the right time for the family,’” Adair said.
Clark applied for the head coaching vacancy in Charleston but did not get it. He did, however, stay with the program as an associate head coach under Candice Jackson. The decision to stay at Charleston is a decision that Adair did not see as a negative. She felt honored by his decision knowing how much his wife and two daughters meant to him.
“That speaks to the character of [Coach Clark] and his family,” Adair said. “If you know about [Coach Clark] you know about his girls from Kristen, to Brittany, to Alyssa.”
Delaware is Adair’s third stop in her career as a head coach. Throughout her time as a coach she has learned about two words in particular from talking to other coaches and colleagues — loyalty and trust.
In all three head coaching positions, she has wanted to bring Clark on to her staff. His 44 years of coaching experience along with the relationship the two have developed makes him a go-to option and as Adair described “a no brainer.”
“The loyalty and trust piece has always been huge for me, and he is someone that over twenty plus years that I can say I can always call on, I can always depend on and that I know he has my back,” Adair said. “For me, I had experience, I had loyalty, I had trust and I had someone that I could really lean on in this role.”
In 2017, when Delaware named Adair its new head coach, Jimmy Howard, one of her assistants she planned to bring to Delaware, got offered the head coaching position at Georgetown. Adair and her staff were excited for Howard, but she knew she had to figure out who would fill the position.
Similar to the decision regarding Georgetown in 2014, Adair met with Clark’s wife and Clark to discuss bringing him on the staff at Delaware. Clark talked to his wife about the possibility of reuniting with Adair.
“I asked my wife; and now my girls are older, my daughter had graduated high school, my other daughter was starting high school and it was different,” Clark said. “My wife said ‘yeah go with her now.’”
In his four years at Delaware, Clark continues to contribute to the team on and off the court. On the court, he works with the team’s defense, which finished the regular season allowing the third-least points per game in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA). Off the court, Clark works with the teams scouting and helps construct Delaware’s yearly schedules.
“He is kind of like the glue guy; he keeps it all together,” Adair said. “I can just count on him for things to be done, for things to be done the correct way, but he’s just a great extension of the culture here.”
For Clark, their professional relationship and friendship also stretches within the arena and beyond basketball.
“I worked for Natasha; I’ve known her as a person; she’s a beautiful person; she’s a great coach,” Clark said. “To me it’s very simple, it was somebody I met in 1998 and just stayed in touch with all my career.”
After clinching the regular season championship, Delaware will look to win its first CAA championship since the 2012-2013 season. In their 17 seasons coaching together, Adair and Clark together have never coached together in an National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament.
A berth in the NCAA tournament would not only mean a lot for the two of them, according to Adair, but also, the other members that have been alongside the two on their coaching journeys.
“I think our story speaks for itself,” Adair said. “But then you look down the sideline and you see Sarah Jenkins who we both coached; you see Mykala Walker who we both coached, for me to have [Kiké Rafiu] and [Adrienne Eisenhauer], players I coached at Georgetown; I want people to see our family.”
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March 14, 2021 at 02:18AM
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Natasha Adair and Bob Clark's coaching relationship built around family and loyalty – The Review - University of Delaware Review
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