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Don Sallee arrives at the Missouri Ozarks Community Health gym in Ava at four o’clock for a long night of basketball. His Victory Academy crusaders JV boys team will take the floor at 5:30 for the first of four games that night. The team is coming off a second place finish in the Ozarks Area Christian Schools Tournament (a year after winning it) and playing out the final few games on their schedule. A bit anti-climactic, but he wants his team to soak up another chance to compete and learn.
Sallee is 88 years old.
“I had always wanted to coach,” he said. “From high school on that’s what I wanted to do.”
Don Sallee has made his life about doing what he wanted to do. And for the past eight seasons that’s included coaching the Victory Academy Crusaders basketball team –the last year as its head coach.
“I’ve always enjoyed working with young people,” he said. “My greatest pleasure was taking some youngster who didn’t have super ability, but you could teach him the fundamentals of the game and he could become a good basketball player.”
Sallee knows what being a good basketball player looks like because he sees one in the mirror every day. He led Ava to an Altitude League title in 1946 and was the school’s first all-state player.
He’s led a life that can hardly fit in one story. Athletic success? Check. Close-knit family? Got it. Military service? He worked counter intelligence in Washington D.C.
He earned an athletic scholarship to Mizzou, but that experience didn’t agree with him. The Ava native wasn’t ready for the profanity of the coaching staff or thy physicality of his opponents. That era of basketball was physical, and it took its toll on him. He injured his foot after getting knocked to the ground going in for a layup. That cost him a season.
Then, once that healed, he told a doctor “I had trouble breathing and I’d gotten an elbow in my chest that split my sternum. He said your basketball is over. I said, ‘no, don’t you tell anybody. I’m going to try to hang on.’
He graduated and got his first coaching job at Lebanon. He accepted another job after that season, but then heard that his hometown Ava Bears needed a head coach. He decided to take that path instead, and he developed a reputation.
“Strict,” former player Fred Bacorn remembers of Coach Sallee. “He was a disciplinarian. He had his rules and you obeyed the rules.”
Those rules were explicit. Just ask David Norman, Bacorn’s in the late 50’s and now Ava’s mayor.
“I remember he came when I was a sophomore,” Norman said. “I thought I knew all there was to know about basketball.
“They were 10 or 12 pages and he handed them out and said here are the rules. And he said, ‘I expect you to get up in the morning thinking about basketball, and I expect you to go to bed at night thinking about basketball.’”
Those rules weren’t just cliché platitudes. They included curfews and academic benchmarks. It wasn’t a good day if Coach Sallee found out you broke a rule.
“We had occasionally someone who didn’t follow them,” Norman said. “Let me tell you – there was no one or two chances to get the rule right. You were gone.”
As Sallee toughened up his squad into two-time South Central Association champs, he raised a family. His daughter says he was never a coach at home. Any fears of a sergeant basketball coach bringing his drills home with him were quickly put to bed.
“You said did he bring coaching home or was he a dad – I think it was the opposite,” Anne Sallee Mason said. “I think he took being a dad to coaching. He was very compassionate. He truly cares about people.
“[Dad]’s got a gift. That is his gift, and it gave him something he could share and teach other people and that’s his joy. Teaching.”
He walked away from that gift three times to tend to his family business, a Ford dealership. He came back in the mid 60’s and again in the mid 80’s when the school needed him.
“That’s Don,” Bacorn said. “He just loves it. It keeps him young and going. It’s in his blood I guess.”
He loves it so much that after getting a blood transfusion one Friday morning this season, he coached Victory Academy that night.
“I felt a responsibility,” Sallee says matter-of-fact. Why? “Because I’ve worked with these kids all the way up through, most of them, and I just feel a responsibility.”
Now that the season’s over, with his Crusaders taking second in the Ozarks Area Christian Schools conference, he’s wondering what he should do next year. He admits that it depends on his health, but, “At my age you don’t worry too much about what’s going to happen,” he quipped.
And at his age, you ease up on the dictatorship. Strict is hardly how his Crusaders would describe their coach.
“He’ll talk strict but then he’ll hug us and just tell us what we need to do,” guard Philip Leone said.
“Oh he’s loosened up a lot,” Mason says through a laugh. “When he got out of school he was a by the book play by the rules, don’t break the rules or you’re not playing the next game kind of guy. He still loved the players, but he was strict. Not so much anymore. It’s just the joy of being with them and teaching them about basketball.”
His methods may have changed a little bit, but Sallee insists he’s still teaching the same style as he was at Ava high school. He’s not a fan of the three point line (“I’m not sure it’s good for the game but it’s good for the spectator.”) and his players need his permission to shoot threes. They always have the green light to drive to the hoop.
“I know when Wilt Chamberlain played at Kansas, coach Phog Allen advocated raising the goals to 12-feet,” Sallee said. “I’m not sure that wouldn’t be a bad idea – especially in the pros and colleges.”
His impact on basketball in Ava is impossible to miss, from the three conference titles he brought home as a player and coach with the Bears, to the countless players he brought along. Ava basketball wouldn’t be the same without Don Sallee.
“Other than my father,” Norman says, holding back tears, “I don’t think there’s any question that Don had the most influence on me other than my own parents and especially my dad.”
The way to measure Sallee’s impact on Norman is simple.
“I remember the rules,” he says.
“It’s been a great life,” Salle said. “I wouldn’t change anything.”
Why would he? He’s done what he wanted.
