If it had been a player from a nearby school throwing down dunks at the end of Thursday's open-to-the-public workout the way Julian Wright and Rod Stewart were throwing them down for Kansas, The Palace would have erupted.Instead, there was barely a murmur. That's the thing about empty seats. They don't have much to say. Without a local team in the pod, very few people turned out to see the practices.The driving distances - rounded off to the nearest mile, and times, according to [mapquest.com][1], for the eight schools playing in The Palace pod - starting with the closest: 1. Kent State (221 miles, 3 hours, 38 minutes); 2. Pittsburgh (315 miles, 5:02); 3. West Virginia (384 miles, 6:16); 4. Bradley (429 miles, 6:50); 5. Iowa (497 miles, 7:56); 6. Southern Illinois (589 miles, 9:24); 7. Kansas (840 miles, 13:07); and 8. Northwestern State (1,193 miles, 18:33).It somewhat has the feel of a leftover pod.For example, Greensboro has Duke; Jacksonville has Florida; Dallas has Texas; San Diego has UCLA; Philadelphia has Villanova; Dayton has Ohio State. Salt Lake City is another pod without a local school.¢ The path most NCAA Division I coaches follow goes something like this: work like a maniac as a part-timer or a manager in hopes of getting elevated to full-time assistant coach. Develop a reputation as a successful recruiter. Get hired by a smaller program as a head coach, get that school to the tournament and bolt to a bigger school with bigger paychecks.And then there is Bradley University's Jim Les. As a pre-teen, Les was the ball boy at Bradley when older brother Tom was the point guard. Years later, Jim returned to Bradley and became Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year in 1986, when Bradley went 16-0 in league play. He also won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith trophy, given to the nation's best sub-6-footer.After a nine-year professional playing career, including seven NBA seasons, Les became a stock broker in Sacramento, Calif. He was hired as Bradley's head coach with his only coaching experience coming as an assistant for the WNBA Sacramento Monarchs for three years.Early in this, his fourth season, Les was on the hot seat until Bradley turned its season around after a blowout loss to Wichita State. In a postgame meeting, Les let the team know guard Tony Bennett, the steadiest player, was the only one whose job was safe.Les was able to sell himself to the coaching selection committee and has been able to use the same skills to sell more athletic players than the school is accustomed to having on the idea of playing in Missouri Valley Conference."It's unusual in that most of my experience has come as a player," Les said. "I learned playing for some great coaches. Lenny Wilkens, Jerry Sloan, Dick Motta, Dick Versace. If I was an assistant to them, people would look at me differently. I was a point guard for them, and I'm not sure there's too much of a difference because a coach is expected to be a coach on the floor."¢ Chuck Buescher, a coaching legend at Peoria Central High for 25 years, came out of retirement to join his son Eric as a fellow assistant on Les' staff at Bradley. Eric was an assistant for his father's staff from 1992-94.Other father-son tournament ties: Steve Burtt Jr. and Gary Springer Jr. of Iona played for the same school as their fathers, losing to LSU. Florida has three sons of famous fathers. Joakim Noah is the son of retired tennis star Yannik Noah and Miss Sweden 1983. Taurean Green is the son of former UNLV star and NBA player Sidney Green.¢ If you get the chance to head south into Canada from the United States, don't you think you should do it? A few of us pulled off that geographic oddity by driving from Detroit to Windsor. A Canadian border official informed us the law requires two forms of identification and one of them has to be a birth certificate or passport. He eventually let us through, but not before sharing his life story with us. He's an environmentalist who says he's going to be featured in a documentary, griping about how all the truck traffic in Canada is tearing the environment to shreds.Anyway, the second we crossed into Windsor, the scene was reminiscent of a Simpson's episode when Bart crosses the railroad tracks and his senses are assaulted with seedy blinking signs advertising massages, Cuban cigars and the like. We cruised down a side street by a club called Leopard's, where inside lonely gentlemen no doubt are telling dancers they can "take them away from all of this." All this what, money? And take them where, to a seat in front of a television set to watch soap operas while they are at work? *Brace yourself for hearing this from losing coach after losing coach throughout the tournament: "We were getting great shots. We just didn't knock them down." Translation: "It's not my fault. I served a victory to them on a platter and they dropped it." [1]: http://www.mapquest.com