Pay may be meager, but Pope says tenure as team manager should provide dividends later

By Chuck Woodling     Nov 14, 1987

For his magnificent salary – if that’s the right word – of $110 a month, Bill Pope estimates he puts in about 200 hours or so of toil.

That’s a cool 55 cents an hour and, as Pope says, “If you’re a migrant worker, that’s not bad.”

Heck, even migrant workers make at least a penny a minute, and they don’t have to wash and dry dirty practice togs and game uniforms.

Now in his fourth year as a student manager and his second as the head manager, Pope can’t begin to estimate all the time he’s spent in front of a washer and dryer in the equipment room.

“I know this” he said. “I feel sorry for my mother for all the times she did it. I hate it.”

And yet Pope obviously loves something about it, or he wouldn’t keep coming back – he’s a fifth-year senior – againa nd again when the altenative of a job that pays at least minimum wage is always available.

Sure enough, Pope believes the positives outweigh the negatives, both in the long and short run.

“It’s a tough job, but the travel is great,” he said, “and I want to be a college basketball coach someday, and I think this will help me immeasurably. I’ll graduate in May with a degree in education, and then I hope to get a graduate assistant’s job somewhere.”

Of course, having worked under a coach like Larry Brown, who seems to know everybody in basketball, certainly doesn’t hurt. Shoot, now Brown even knows HIM.

“My first three years here coach Brown didn’t even know my name,” Pope smiled. “He just called me Kiddo. Now he knows my name.”

Brown also knows Pope can go-fer with the best of ’em. Consequently, the head manager is always busy, especially when the Jayhawks are away from Allen Fieldhouse.

“I’ve been to a lot of places, like New York and North Carolina and Hawaii,” Pope noted, “and there are a lot of responsibilities on the road. For instance, when we were in Hawaii (for five days), I had onely one free morning. Other than that, there was always something to be done.”

Within the chest of 95 percent of all student managers, it is said, beats the heart of a frustrated athlete. Pope isn’t one of the other five percent.

“It’s true one time I was an athlete,” he grinned.

Well, at least he played on the basketball team at Rose Hill High down near Wichita.

“Ever since I was six years old,” he related, “I’ve always wanted to play basketball, but I’m too short and I’m not very good.”

Probably better, though, than he puts on because, when he was a junior, his high school team gave Topeka Hayden, a powerhouse then with players like Tom Meier and Mark Turgeon, all it wanted in the first round of the Class 4A state basketball tournament.

“Turg played terrible that day,” Pope recalled, “but they were a lot deeper than we were, and Tom Meier really beat us.”

Meier, as you know, led Washburn to the NAIA national title last spring while Turgeon, after playing for four seasons with the Jayhawks, is now a student assistant under Brown.

Curiously, Pope came to Kansas from Rose Hill because he wanted to serve as a student trainer under the late Dean Nesmith who spent nearly four decades as head of KU’s training room.

“It was between Missouri, Kansas and Creighton where I was going to college,” Pope pointed out, “and Deaner convinced me. He was a very special person. I’d probably still be a trainer if he hadn’t retired after my freshman year. When he retired, I wanted to have more contact with basketball.”

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