Click click click. Videotape is the focus of Will Voigt’s first job after his 1998 Pomona graduation—collecting it and editing it for the San Antonio Spurs. He is a peon in the kingdom of professional basketball coaching, his only power the dicing and splicing of game tape. Start, stop, rewind, pause, fast-forward—the VCR controls are squares, triangles and hash marks, some of the same symbols coaches use to communicate basketball plays.

That basic code of basketball is something Voigt knows well from competing for his tiny Vermont high school three hours north of the gym where James Naismith invented the sport with peach baskets as goals. In the NBA org chart, the assistant video coordinator is barely listed, but in Voigt’s case, it gives him a seat on the bench where Pomona-grown head coach Gregg Popovich and assistant Mike Budenholzer ’92 held court.

The Spurs gig didn’t turn into a trailer for his own version of Hoosiers. He didn’t move up and around the NBA. Instead, Voigt’s own education and mastery of basketball coaching would be a peculiar string he kept unspooling, to Norway, back to Vermont, California, China, Angola, and even the 2016 Rio Olympics with the Nigerian national team. He’s bounced from continent to continent, most recently landing in Germany at the height of the pandemic to coach the Telekom Baskets Bonn in the Basketball Bundesliga.

If you lose track of where in the world Will Voigt is coaching, you can usually find him on YouTube, sharing the artful ways basketball is played far from the NBA. Now he’s starring in videos instead of taping others, and friends and strangers are watching, backing up, clipping, studying. Trying to get an edge from Will Voigt.

“Will is a little wacky, and his story has played out that way,” said Budenholzer, now head coach of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. “In San Antonio, he was there anytime for anyone who needed anything, because everyone mattered, from the bottom of the ladder as a video guy to the top. Everyone contributes whatever is needed to the team’s growth. Young coaches can be fascinated with the NBA, but there are only so many teams and jobs, so you have to be willing to go anywhere. Will is the greatest example of taking that advice to new places that are almost unheard of in the NBA.”

Tipoff

Everyone matters in unincorporated Cabot, Vermont.

When Voigt was 5, voters in the city of Burlington, 60 miles west, elected a new mayor named Bernie Sanders. The most famous export is the cows’ milk that’s used to make Cabot cheese, which comes from a local co-op. In 2019, the population was 189. “Indomitable people,” Calvin Coolidge said of Vermonters, “who almost beggared themselves to serve others.”

Voigt practiced shooting to a goal in his family’s barn, where birds would build nests between the net and backboard when Voigt went into soccer and baseball seasons. Every athlete who could play, did. Voigt, a point guard, led his team through state playoffs against Vermont’s smallest schools and graduated valedictorian in a class of 18. He also played piano because his mother, Ellen, who had served as Vermont’s state poet, and his dad, Francis, who had started the New England Culinary Institute, insisted he do something besides sports. When it came to his college, they insisted on strong liberal arts. “They would not budge,” Voigt recalls.

Due east, over the White Mountains and into Maine, is the  town that Bill Swartz had left to become head soccer coach at Pomona-Pitzer. When Voigt reached out, Swartz recalled thinking, “I can definitely take a chance on this guy. I’ve always thought that players from those New England states had qualities that were difficult to put on paper. Will had a good sense of who he was and how he fit in.”

With Voigt as a backup forward on the soccer team, the Sagehens won the 1996 Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. With less fanfare but more foreshadowing, Voigt performed in a mock Congress with Claremont McKenna students, playing independent-minded Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords. “Will was a swing vote, in the middle of everything, talking to both sides and paying attention to everything,” noted Professor of Politics David Menefee-Libey. “It makes sense that he’d become a coach.” Voigt didn’t see it then. When he graduated in 1998 in political science, he expected to go to law school and become a sports agent. Basketball was calling.

First half

Earlier in the century, the sunny beaches of Los Angeles had inspired tire retreader William J. Voit to invent an inflatable rubber ball. He vulcanized it to create the modern basketball. The summer after college, Will Voigt bounced into the Long Beach State Pyramid for the NBA free agent league. He hoped to hang with agents, and one asked Voigt to coach a team led by Duke’s Ricky Price. “The players were trying to shine and show teams what they could do, and Will took it so seriously,” Price said. “He even put in a defense—for a summer league? I thought he was auditioning for a coaching spot for real.” This—plus an internship with the Los Angeles Clippers and Pomona ties—helped him get to the San Antonio Spurs’ sideline.

“Good or bad, I have had a confidence in myself that is generally unjustified,” Voigt said. “Like I have never been afraid of the moment. That helped me in San Antonio, being able to keep it real. I could be myself. If I stopped and thought about being a small-time Vermont kid on the NBA court with one of the best coaches in the history of the game, I would be paralyzed.”

Voigt had ventured into college basketball coaching when a voice from his past opened an unexpected door. His high school coach Steve Pratt, in Chicago to train players for college and the NBA draft, was asked if he knew anyone who could coach a pro team in Norway immediately. Its American coach had decided not to show. “I have the guy,” Pratt said.

Halftime

To say that Voigt, then 27, brought passion to the Ulriken Eagles is incomplete. He also loves arguing. In Oslo, the Eagles were down 26 points to the league’s best team when Voigt got ejected right before halftime. Pratt was visiting, and heard Voigt’s last words to his team: “Screw this! You have nothing to lose. Just go beat their ass!” And they did.

Second half

A vote brought Voigt back to Vermont, when he was elected coach of the Vermont Frost Heaves, a startup in the American Basketball Association. Yes, elected by Vermonters given ballots by team owner and Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff. “Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who was deep into hoop and who can see the larger world out there?” Wolff wondered. The Frost Heaves won two straight ABA championships, which had only been done before once, by the Indiana Pacers.

“My first impression of Will? I got a knock on my door at the Ho Hum Motel in Burlington, and God knows who was going to show up,” said John Bryant, a signee who had just flown in from China, now an assistant coach with the Chicago Bulls. “Will didn’t even look like a player much less a coach. He has that baby face. He couldn’t be the right guy, but he was.” Voigt moved on to five years with the Bakersfield Jam in the NBA D-League, where he left a memorable impression on his team’s Nigerian-American players. When the Nigeria Basketball Federation needed a coach, it picked Voigt, who had just wrapped a gig with the Shanxi Dragons of the Chinese Basketball Association. Voigt coached the Nigerians to the African title and one of only a dozen spots in the 2016 Rio Olympics. Despite winning only one game in Rio, Voigt had sealed his reputation, and the next team to sign him was Nigeria’s fierce rival Angola. In Luanda in 2018, Angola was practicing in the Estadio da Cidadela when a large light fixture fell from the ceiling, barely missing Voigt and nearby players. “At that stage, I had been in Africa so long, that didn’t faze me as much as it should have,” Voigt said.

He tweeted the near-miss with video footage. Just like in San Antonio, the cameras were rolling in Luanda, too. But now Voigt was becoming a more seasoned coach in a setting that was less star-driven, more Cabot-like. Even the international basketball court, at 28 by 15 meters, is slightly smaller. “More ball movement, more people movement,” said Budenholzer. “We all try to do similar things as coaches, but the international coaches and teams buy into it more, and when everybody is touching the ball and moving, it is a more inclusive way of playing.”

African players taught Voigt an intuitive defense that fascinated him. Defending players typically must react in seamless actions when the other team drives to the basket: cover their player, help defend against the ballhandler, rotate to help other defenders, and then recover to their assigned player. The Africans simplified this. When the ballhandler beat the primary defender, the next defender rotated into that gap, leaving a gap that the next defender filled.

Voigt calls this defense the peel switch. “Most of the teams I coach have to be different to find a competitive edge, so when I saw this, I knew it was something different that would help us play to our strengths,” Voigt said. “Teams that do this are really good at communicating, and I liked exploring something new like this rather than doing what we always do.”

Last year, when the pandemic created a gap in his chances to coach, Voigt did a peel switch of his own, turning to teaching this and other basketball strategies online until he got the call from Telekom Baskets Bonn.

Final score

Voigt is now 44, and when he looks back on his vagabond career—the video highlights, if you will—Pomona’s liberal arts training shows in his open-mindedness, critical thinking, engagement in the larger world and appreciation for multiple perspectives. He left campus at the end of one century to embrace a rapidly changing world while hopscotching between rectangular hardwood landing pads. He speaks six languages.

“If you look at all the places I’ve been, it’s hard to imagine any plan that would have taken me on that route,” he said. “I think everyone aspires to be and do what they can at the highest level, and for me that was to be an NBA coach one day. But when you get locked into that, as soon as you go somewhere, you are trying to  get somewhere else. You won’t enjoy yourself, and you won’t give everything you have. I’ve embraced jumping on opportunities when they’ve presented themselves and doing it ‘all in’ and seeing what that leads to next.”

The Voigt video is still rolling, so stay tuned for the next episodes, wherever they’ll be filmed.

Professor of Politics Pierre Englebert has never had any illusions about becoming a rock star. He’s more than content with his day job as a tenured professor at Pomona College. But his on-again, off-again love affair with writing and performing music has been on again for the past couple of years, and the evidence is mounting at a range of free, online music platforms. To understand how a noted scholar of African politics became a veritable one-man rock band, PCM invites you to step briefly into his musical shoes.

Learn a few basic guitar chords from a Scout leader as a Cub Scout in Brussels, Belgium. Get your own guitar for your birthday, and take lessons from a high school student. Ask your parents to have the family piano tuned so you can practice chords.

Start your own band—named Rhapsody for the famous song by Queen—at age 16. Play for the fun of it, but more importantly, to get the attention of girls. Sing in English despite having only an elementary grasp of the language.

Write your first song in high school. In college, form a better band—named (inexplicably) The Ice Creams. Go to lots of rock concerts by bands like The Police and UB40, and play more than 50 gigs, once as the opener for a Tom Robinson concert.

Cut your first and only record at age 20 on a local label and see your music video appear—once—on Belgian TV. As your interest in African politics takes precedence, dissolve the band and drop music almost entirely for the next dozen years or so.

Buy an electric piano with your first paycheck from the World Bank in 1988. Use it sparingly until the mid-1990s, when you resume songwriting as a creative outlet while working on your dissertation. Get an 8-track recorder and sound-engineer your own songs, one track at a time.

Write a few new songs, including one for your wife titled “When You Shave Your Legs.” After getting your Ph.D., lose yourself in work. Store your instruments under the bed, where they will mostly gather dust for more than 20 years.

Notice a flyer for guitar lessons while on sabbatical in 2018. Decide to expand your musical chops by taking guitar lessons. Then take it a step farther by auditing music classes with Pomona professors Tom Flaherty and Eric Lindholm.

Start writing songs again, using software called Guitar Pro. Then with another program called Logic, build them out a track at a time. Send the “pre-mix” to a studio in Los Angeles to be professionally mastered.

Under the moniker “Not a Moment Too Soon,” produce your first album, titled “Back to Plan A.” Post it on SoundCloud. Then sign up with a distributor to post your tracks on a range of platforms, from Apple Music to Spotify.

Post your second album—titled “Well,”(including the comma)—with cover art by Pomona student Sei M’pfunya. Plan to keep sharing your songs as long as you find it rewarding and the songs give people joy.

Both of Englebert’s albums are available free at his website: www.not-a-moment-too-soon.com, and at such online repositories as SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Heartthrob
Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back
By Susana Chávez-Silverman
University of Wisconsin Press | 336 pages | $34.95

Some say Romance Languages and Literature Professor Susana Chávez Silverman has outdone no less than J.R.R. Tolkien. One author points out that while Tolkien invented a number of languages, Chávez Silverman “has turned Spanglish into an astute literary tongue capable of baroque depths.” The International Latino Book Awards literally seconded that—her book recently won second place in the memoir category.

Chávez Silverman is known for seamlessly alternating languages. But that is style. Even more than that, what she does in her new book, Heartthrob (subtitled Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back), is storytelling. Using her letters and diary entries as a palimpsest, Chávez Silverman chronicles a love affair that is both deep and delicate, fiery and fragile, set against politics and place—and one that takes her from San Francisco to South Africa.

PCM’s Sneha Abraham chatted with Chávez Silverman via Zoom (or as the professor likes to call it: “Zoomba”) about language, love, location and more. This interview has been condensed and edited for space and clarity.

PCM: Tell me a little bit about your family and how language was used in your household.

Chávez Silverman: Well, that’s a very intriguing question because my current project is actually delving into a bit of my family history, particularly on my mom’s side. And that’s something that I haven’t really written much about—my family.

My dad was a Jewish-American Hispanist born in the Bronx, and my mom was a Chicana. She was born in Visalia in California and grew up in San Diego. They met in summer of 1949. It was kind of like a study abroad experience. My mother got a fellowship from the Del Amo Foundation, I think. They were both on a study program in Spain. That’s where they met.

And each of them had apparently a fairly serious paramour. But when they met, it was like a flechazo, like a love-at-first-sight thing. They got married in 1951, much to the disapproval of my dad’s mother in particular. I have my parents’ love letters, which were sent to me a couple of years ago by my youngest sister. She had inherited them when my mother passed. And there are quite a few.

And my mother’s parents were also not in favor of the union, particularly her father. My mother was the granddaughter of two ministers. Her maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and her paternal grandfather was a Methodist semi-itinerant preacher. This was in New Mexico. My mother’s parents eventually came around, to the point that my parents’ wedding was on their front lawn, performed by Samuel Van Wagner, my great-grandpa.

We grew up, mainly, English dominant-ish when I was very, very young. However, we were around relatives who spoke different languages. On my dad’s side, it was Yiddish and English. We weren’t too much in connection with my dad’s, but they were all back in New York. But on my mom’s side, we were very, very close to my mom’s parents, to my grandparents, my maternal Chavez grandparents, and they spoke Spanish and English or sometimes code-switched with all my grandmother’s siblings and relatives, etc. We often were there in San Diego with them.

And my dad played with language a lot. My mother did not encourage code-switching, but it has to do with the time that she grew up in, in the ’40s, and the particular prejudice she experienced. It was: You speak correct English or correct Spanish—no mixing! And it was all about assimilation. And my mother retained her Spanish. Her two sisters really did not.

But because my dad was on sabbatical, my first year of school was in Madrid, when I was 4 and 5. I was thrown into a Madrid kindergarten. That was one of my top traumas. I don’t have a lot of memories of my early childhood, but I remember that. That’s a horror because I was very shy, with minimal Spanish at first, and I was terribly bullied at school.

PCM: How does language work in your head? Are your dreams multilingual?

Chávez Silverman: Oh, yeah, very much so. As a matter of fact, dreams form a very crucial foundational kind of intertext. I always think of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who said that many of the subjects of his stories came from dreams. A little grain or a little seed or even a full scene or images come from my dreams. I have a lot of access to my dreams.

I’m a proselytizer for dreams. I tell my students, “How many of you remember your dreams? If you don’t, here’s how to remember them and keep a dream journal, etc.” Because I think it’s very important.

But I dream in both Spanish and English, sometimes Italian, sometimes Afrikaans. And I also dream in languages that I don’t speak. Like, I wake up, and I know I was speaking German, which I don’t—I have a slight understanding, but not much. I don’t speak it.

PCM: When you write letters or crónicas, are you conscious of their potential of being published?

Chávez Silverman: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s see, initially, I wasn’t, as a matter of fact. This whole transformation or process started—I can date it very clearly to 2000, when I had won an NEH Fellowship to Argentina, and I had been living in Buenos Aires for a good part of a year. I would be there a total of 13 months.

And I was writing and emailing. I’ve always been a correspondent. Without my journals, which I recopied as letters, and letters that people returned to me and emails, my recent book, Heartthrob, could not have been written. I started sending these emails home from Argentina. I was meant to be writing a scholarly book on poetry, which I was working on.

But when I got back to the U.S., pretty soon, within a couple of weeks, I think, 9/11 hit. So, this is 2001. And I had a teenage son—he was 14 and started acting out. And I just felt very disoriented between 9/11 and reentry shock of being back after living abroad for a year.

And my editor himself said, “You know what? I can’t think that a book on Argentine poetry is going to be a big hit or a bestseller.” I mean, academic publishing was already starting to struggle. It was 20 years ago.

I had begun to send these—I had deliberately called them crónicas—and send them along with my letters to people. “How many of those do you have?” I said, “I don’t know—20, 30.” He said, “That’s your book.” So it was really Raphael Kadushin, my former editor at University of Wisconsin Press, who identified the work I was doing as publishable writing, as literature.

PCM: Heartthrob is very intimate. How is it to write to the bone?

Chávez Silverman: But I don’t, my darling. I mean, I’m really very glad that it gives that impression. But I actually consider myself to be a rather close-to-the-vest person. However, I know that my writing gives people the impression that I’m spilling my guts.

In my author’s note in Heartthrob, I’m citing the writer Wyatt Mason about Linn Ullmann, who is a Norwegian writer. And he writes, “She was not looking for reportorial evidence, even if she was writing a scene based in what she could recall. She allowed herself to see with the imagination. She gave herself the freedom to imagine what had been forgotten, not in an attempt to establish fact, but to find the truth.”

I thought that was brilliant. That quote kind of gets at that tension that comes out in my epigraph between truth and reality. So I’m very aware. I’m always negotiating when I’m writing—how much to share and how much to leave out.

Publishing and truth, you spilling out your whole guts, they don’t always go together. It’s about a process of negotiation. And I’m very aware of that.

PCM: This book takes you across the world. Can you talk a little bit about place and love and how one impacts the other?

Chávez Silverman: I had the sense—it’s hard for me to know what kind of wisdom comes with hindsight, but it’s a lot, you know. But even at the time, in the ’80s, I ended the relationship, but not because I didn’t love him or he didn’t love me. I was finding the place, South Africa, impossible for me. I was very politicized throughout my 20s, especially. It didn’t stop but it morphed—elements of practicality and motherhood and other things came in.

I don’t want to say I had a death wish, but it was pretty ridiculous to throw myself off that cliff and move to South Africa under apartheid, considering my political beliefs and the family that I grew up in and everything.          But I hate that. The heart wants what it wants.

I mean, it was love at first—it was a major flechazo, similar to my parents, ironically. My parents, by the way, met the Roland Fraser character in San Francisco. And both of them liked him. My mother was very fond of him. I’ve just discovered both he and my mother share a moon in Capricorn. Yes. I’m very into astrology as my friends, readers and students all know.

But it’s as if I felt something fundamentally shift between us. I’ve written that he got swallowed by the underworld, the undertow, not exactly of apartheid per se; he was very progressive for a privileged, white English South African at that time. But it wasn’t that. It was between the familial and sort of the societal structures and expectations of the northern suburbs of Joburg. He was the eldest of six, and the family expectations on him, and also his own double Capricorn personality—we were screwed, kind of, by the place, by the effect of the place on us.

And yet, as I also write in the book, it was almost as if upon sacrificing that relationship, which was really my true love, I became myself: a writer. And that’s how I see my writing really. I started thinking of myself as a writer in my mid-20s in South Africa.

We revisited our love story and saw that the feeling is the same, or it’s there still. And yet, for me, it’s still impossible. I don’t want to make a life in South Africa. It’s something that has inherent tensions and impossibilities that make it very powerfully seductive and also impossible. I tried to capture that in the book’s final sentence.

PCM: Love is not enough. Right? 

Chávez Silverman: Right.

PCM: With love, there’s an intensity and there’s also a breakability. Does that change over time?

Chávez Silverman: I have a tension between the heart and the head. So you can chalk it up to the stars, or chalk it up to the personality or whatever. Probably the signature word that a lot of people would apply to me would be “freedom.” People have said that I’m very iconoclastic in many ways.

And so, there was some part of me that railed against … I don’t think love, passion and domesticity go together very well, for example. So that wasn’t going to go over well in that South African mundo, which was going over to his parents’ for barbecue for lunch every Sunday and so on.

No. But we didn’t have any way of seeing that ourselves, madly in love in San Francisco, in New Orleans. You know, I couldn’t see that until I actually went there. I’m not at all sorry because, paradoxically, going there to South Africa also made me who I am in many ways. But as far as love, I mean, I can’t tell you anything except this: I have a very romantic heart, and I’m also intractably rebellious or freedom-oriented.