These days, Seth Berger's office is a cramped locker room that smells of overworn sneakers. There's a whiteboard with objectives for the next game ("Respect the opponent"), John Wooden's "Pyramid of Success" is pinned to one wall, and a muffled thud, thud, thud of dribbling basketballs in an adjacent gym provides a constant soundtrack.
In other words, it could be just about any coach's office at just about any high school in the country, which is exactly how Berger wants it.
Berger, 44, is head basketball coach at Westtown, a bucolic boarding school nestled on 600 acres in West Chester. At first glance, Westtown seems like an unlikely basketball power. The campus looks more like that of a small liberal-arts college, with an arboretum, a lake, and an organic teaching farm. The upper school costs $46,000 per year to attend. Yet since becoming coach, Berger has made Westtown's program one of the best in the region, drawing prospects from as far as Africa and Europe, and spectators such as Villanova coach Jay Wright and Temple's Fran Dunphy.
But the setting isn't the most remarkable thing about Westtown's ascent in the hoops world. It's Berger. Before becoming a volunteer assistant in 2005, after all, he had never coached a single game. For the previous 12 years, his energy had been focused on his high-profile - and highly profitable - business, AND 1, the basketball shoe and apparel company he cofounded and helped turn into a $280 million enterprise.
Today, though, when you bring up money or business, Berger winces. He would just as soon talk about scoring margins than profit margins. He even kicks his coaching salary back to the school.
"To me, I'm just a coach. Being in business, that was a prior life," Berger says.
Even so, 7 years removed from selling AND 1, Berger is doing on the court what he once did in the sneaker business: taking an upstart and turning it into a major player. The difference is that even when he was living the life of a business mogul - a life others often dream about - this is the life he always wanted.
"I can't think of a more fun way to make a difference in a kid's life than coaching high school basketball," he says. "It's been more intense, it's been a bigger intellectual challenge, and quite frankly, it's been more rewarding."
Or as Jay Coen Gilbert, an AND 1 co-founder and Berger's best friend since seventh grade, puts it: "It's a mistake to say that because Seth made a bunch of money at AND 1 that all of a sudden he had the freedom to become a high-school basketball coach . . . I think Seth would have become a basketball coach whether he was a UPS man, or whether a successful entrepreneur or whether he was running for political office."
Berger first played organized basketball in middle school. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Manhattan, he went to a prep school in the Bronx, where he played hoops and met Gilbert.
"The only two dream jobs for Seth were either point guard for the Knicks or high-school basketball coach," Gilbert says, joking that Berger, who played junior varsity as a freshman at Penn, still has visions of playing point guard for the Knicks.
After graduating from Penn, Berger dabbled in politics, spending 2 years on Capitol Hill before deciding to go to grad school. Although he originally wanted to get a master's degree in public policy, he figured he would be left with too much debt. Instead, he decided to get his MBA at Wharton, where he considered entering investment banking before acknowledging that the numbers weren't for him. In his second semester at the business school, he settled on going into the basketball business, working up an advanced study project for a business plan called "The Hoop," a basketball retail store. The project eventually led him and his partners to the shoe industry, whose major players at the time all focused on multiple sports. Berger thought he could tap the market of basketball devotees by focusing solely on hoops.
"If you give everything you got and you fail, in 2 years you'll be 27 with a Wharton degree, you'll go a get a job," Gilbert told him. "No wife, no kids, broke. Who cares?"
They named the company AND 1, a common bit of basketball jargon. When people came to him and told him they didn't understand what "AND 1" meant, Berger thought: Good. It's not meant for you.
"We viewed AND 1 as a company that was for and by basketball players," Berger says. "We never tried to be a renegade company. Make products, make marketing that spoke with and spoke for basketball players."
Yet, they fit the image of the renegade company. One of their most notable endorsers was Latrell Sprewell, who signed with the company after the NBA suspended him in 1997 for 68 games when he was with Golden State and choked coach P.J. Carlesimo. When Sprewell was traded to New York and led the Knicks to the NBA Finals the next year, AND 1 embraced his reputation not by offering apologies but by offering a story. It was a 30-second spot of Sprewell getting his hair braided into cornrows. Jimi Hendrix's famous Woodstock rendition of the national anthem played in the background. Sprewell looked into the camera and said: "I've made mistakes, but I don't let them keep me down. People say I'm what's wrong with sports. I say I'm a three-time NBA All-Star. People say I'm America's worst nightmare. I say I'm the American dream."
The brand would come to have a devoted following. So much so that some players, including former Sixers guard Larry Hughes, sported tattoos of the company's logo.
"When they were at their peak, they took market share from Nike," says Matt Powell, a shoe-industry analyst from SportsOneSource. "They were an extremely formidable competitor to Nike in the basketball sense . . . I think people were looking for an alternative to [Michael] Jordan, partly because of price, partly because of style. They came out with some looks that were unique and marketed them in a unique way. The time was right for an upstart company like that."
At its peak, the company had 23 percent of the NBA wearing its sneakers. Yet AND 1's most noticeable influence came away from the NBA. They thrived with mix tapes, going on tours with street-ball players who did ball tricks, and sold trash-talking T-shirts with slogans such as "My game is like rice, one minute and you're done" and "Here's $5, go buy a game." At one point, they trailed only Nike in the basketball market. But as tastes changed and basketball sneakers became less fashionable off the court, the company's revenues started to decline. Plus, there was the realization that no matter how big the company got, the company could never overtake the behemoth from Beaverton, Ore.
"I knew we couldn't beat Nike," Berger says. "I had been in business for 12 years; it was time to go make a difference."
When Seth Berger was working on Capitol Hill, he had a conversation with a friend. If you could somehow earn enough money to feel comfortable - comfortable enough to turn your back on the life you've created and pursue the life you really wanted - what would you do?
It's the sort of conversation you have when you're 21, when idealism and the ability to pay the rent haven't yet gone their separate ways. Even then, though, Berger knew he eventually wanted to work with teenagers. Even then he knew he wanted to be a high-school basketball coach.
On his way to start his new life, however, Berger had to deal with the obstacle of never having coached basketball. So at age 37, he started as a volunteer assistant at Westtown, learning how to do the job. He studied the game and developed a relationship with the players, gaining enough experience that he considered looking elsewhere for head-coaching jobs before Westtown hired him to replace its retiring coach in 2007.
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