New Stanford coach Jerod Haase built success, one floor burn at a time

Hidden among the pines in South Lake Tahoe is a backyard basketball half-court with ax marks on the free throw line and the area under the rim. Crime clues, perhaps?

Hardly. They’re the handiwork of a young man who three decades ago wouldn’t stop practicing his foul shots, come hell or high snowpack.

In the winter, Jerod Haase would shovel the snow off the court, but if it drifted up to 3 or 4 feet — “which it did a lot,” he says — he’d just shovel the free-throw line and the area beneath the hoop. The sun might melt some of the snow, but it would freeze back over into a layer of ice.

“So I’d take an ax and ax out the ice down to the ground, so I could shoot free throws again,” he says.

His sister(South Tahoe Middle School Vice-Principal Karin Holmes) owns the house they grew up in, and Haase says the ax marks are still there. They indicate not just the thickness of the ice he attacked, but also the depth of his resolve to become a great basketball player.

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