Sports Poets Society

https://phillyjewishsports.org/2014/03/stan-novack/ Stan Novak was an athlete, educator, coach and NBA scout . He excelled at every level and overcame every challenge. A native of West Philadelphia , Novak was a two-time all-public league basketball player at West Philadelphia High School, leading the 1940-41 squad to the Public League Championship. After a stint as an officer in the Navy, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania where he made the All-Ivy League team in his junior and senior years. He coached the Penn freshman team while getting his master’s degree in education . From 1949 to 1967, he taught and coached basketball at Springfield High School in Montgomery County, finishing with a record of 245-89. While teaching at Springfield, he also was player-coach of Sunbury in the Eastern Basketball Association, a position he held for 18 years . He spent another 12 years as a coach in the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) with the Wilkes-Barre Barons , Scranton Miners...

https://www.nba.com/pistons/news/forever_a_piston_061023.html October 23, 20066:03 PM EDT AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – Before the NBA exploded into a multinational, multibillion-dollar business, franchises were run like a mom-and-pop corner convenience store. And the best ones had a strong leader and a sidekick or two in whom complete trust was warranted. That’s the way the Detroit Pistons operated in the days when they were sowing the seeds for what would become their Bad Boys dynasty. Jack McCloskey arrived as that strong leader and leaned hard on the two people who made up his scouting department, Detroit legend Will Robinson and a man far more content to avoid the spotlight, Stan Novak. “Stan was a stay-in-the-back kind of guy,” recalls Oakland University basketball coach Greg Kampe, whose friendship with McCloskey resulted in Kampe working closely with Robinson and Novak in the days when the Pistons would hold their practices in Kampe’s OU gym. “He didn’t want anybody to know what he wa...