The Campaign for Sustained Leadership

It’s not as if Mark Alarie hadn’t had a fulfilling life. He’d been on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1986 as his Duke University basketball team blitzed to a 37-3 record before falling to Louisville in the NCAA finals.The All-Atlantic Coast Conference forward then spent six seasons in the National Basketball Association with the Denver Nuggets and Washington Bullets.

Following his basketball career, Alarie came to Wharton and got his MBA in 1995. He went into institutional sales at Alex Brown covering the Southeast United States and settled into a comfortable home life in Bethesda, Md., with wife Rene and newborn Isabella. The cup was looking fuller and fuller. But there was a little itch that Alarie couldn’t scratch.

A good number of his closest friends and mentors at Duke – Tommy Amaker, David Henderson,Quin Snyder, Johnny Dawkins and,of course, his own Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski - were coaching college basketball. “I always kind of dreamed about leading a team as a coach in Division I college basketball,” said Alarie. “I thought constantly about what I would do and how I would do it.”

His chance appeared when he read about an assistant basketball coaching job open at the U.S.Naval Academy. Though he was earning mid-six figures at Alex Brown, Alarie threw caution to the wind and applied enthusiastically for the job – which paid in the low five- figures. By April 1999, it was his.

Alarie commuted 45 miles each way from Bethesda to Annapolis to help coach Don De Voe lead Navy to a 23-6 record before the team lost in the Patriot League championship game to Lafayette. Sports Illustrated featured Alarie in its “Catching Up With …” feature this winter. By all appearances, Alarie seemed on a clear path to a life far removed from the business world.

But within a few weeks of the season’s end, Alarie announced his resignation. In short, he says, he found he didn’t have enough of the right stuff. “It’s hard to sum up in two sentences or less,” he says. “College basketball happens to be a very confined environment. It is difficult, if not impossible,to be entrepreneurial, to build something that hasn’t been built before. There is a heavy-handed regulatory association – the NCAA – and it is very conservative by its nature.

“But all that aside, I think the most difficult hurdle is the fact that I am a 36-year-old man who has a relatively broad variety of experiences and I was starting on the lowest rung of the ladder in coaching,” he says. “It takes a while to work your way up and I hope I am not being impatient. I needed to be 100 percent certain that it was the path I wanted to follow. I came to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t.”

De Voe indicated it was purely Alarie’s decision to leave, that he had not been pushed out of a job. Alarie said, in turn, that he was happy De Voe gave him the opportunity. “The preparation for the season and the games, that was the real joy of coaching,” says Alarie, who grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., but now considers himself an East Coast kind of guy. “Working with the kids who were here, that was terrific.

“But it takes a particular type of individual to be a successful head coach,” he says. “And I’m making an honest assessment that I don’t see them in myself.”

Alarie plans to do something entrepreneurial, perhaps with some fellow Wharton classmates.

“I’ve always thought the biggest mistake I could make in my life is not to be adventurous,” he says. “I want to find passions. I find that in my family and friends, as most people do. But aside from that, I want to find whatever else that I can hop out of bed for and feel excited about. Even after a good year, though, I found it wasn’t coaching.”