Rowan women’s coach Demetrius Poles has taken on cancer and more, now has the Profs back in NCAAs

The next game — even an NCAA Tournament game, which happens to be next — isn’t going to fill Rowan women’s basketball coach Demetrius Poles with crazy anxiety. In his own playing days, Poles had been there, done that, all over the world.

Far beyond hoops, recent years have tossed Poles the kind of perspective you don’t ever want to earn. Imagine calling your wife and two children from the hospital, telling them you love them, essentially saying goodbye without using the words.

From that threshold to sitting in his office earlier this week in Glassboro, video of Rowan’s first-round opponent, Rhode Island College, on his screen. Poles was quick to put a mask on when a visitor showed up. Doctor’s orders, he said, and he takes such directives as seriously as any he gives to his players.

“We’ve got to get used to everything being hard,” Poles said, freezing the game video, talking about his 20-8 team playing postseason ball. Its first-round NCAA game is 6 p.m. Friday in Scranton.

He’ll just pivot quickly to different levels of hard.

“I got diagnosed December 8th, 2020,” Poles said.

He’d thought the cracking he heard as well as assorted aches and pains were from arthritis. He’d played basketball for years in Europe — he lived in Sweden for 17 years, using it as home base after helping Rowan win the 1996 NCAA Division III national title. Poles began getting massages for his back and shoulders.

After a month, no improvement. The message specialist told him to get an MRI. Poles did, and the man scanned it.

“Ooh, I can’t help you – you’ve got to go to a specialist ASAP,” Poles remembers being told. “I had thousands of cuts and lesions in my bones.”

The diagnosis: multiple myeloma. Caused by stress, he was told. Fighting for custody of his two sons for eight years was what he pinned it on.

“That did me in — now I’m happily married; my kids are doing good,” he said. “We have a new house, a new dog. But it’s been rough.”

He eventually had back surgery to fuse things together. “I have a cement block in my back now,” Poles said.

Right after the cancer diagnosis, in January 2021, Poles had what he called “intense” radiation, 12 days straight.

“It kind of made my immune system very, very weak,” he said. “It just worked me over.”

His birthday was in February.

“I ordered some good food, and I couldn’t taste it,” Poles said. “My wife is a medical coder. She got really nervous, and she took me to the hospital. I was not happy. ‘I’m OK, I’m OK.’ Then as soon as I get to the hospital, I black out.”

This diagnosis: COVID-19.

“I was on a ventilator for four days,” Poles said. “Luckily, she took me. Because I really didn’t want to go that night. I didn’t say one word to her on the way to the hospital.”

That year, Rowan wasn’t playing basketball. Poles was still working, but there was no New Jersey Athletic Conference play because of the pandemic.

“I went in Feb. 28. March 17, I got out of the hospital,” Poles said.

A couple of days in, Poles not breathing on his own, that phone call went home … “They made me call, right before I passed out,” he said. “My kids, they’re 13 and 11 now. That was two years ago. It was heartbreaking. That was my last visual. They asked if I had video chat on my phone. I had it. They made me call ‘em. They didn’t think I was going to make it. I just told my wife and my kids that I loved them. I told my kids that I would be back, but the hopes were very slim. I didn’t want to seem upset, but they were upset.”

The next thing Poles remembered — “four days later, I woke up. I was on the ventilator. I woke up immediately crying and saying, ‘I want my kids.’ It was tough. My oncologist now said to me, ‘You’re a walking miracle. You should not even be here. You’re as tough as a Navy SEAL. We don’t know how you made it through.’”

After undergoing stem cell replacement last June, “right now, the cancer is in remission, but I stayed in Penn hospital for like 46 days,” Poles said. “All summer. I couldn’t recruit. I was not happy about that. But I fought every day, made it through. I just started feeling better in maybe December. I was very weak. I developed a heart issue, [atrial fibrillation]. … I’ve got to go back and get an ablation. It’s a side effect of the multiple myeloma and all the medicines I’m taking.”

Poles, the star center on the greatest team in school history, has been open with his players about this whole ride.

“My team was behind me the whole time,” Poles said, relating how Rowan athletic director John Giannini, Poles’ head coach in his Rowan days and, more recently, La Salle’s coach, would pick up some practices, as did men’s coach Joe Crispin and Poles’ predecessor, Gabby Lisella, still an administrator at Rowan. “Just to keep them going.”

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Now 50 years old, Poles brings so many experiences to his job. After playing in 16 countries, by his own count, Poles began coaching overseas. He’d started his own college playing career at St. Joseph’s before transferring to Rowan. “Phil Martelli always told me I had a great vision for the game — I could see things before they happened.”

While at his last stop in Argentina, a former coach in Sweden said he had a job for Poles and that “you’re the best passer I ever saw in my life.” Poles took the job, working with the youth club in Gothenburg. A friend from playing in Lebanon used to get European players together for a camp in Treviso, Italy. Poles worked with a lot of players who moved on to the NBA.

“I have all my notes here in the cabinet — I go back to my fundamentals,” Poles said. “Fran Fraschilla used to wait for me at the airport in Italy when I came back from Sweden. I was around the best coaches in the world. You couldn’t do anything but learn from them.”

Finally back for good in New Jersey, Poles said he stopped in at Rowan and remembers former men’s coach Joe Cassidy saying, “You’re back for good?”

He was.

“Good — go upstairs and talk to the AD. You’ve got a contract.”

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Poles spent three years on the men’s staff, then doing assistant work for the men and women — “I found out how to recruit. We started getting some very talented girls in here. I was like, ‘This is great, these girls can play.’”

Lisella passed the program on to Poles, and Rowan won the NJAC his first year. He’d learned fundamentals in his own days at Delsea Regional High School: “I learned to take a piece from everywhere.”

“They’re very serious about their craft — they always want to learn,” Poles said of his players. “They want to sharpen things up. They’re always looking for feedback. Always.”

He’s feeling stronger every day. This year’s team started slowly, he said, dropping their first couple, partly because he likes to play a lot of players, which is a European thing. “I want to be a threat from everywhere,” he said. “I want it like, what’s that game, Whack-a-Mole? You don’t know who is going to do what.”

Of his own experiences: “I am used to winning. Being in different roles as a player, I can relate to what they’re talking about. We’ve been in a role. And they’ve accepted their roles. We’re a dangerous team.”

The coach walked into the gym a little later, still wearing his mask, careful, knowing all that life can throw at you. There’s no “woe is me” about this man’s manner, though. If you can excuse any coach in this year’s NCAA Tournament for simply being happy to be here, Demetrius Poles has to be the one.