By Doug Carroll

His given name is Newton. In some parts of the world, he is known as Benito.

Around Scottsdale Community College and basketball people, he is Bike. Yes, that is short for bicycle, and it can be explained by a story or two.

"A family friend was in a cycling club," Bike Medder says. "He took me to a meet. I started training on a velodrome track in Queens, N.Y."

The training didn't last but the nickname did, and it turns out that Bike wasn't done with bikes. After he had moved on from Brooklyn, his home, to Arizona State University, he would dribble a basketball as he cycled around the Tempe campus. The palm trees and sunshine were just as he had imagined them.

He never left. And now, at 68, Bike Medder is one of the unlikeliest ambassadors for his sport that Arizona has ever known, a native Jamaican who:

• Was SCC's head coach of women's basketball for 36 years, never coaching from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday while following the Sabbath observance of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, to which he belongs.
• Operated a cleaning business on the side while coaching.
• Recruited Native American student-athletes when few other coaches did, including Ryneldi Becenti, a two-time NJCAA All-American at SCC and the first Native to play in the WNBA.
• Says his most memorable SCC team was the one that had seven Academic All-Americans (2020), not the one that set a school record for victories in a season (26 in 2004).
• Still assists with the Artichokes — now coached by Tasha Washington, one of his former players — while making time for mission trips to Jamaica and Honduras.

SCC has been around for 54 years, and Medder has been around SCC for 41 of them. He's a long-haul kind of person.

"We go way back. He's from Brooklyn and I'm from Harlem," says lifelong friend Willie Young, who has worked in athletics for Mesa Community College for 20 years. "I appreciate him dearly. I call him my brother from another mother. His perseverance and his ability to adjust, to achieve — he's done that his whole life."

The basketball part of that life began with a revelation. As a young boy in Jamaica, Medder played only soccer and cricket until he first saw the Harlem Globetrotters on a black-and-white TV in the late 1960s.

He was mesmerized, and it was basketball from that point on.

"When I go to America, I'm going to play that game," he vowed.

The Knicks and the Eagles

The opportunity to move came shortly after he had turned 15, but success came slowly at John Jay High School in Brooklyn. Despite his natural athletic ability — he could practically jump out of the gym — the 6-foot Medder couldn't crack the varsity's starting lineup until his senior year.

The adjustment to new surroundings was difficult, even hurtful at times.

"When guys called me names, it motivated me to play better," he says. "I decided I would get good at any cost. I told them they'd be coming to ask me to play (in the parks) someday, and they did."

He worked on his game at the local rec center. He listened to New York Knicks games on the radio and patterned his play after the best rebounders of the day, NBA stars such as Bill Walton, Nate Thurmond and Wes Unseld.

The Restoration Eagles, a club team that reached into underprivileged neighborhoods, helped him along. The late Gil Reynolds, a stern taskmaster known as the father of Brooklyn basketball, coached the government-funded Eagles program and developed the likes of Bernard King, Fly Williams, John Salley and Rolando Blackman.

Reynolds' approach was long on fundamentals and devoid of nonsense. He was "a teaching coach who understood that the lessons you learned on the court were the same ones that could help you during challenging times," King, a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame member, wrote in his memoir, "Game Face."

Bike kept pedaling. He went on to play at Orange County (N.Y.) Community College and then followed an Eagles teammate to ASU, where he walked onto the team and graduated with a business administration degree. Future NBA players Fat Lever and Alton Lister were stars for the Sun Devils at the time, and they remain close friends of his.

He caught a break when SCC's Art Becker gave him an opportunity as a volunteer assistant coach. That led to a full-time assistant's position and eventually to the head coaching job in 1984.

Getting better with Medder

Medder had known since high school that he wanted to coach, and he had been taking notes all along.

"My philosophy was always to make a better player and make a better you," he says. "I was focused on the individual player getting better. It hurts when people don't do what it takes. But when they walk in with nothing and leave with something, that's a good feeling.

"If you're in the gym getting better, it shows in your performance."

Rather than coach his players to fit a prescribed system, Medder says he preferred to adapt his coaching to their abilities. He opened up SCC's offense to accommodate the highly skilled Becenti, a point guard who led the Artichokes to 44 wins in 1990 and 1991 and then starred at ASU.

"You can't hold a good player back," he says. "You let them play, and you build a team around them."

As he was building teams, he also built summer leagues and tournaments and other offseason opportunities for players to develop. The goal, he says, was to make metro Phoenix a hoops haven for the Southwest, just as New York City was for the East. Along the way, in his gregarious style, he came to know everyone.

That investment in people now extends to the mission field, where he is known as Benito and helps build houses for the underprivileged.

"My thing is just helping people," he says, pulling up a photo on his cellphone from a recent home build. "I see a need and I try to help."

Young, whose daughter played for Medder at SCC, says it has never been about fame or acclaim.

"We don't look for the fanfare," he says of their friendship. "But we recognize what our purpose is, and that's what makes us so close. We just love what we do. It's been an honor and a pleasure to know Bike."