Frank Martin hears the sound of bullets.
The year is 1992. The then-26-year-old high school basketball coach is at his night job, working as a bouncer at a bar named Calico Jack’s. He and two other bouncers are currently dealing with the return of two patrons whom they had already kicked out.
Just a few minutes prior, the trio of men closed up the bar for the night at 2 a.m. and walked out to head home. Not long after stepping out into the humid Miami air, they notice a car with its lights off driving towards them. Their instincts kick in as soon as a window rolls down, and the group dives behind a random vehicle. Gunshots ring out into the night.
“[If there was no] car there, we take the bullets,” Frank said.
Eventually, after delivering a message but no injuries, the car drives away. Frank collects himself, gets into his own vehicle and drives back home.
There’s a lot going on at this point in his life. He has three jobs at Miami High School, serving as the head junior varsity coach and assistant varsity coach for the school’s men’s basketball teams, while also filling in as a substitute math teacher. Those positions are personally rewarding, but they only pay so much, and certainly not what he needs to pay the bills.
Being a part-time student at Florida International could pay off for him down the road, but at the moment, he’s doing a lot of work for no financial gain. He’s bouncing at multiple bars to scrape by, but is $100 a night even worth it when a potential downside of the job is death?
Driving home that night, Frank makes up his mind. Something needs to change. In that moment, despite the low pay, becoming a full-time teacher and coach doesn’t seem so bad.
Frank did not take a linear path to get to this point. His ensuing years in Miami certainly had some twists and turns as well. This night is just one of the many stories from Vice City that molded a young resident into a longtime college basketball coach.
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When Frank was a child in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, basketball was an afterthought to him. Without a professional basketball franchise in the city at the time, kids looked up to Miami Dolphins players, and he idolized star fullback Larry Csonka for his gritty, hard-nosed play.
His mom was reluctant to send him back onto the gridiron after he broke his foot in ninth grade. Listening to her words, Frank decided to take basketball more seriously. This is where Shakey Rodriguez – a local high school coach and mentor to many young Miami athletes – comes in.
“Shakey Rodriguez took a liking to me because I wasn’t very good,” Frank said. “His desire to keep me around and let me learn how to play the sport … and then [his belief] in me to give me responsibility to help him teach the sport in the neighborhood we grew up in was the most powerful segment of my life.”
As Frank continued to learn more about basketball, Shakey was in the early stages of his coaching career, getting promoted to head varsity coach at Miami High in 1981. Once Shakey took the reins at the school, his strict, excuse-free culture was implemented quickly.
“[Shakey] had two rules: don’t fight … don’t quit,” Frank said. “He was a hard driver, man.”
There’s an argument to be made that a disciplinarian coach was needed at Miami High. The inner-city school had its fair share of troublemakers, and without an extracurricular leader who sought to provide guidance, it was easy for a student to get swept up in the wrong crowd.
“[The program] really kind of saved our lives,” Allen Edwards, former Miami High player and current UMass assistant coach, said. “We really had no other way [because] obviously, the school system in the inner city [isn’t] great, and [it’s not] like that was being pushed to us.”
According to the New York Times, Miami led all major U.S. cities in murders and robberies per capita in 1980, with violent crime that year rising by 18%. The most common explanation for those numbers lies in the city’s place in the drug trade, as illicit narcotics were constantly being brought into the 305 and dealt out. From those shipments, flare-ups and violent disagreements arose.
Little Havana // Photo via Shutterstock
Through this difficult time for the city, in a situation where the streets could’ve sucked Frank in, he stuck with basketball throughout high school, improving his game while absorbing more of Shakey’s life lessons. His goal quickly became to play college basketball, but just like on the gridiron, the injury bug arrived with a torn-up knee limiting his athletic ceiling.
Now it was time to take the next step in life. At 18, he had tried college for a bit, but quickly determined that it wasn’t for him. He took a full-time job as a proof operator at a bank, mainly to pay off a new Chevy Camaro. There were no long-term plans yet, but life wasn’t half bad.
Then came a call from Shakey. He had heard about Frank dropping out, and he wanted him to go back to school.
“[That was] the only time in my life I ever said no to him,” Frank said.
“Well,” Shakey said, “If you’re not going to go back to college, come by and help me coach.”
His former player wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea.
“He [said] ‘The kids in the neighborhood respect you too much,’” Frank said. “So I started coming around at night.”
As Frank continued to help Shakey run his program, he became more enamored with passing down the wisdom he had learned as a player, both on and off the court. He started out as a junior varsity assistant at Miami High during the 1984-85 season, but with a few games remaining that year, the head JV coach quit due to a disagreement with Shakey. Without advance notice, Frank received his first coaching promotion.
The abruptness of the move meant he needed to learn a lot on the fly. He’ll be the first one to tell you that in those early years, his basketball knowledge lagged behind that of a typical high school coach. Instead of teaching advanced schemes and strategies to his players, he leaned on Shakey’s ideals: be honest and tough, emphasize team chemistry, instill fearlessness and maintain a highly competitive environment.
X’s and O’s be damned, Frank was enjoying every second of being the JV coach and assisting Shakey with his varsity squad. The idea of a coaching career intrigued him more and more, which meant that his and Shakey’s lone disagreement was resolved. To help his future prospects, Frank enrolled at Florida International University, eventually working toward a bachelor’s degree in physical education.
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Benny Valdés is uniquely intertwined with Frank Martin and Miami High. Valdés is a 1989 graduate of the school, and he played one year on JV under Frank before moving up to learn from him and Shakey. After graduating, Valdés eventually returned to his alma mater as one of Frank’s assistant coaches, and nowadays, he’s the school’s principal.
Heading into his first year of high school basketball, Benny knew about Frank, but he was about to learn a lot more. The coach who had yet to turn 20 pushed his players with the urgency of a basketball lifer.
“I still remember him getting out of his car with his Big Gulp, coming in and making us run and run and run, suicides and sprints,” Valdés said. “A big part of his coaching style is motivating kids … to be better and better and play mistake-free. Obviously, as a 14-year-old, 15[-year-old], that’s pretty difficult, so we took a big brunt of Frank’s wrath.”
Edwards came to Miami High a few years after Valdés, but the structure of the program – Frank as JV coach, Shakey as varsity coach – remained the same. He dealt with young Frank’s yelling and screaming, too, and while it ultimately helped him improve as a player, he argues that Frank’s off-court behavior made the biggest impact.
“Sometimes as an inner city kid, you didn’t have enough to eat,” Edwards said. “Sometimes just taking a kid to Burger King, man, that means a lot. And then at the same time, sometimes you didn’t have bus fare to get home, and [Frank] and some of the other coaches just [drove] us home.
“At the end of the day, the game of basketball is the game of basketball, but when you come across coaches that care about the person … that’s a special type of coach.”
Frank’s care extended beyond players’ high school days, and it sometimes rose to an illegal level.
On the set of the NCAA Tournament in 2012, he came out and admitted that he gave money to some of his former high school players while they were college athletes; it’s unclear how much he distributed, but he said he tried to assist athletes suffering financially in the pre-NIL era.
To Frank, this off-court impact wasn’t anything new: it was simply an extension of what Shakey had been doing. The varsity coach didn’t live in a swanky high-rise or a house in the suburbs, instead living in the same neighborhood as the players he coached. By constantly being present on and off the court, Shakey set an example for young men to follow, and Frank wanted to do the same.
At this point, balancing coaching, teaching, work and school in his early 20s, Frank had all the opportunity he needed in Miami.
“All I ever wanted to do was coach in my neighborhood,” Frank said. “[I wanted to] help the kids the way that that neighborhood helped me.”
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All in all, Frank spent eight seasons as the head JV and assistant varsity coach at Miami High. From 1985-93 – a time period spanning his early-to-mid 20s – he was solidifying his name in local coaching circles, backed by Shakey and his former players.
While fruitful, these positions couldn’t support him financially on their own. This is where the side gigs came in.
Working extra hours to maintain financial stability wasn’t new to Frank when he started coaching. He had been working since he was 11 to support his family. First, it was a job on the periphery of the media industry, going door-to-door selling subscriptions to the Miami Herald. Then he became Frank Martin, the Dairy Queen worker.
While coaching JV, he worked two other jobs. One of those was as a bouncer and bartender at a couple of different clubs in Miami, as the pay was decent and the nighttime hours lined up with his schedule as a coach.
Frank’s job was made easier by his hulking frame, which once resulted in an offer to be a bodyguard for a foreign aristocrat. He did well enough to maintain his job at bars that featured gangsters and seedy characters. But it was his personality that separated him from his coworkers.
“Some guys like [conflict],” Frank said. “Those are deranged human beings that live life that way. For me, I [didn’t] want problems, man. Let’s settle this thing down so we can all have a good time tonight … That’s how I tried to handle the job.”
The number of conflicts he wound up getting involved in continued to mount, and that night at Calico Jack’s in 1992 was the tipping point. He needed to work harder to become a full-time teacher and coach, even if the pay was similar. Putting his life on the line just wasn’t worth it.
A new opportunity arose in May of 1993. A local coach that Frank had interned under informed him that North Miami High was looking for a new varsity basketball coach. If Frank was interested, the coach would tell the principal that he needed to meet with him the next day.
The young coach was unsure about this. On one hand, he had somebody telling him that he was more than deserving of a varsity coaching job. On the other hand, he had never thought about anything other than giving back to his neighborhood, giving back to Miami High.
He went to Shakey for advice.
Shakey Rodriguez // Photo via The Stingaree
“Frank, I think it’s time. I think you’re ready to go take your own job.”
Just two days later, he became the varsity coach at North Miami High.
He only spent two years at the school, but that time did wonders for his professional development. No longer under a different coach, his unique coaching philosophy began to materialize as he held onto elements of Shakey’s style while developing some of his own traits.
His on-court acumen was coming along nicely as well. Many of his offensive schemes came from Lon Kruger’s Florida squads, and elements of that offense survived in his playbook all the way up until just a couple of seasons ago. Whatever he ran worked, as North Miami went 39-18 with him at the helm.
After year two at North Miami, in the spring of 1995, a bombshell hit the Miami basketball community. After 14 years, Shakey Rodriguez was leaving Miami High to coach college ball at his alma mater, FIU, becoming the first Hispanic Division I men’s basketball coach in NCAA history.
Frank knew that his name would get mentioned to fill Shakey’s spot at Miami High, but he also knew that his coaching style was now notably different from his mentor’s, which would likely ruffle some feathers. With that in mind, he had no interest in pursuing the job.
Then came a call from Shakey.
The outgoing coach informed his former player that, in the administration’s mind, he was the only true candidate for the opening. They didn’t want to make a different choice. Frank met with the school’s principal the following morning, who echoed the same sentiment.
“How am I going to say no to the people [who] have given me everything in my life from a work standpoint?” Frank said.
In 1995, he returned to his old stomping ground at Miami High, now as the head varsity coach.
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In addition to working at bars in Miami, Frank’s other job while coaching kept him busy from morning to mid-afternoon. He worked as a substitute teacher while coaching JV at Miami High, and when he returned to the school, he became a full-on high school math teacher.
The reasoning behind choosing math was relatively simple. He was always good with numbers and entered FIU as a math major, but his studying time for advanced math classes got squeezed out in lieu of time spent on the court. He ended up reworking his academic plan to get the best of both worlds: a physical education major (for coaching) with a math minor.
Frank’s teaching at Miami High impacted his coaching, and vice versa. When he walked into the classroom each day, it was easy to stand at the front of the room and offer students guidance thanks to his time spent on the sidelines. Some students aren’t as eager to learn about math as they are about basketball, however, so teaching taught Frank how to refine his messaging.
As he dealt with scores of apathetic students over the years, it became a goal of his to always have a clear response to any question thrown his way. He refused to bumble his way through an answer filled with filler words and logic that he came up with on the spot. Either students got a confident, clear answer or an admission that he didn’t have the answer, but most often, they received the former. This mindset carried over into coaching, where he both answered questions and created learning opportunities of his own.
“[Frank’s] a caring individual … [he’s] good at giving advice,” Steve Blake – former Miami High player and 13-year NBA vet – said.
To add a degree of difficulty to his efforts, Frank was assigned many students who were struggling academically. Dealing with some of the most challenging students in the school prepared him even more to convey the right messaging, and while the impact of his math lessons on high schoolers with Cs is a mystery, the effects those had on his coaching successes are as clear as day.
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It’s never a good sign as a new head coach when players are calling the old head coach for advice. That happened at certain points throughout Frank’s first season at Miami High, reinforcing the main worry he had upon taking the job.
On the court, Frank had different ideas for certain players’ roles. Off the court, he was more involved academically, instituting a classroom attendance policy and demanding that players wear a shirt and tie on the day of home games. Some players disapproved of these decisions.
An early boiling point came midway through that first season, when three starters decided to miss school on the day of a league game. Sticking with his attendance policy, all three players were healthy scratches, and Miami High lost that night. The locals fumed.
“I had people that were celebrating me when I got hired now question me,” Frank said. “These are people that have been dear to me for a long time, but [whom] I’ve never spoken to again.”
Quickly, Frank responded with production on the court. His Miami High Stingarees ripped through the state tournament, winning all but one game by double figures en route to a Florida 6A title.
The good times kept rolling in 1997, as most of his key players returned and bought into his vision. Martin coached this group to a 36-1 record, a national ranking and another state title, winning the championship game over Oviedo by 33.
Miami High 1997-98 // Photo via @miamiseniorhigh (X)
Frank considers his 1998 squad to be the most talented of the three, but with a host of new faces, players struggled to gel out of the gate. Once conversations were had, the train was back on the tracks, and they somehow matched the lofty benchmark that the ‘97 team set: the Stingarees again went 36-1 and secured their third consecutive state title. Led by future NBA veterans Blake and Udonis Haslem, nobody came within 20 points of Martin’s squad in the state tournament.
“To me, [we] were the best team in the country that year,” Blake said. “ … I remember [a] game [against Dillard High], and once we won that one handily, I felt like we weren’t going to lose any other ones.”
Throughout these wildly successful three years at Miami High, the basketball scene in Miami was still rooted in the high school game. The NBA’s Heat had strung together a couple of great seasons in a row, but their fanbase was still growing due to a bad 1990-95 stretch. The Miami Hurricanes were in the same boat.
If fans wanted to attend a basketball game that they knew featured players at the top of their level, they went to high school games, which were also backed by a half-decade of history.
“There was a tremendous passion for Miami High basketball, and it was a hot ticket,” Edwards said. “…[Games] were so big that a couple may have gotten moved to the Miami [Heat’s] arena.”
When the games stayed on school grounds, Miami had an advantage in a home gym that became known as “The Asylum.” Picture this: a 17-year-old wraps up his precalculus studying on the bus before walking in to face Miami High. On this night, his assignment is future 20-year pro Haslem, a special talent with an endless motor who’s being guarded by a future accountant.
To make matters worse, he has to try his best in a gym with old Spanish architecture that creates a haunting presence for visitors. There’s also no air conditioning to protect him from the Florida humidity, and noisy fans of the home team have sold the place out. Suddenly, tomorrow’s precalculus test sounds like a walk in the park.
“The Asylum” post-renovation // Photo via Stratus
“The [opposing] teams, their best players [would have] to sub out because they’re just cramping up or sucking wind,” Valdés said.
“I remember going back in there and playing [after my freshman year at Kentucky],” Edwards said. “I was so bothered by how hot it was … I said to myself, ‘There’s no way I played four years in here.’”
There was certainly no need for the gym to give an extra boost to an extraordinarily talented Miami High program. Frank battled through some initial doubters to bring a state title three-peat home; even through a major coaching change, the winning pedigree at Miami High remained the same. Within 12 years, Frank and Shakey – student and mentor – won eight state titles.
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“Dream Team”.
That was the title of a 1998 article published in the Miami New Times that implicated Martin and his team in a major recruiting scandal.
The situation, as the New Times described it, was that some of Frank’s players were using illegal methods to come play for his team. At the center of the scandal were three of the 1998 team’s best players: Blake, Haslem and forward Antonio Latimer. The newspaper claimed that those three were part of a group of five players who lived with either a school employee, a coach or a team booster, all of which broke Florida recruiting policies.
Steve Blake // Photo via Wikipedia
Frank was approached by the reporter of the exposé, Robert Andrew Powell, midway through the 1998 season. The two men talked for a long time in Frank’s office, holding a conversation that the coach says rarely turned negative. Then, out of nowhere, a week before the state title game, the story dropped.
From the coach’s perspective, he knew what his ‘98 players were doing, but he argues that no rules were broken. According to him, he still has a shirt that reads 232.61, referring to a Florida statute that states, among other things:
“The bylaws governing residence and transfer shall allow [a] student to be eligible in the school in which he or she first enrolls each school year … Where the student lives, with whom the student lives, or which school the student attended the previous year shall not be a factor in determining eligibility.”
For each of his three key players, Frank has additional evidence that goes against the New Times’ claims. Latimer lived in an efficiency apartment on his own, but he could pay for it rather than a booster since the Puerto Rican government supplied him with money due to his independence.
According to Frank, Haslem’s biological mom lived just a 15-minute drive away from Miami High, which could make the New Times’ report that Haslem lived outside of the county false. Blake was supposedly living in an apartment with his father and a booster: Frank didn’t mention a booster, but he did say that Blake’s father bought the apartment, and that the school’s principal approved the purchase with the mindset that Blake was legally eligible to play for the Stingarees.
Udonis Haslem // Photo via NBA
There’s also the point of contention over whether some players actually lived at their listed addresses. The New Times says no, claiming that guys like Blake really lived well outside Miami High’s attendance boundaries. A state investigation drew the same conclusion. When the topic came up on a podcast in 2023, Haslem didn’t deny the claim that he lived a county over, and he admitted that the house registered under him to be eligible was his grandma’s.
“[The state] never did [the investigation],” Frank said. “The State Association left a business card at [Blake’s] apartment, and they used Sunshine Law to say that Steve Blake was renting an apartment that he didn’t live in. If you’re going to go after people, at least investigate.”
Also, it would be illegal – per Statute 232.61 – if Frank went out and recruited players to come to Miami High for athletic purposes. Almost 30 years after the scandal broke, Blake and Haslem have made it seem like their move to Miami High originated from themselves and their families, with no recruiting necessary.
“Basketball-wise, you had to go to Miami High,” Haslem told The Pivot Podcast in 2023. “[There] was only one place to go [where] you [were] going to get the exposure.”
“I think anybody that lived in the city that had a very talented young man, they were going to probably try and get them to play at Miami High,” Blake said.
After the story came out, it was business as usual for Frank throughout the summer. He thought that he, his principal and his athletic director were all on the same page regarding the story, with all of them believing that their program played within the rules. The story can no longer be found on the Miami New Times’ website, but he swears that the principal had a quote that made it seem like the two of them were in lockstep.
In late August 1998, head coach Frank Martin and athletic director Jose Nunez were both fired from Miami High. The decision came after the state hit the school with fines and vacated its 1998 state title. Frank initially took legal action against the state, but the case took so long that he eventually dropped it. After just three years, his tenure at his dream job was over.
“I learned that when certain things are going to take place, don’t trust in the decision makers if it’s not me,” Frank said. “… The people I answer to, they give me jobs, they do. But if I don’t trust, I got to go.”
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Frank’s first season following the firing – 1998-99 – solidified a rare demotion in the coach’s career, as he held onto his teaching position at the same school that had just let him go.
“The principal came up to me in October and asked me to help him raise money for the basketball program,” Frank said. “ … I was like ‘This is unbelievable.’. I just walked away.”
The extra gigs came back into Frank’s life around this time. During that spring and summer, he returned to coaching as an AAU program’s leader. He also went back to bouncing for a short period of time, working at a club named Stefano’s.
It was obvious that he needed another fresh start, and he was given that opportunity in the summer of 1999. After initially signing on to be a middle school dean of students, the principal at Booker T. Washington High School called. Her school had just been upgraded from a middle school to a high school, and she needed a coach to build a solid basketball program from the ground up. Frank accepted the offer.
Instead of being a math teacher, this time Frank split his coaching duties with a job as the director of truancy. Every morning, a list of absent students in the truancy program made its way into his hands, and he would drive around and wrangle them up. Years spent as a bouncer certainly didn’t hurt him in this role.
After his first year at Booker T. Washington, college basketball came calling. The job wasn’t in Miami, but it was a Miami connection that got Frank an assistant coaching job at Northeastern.
“[Charlton Young (now-Miami (FL) assistant coach)] and I knew each other pretty [well],” Frank said. “He called me [at Northeastern] and says ‘Hey Frank, I’m taking a job at Auburn. Coach [Rudy] Keeling loves you. I’ve told him that he needs to hire you.’”
A couple of days spent in Boston led to a job offer, and this time, Frank didn’t need to consult Shakey. He flew back to Miami, packed some bags and began what’s now been a 26-year career at the Division I level.
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If you ask former players at Miami High whether Frank Martin has changed from his days in The Asylum to today, even those who don’t see him as often are confident that much of his coaching style has remained intact.
“I love watching Frank on the sideline, because I tell people, I lived it,” Valdés said.
“Frank still has this ability … [to keep player] No. 15 just as accountable as he keeps No. 1,” Edwards said.
Talking to him, it seems like every stop on his journey taught some sort of lesson that’s stuck with him to this day. Whether people agree with what Frank says or not, there’s no doubt that he can command a room of media members, and that can tie back to when he commanded a room of rambunctious teens. His conflict resolution was learned from bouncing, his outlook on player-coach relations was formed at the start of his time at Miami High and his perspective on trust was forged at the end of that era.
Miami High // Photo via The Custodian US
Shakey also taught him many lessons that he still holds dear. The Miami coaching lifer passed away in November 2020 due to a brain aneurysm. His legacy lives on in the memories of his former players, including one Frank Martin.
“[He’s] who I learned from,” Frank said. “[He’s] who I’ve tried to be my whole career.”
Even in 2026, over a quarter century after Frank left the city, he’s still getting honored for his accomplishments in Miami. Before UMass faced Florida State in Sunrise, Fla., this past December, his friend hosted an event for both UMass and Miami people whom Frank was familiar with. Before Frank was scheduled to make a speech, he was interrupted by an announcement.
On June 5, Frank Martin will be inducted into the Miami Dade College Alumni Hall of Fame. The induction will serve as a reminder of everything he did in his hometown, while also posing the question of how much more he could’ve achieved.
“I never would have left [Miami High],” Frank said. “Being at a university was never part of my DNA. My life growing up, it was the neighborhood … Giving back to the people from the neighborhood, so they can aspire to do better. That [was] it.”
Dean Wendel can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @DeanWende1.
