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GREENSBORO — Painting a portrait of someone is always risky business, but even more so when the subject is Stan Kowalewski. Every stroke seems to fight the previous, every line opposes another. There is little room for gray on Kowalewski's canvas, only black and white.

Consider:

He is a high school basketball coach who can't coach basketball — at least not within Guilford County Schools.

He once sued an athletics director who accused him of recruiting — only to later accuse a fellow coach of the same thing.

He has been called a selfish man who would risk his own players' futures for glory. Yet he thinks nothing of hopping in the car and driving through the night just to visit a former player in college.

Parents swear he is Father Flanagan incarnate, rescuing their children from the mediocrity of other high school basketball programs.

Coaches of those programs curse and accuse him in conspiratorial whispers and point to his resume: three head-coaching jobs, three investigations.

If Stan Kowalewski is bothered by these contradictions, he doesn't show it. He sits in a local restaurant, 6-feet-8, broad frame, wide shoulders, a flat-top haircut only Johnny Unitas could love. He twists the state championship ring on his finger — the title nobody but he and a small band of supporters recognizes — and sips his Coke. What could possibly be wrong?

Plenty. Kowalewski, 37, is caught between two worlds, the believed and the non-believed. To hear him tell it, he has invested his heart and soul — to say nothing of a considerable amount of money — into the Northern Guilford boys basketball program.

To hear others tell it ... well, actually others won't tell it. Not publicly, at least. Twelve high school coaches were asked to talk about Kowalewski for this story. Four did not return phone calls. One hung up on a reporter (twice). The other seven declined interview requests.

Sue a guy for defamation, as Kowalewski did last year with Northwest Guilford athletics director John Hughes, and your adversaries aren't the only one who will clam up.

"Find someone else to talk about Stan," said one coach, who described himself as a friend of Kowalewski. "I'm not jumping into that fire."

Kowalewski shrugs and offers a contradiction of his own.

"I've got a lot of great (coaching) friends, private and public," he said. "But just like any other coach, guys are going to be jealous if you succeed. In basketball, sometimes your friends are also your enemies."

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Let's begin with the truth both sides agree on: Stan Kowalewski is an unusual talent. Born and raised in Camillus, N.Y., just outside of Syracuse, a city that takes its basketball seriously, he is the only child of a father who was a Syracuse cop and a mother who saw to his every need.

The family was not rich, but there was always time and money for Stan's love of basketball.

When Stan Kowalewski Sr. retired from the Syracuse police force in 1984, he took a security job at the Carrier Dome, where Syracuse University plays football and basketball.

Stan Kowalewski Jr., barely 13, got a job as a ball boy for the Orangemen. For a kid who lived and breathed Syracuse basketball, mopping up the sweat of Derrick Coleman and Sherman Douglas was better than Christmas.

Kowalewski remembers sitting under the basket in awe of Douglas, Coleman, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin and those other Big East stars.

"It was a reality check," he says. "If I thought I was going to be the best player in the ninth grade because I was the best player in eighth grade, that was quickly erased. I knew that I had to work at it. I thought I was good, but these guys I watched play were great."

In a sense, that ball-boy job may have taught Kowalewski his first important lesson: Nothing will be handed to you in life.

Maybe that's why Kowalewski, when he left to play basketball at Dartmouth in 1990, told his parents he would not be returning to Syracuse. Not even in the summer.

He knew what he wanted — money and success — and he knew Syracuse could provide neither. Even more importantly, he knew basketball could.

He wasn't the most gifted player. What he lacked in skill he made up for during practice.

"Always the kid who showed up first and was the last to leave," said Dave Faucher, Kowalewski's coach. "Nobody worked harder outside the class or off the court than Stan."

Ivy League schools do not come cheap, nor do they offer athletics scholarships. Kowalewski used his work ethic to help pay his annual $30,000 tuition. His first year at Dartmouth, he hammered out a licensing deal with the school to design and sell T-shirts on campus.

Black Phoenix Sportswear, the name he gave his business, was a hit. While he was playing basketball inside Leede Arena, students were outside peddling his shirts.

He made about $25,000 a year by his account. These days he makes more than that a month managing a hedge fund. He lives in a 9,700-square-foot home overlooking a lake in Summerfield and bought his parents a home in Greensboro.

But it's the sportswear company he prefers to talk about.

"My parents never had to write a check to Dartmouth," he says with pride.

Be it business or basketball, friends and family say Kowalewski had an unbending will and a bullheaded determination. Who knew that combination some day get him in so much trouble?

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"Here's the thing," Kowalewski says, pushing aside his Coke. "There are always going to be people who are jealous of your success."

For seven years, Kowalewski has been running two races. One with Guilford County Schools in his rear-view mirror. The other with glory somewhere down the highway. Always chasing one, never shaking the other. They collided this spring in a span of a month.

On April 10, three weeks after Northern won the 3-A state title, the school's principal, athletics director and lead custodian, whose son played on the Nighthawks' basketball team, resigned. That same day, school system officials announced they were investigating Northern's athletics program for eligibility issues.

Officials wouldn't say what sport they were looking into. Then again they didn't need to: Ten of Kowalewski's 16 basketball players also competed for the NC Gaters, the state's largest AAU basketball program.

For months, coaches and parents had quietly complained to officials that Kowalewski, vice president of the Gaters and one of the program's coaches, was recruiting Gaters players. Some from as far away as Mebane and Yanceyville.

When investigators determined Northern had used two ineligible players — a ruling that cost the school its 3-A title, Kowalewski was livid. He blasted the handling of the probe, yet in the same breath, pointed out that investigators had determined he had done nothing wrong.

Investigators also questioned his spending of more than $5,200 from a Northern Guilford basketball account on personal expenses such as landscaping, satellite television and a home exterminator.

He said those checks were his way of repaying himself more than $10,000 of his own money he put into the account. On Friday, he said his attorney turned over more than 300 documents last week to Jill Wilson, attorney for the Guilford County Schools board.

Wilson could not be reached to comment.

Kowalewski said he expects to be cleared of any financial impropriety, but wondered if that would put an end to his problems.

"First, they tried to get me on recruiting, then eligibility and they admitted they didn't have anything there and then the financial issue," Kowalewski said. "It's like, 'We've got to find something to nail Stan.' "

That's the beauty — and problem — with Kowalewski. He speaks his mind. Always has. Like the time he fired off a letter to the editor, ripping the two referees who he felt cost his team a win in the state playoffs.

"The officials," he wrote, "pulled off one of the greatest hometown jobs in history."

He called the game "a farce" and demanded that one of the referees never be allowed to officiate again.

Strong words for an adult. Kowalewski was a high school junior.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wish I wasn't so outspoken, but that's who I am."

He has won wherever he's coached. But success has come with controversy. He's been investigated at every high school coaching job he's held.

At Bishop McGuinness, his first, he was cleared of recruiting Montez Downey, Oak Ridge Military Academy's star basketball player in 2004, only to be fired later that year — three weeks before the start of the season.

As Kowalewski tells it, Bishop McGuinness officials complained to him that too many black students were enrolling at the school — many of them basketball players.

"Guys, c'mon," he recalls telling them. "You're not in the 1960s anymore. You can't continue to operate like this."

When he realized he was fighting a losing battle, he told his assistant coaches they needed to leave after the season. He said assistant coach Josh Thompson, the Villains' current head coach, informed school officials of the planned exodus and the staff was immediately dismissed.

Bishop McGuinness' principal, George Repass, won't discuss Kowalewski's firing, saying it is a personnel issue, but he denied Kowalewski's allegations that the school tried to curb the enrollment of blacks.

"That's absolutely, totally false," he said. "There was never any meeting of that nature or anything close to that with (Kowalewski)."

Kowalewski's next high school job came in 2005, at High Point Central, where he was accused of recruiting Jonathan Frye, a member of the Gaters and a promising freshman.

Again, Kowalewski was cleared.

When he took the job at Northern in 2007, Frye's family followed him, buying a house in Northern's attendance zone.

Once more, with feeling:

"I'm not the one recruiting these kids," Kowalewski says. "It's the parents who research me."

He says parents know his reputation. He says they know college coaches think highly of the way he runs his basketball program. Of the offseason workouts that build strength. Of the players' in-school reading program at Summerfield Elementary.

"Colleges know when they get a kid from our program he's going to be ready for basketball and school," he says.

Siena College coach Fran McCaffery agrees. McCaffery hired Kowalewski as an assistant coach for a year when McCaffery was the men's coach at UNCG.

"Stan's an excellent tactician," he said. "He knows the X's and O's better than anyone in Guilford County, and parents know this.

"Look, the world's changed. If a parent wants what's best for their child in school, they're going to move to the school that has the most computers, the school with the math department or the basketball coach they think can get their kid to the next level."

That's how Northern Guilford junior Michael Neal feels. "If Coach K is coaching somewhere else a lot of us will probably go with him," said Neal. "He's just a great guy. He's always so positive it makes you want to be around him all the time."

Kowalewski is still coaching AAU basketball. He just got back from Charlotte, where his sons AAU team played. He believes he'll be coaching in high school next year.

Sources said Saturday that Kowalewski approached officials at Oak Ridge Military Academy — the same school that once accused him of recruiting — about rebuilding their program. Oak Ridge officials told Kowalewski they needed to see how Guilford County Schools investigation into Northern, which is still ongoing, plays out.

School officials did not return phone calls, and Kowalewski declined to talk about any possible job.

McCaffery believes it's inevitable Kowalewski will be back coaching in the high school ranks somewhere.

"He loves basketball too much not to be a part, plus he's too good," McCaffery said. "We need more guys like Stan. I know what he stands for. You'll find that too many coaches stand for the opposite."

Then again, finding opposites has never been a problem when dealing with Stan Kowalewski. Finding something both sides can agree on is another story.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com