Mentor’s Bob Krizancic solidified his place in Ohio high school basketball history on Jan. 16.

After 38 years, 25 at Mentor, the Cardinals’ coach won his 600th career game with a victory at Eastlake North. Only 13 other coaches have surpassed such a milestone.

Six hundred victories don’t indicate to Krizancic what the scoreboard showed after a given game. He doesn’t even think it says much about his own career.

“If I could script out what I want on 600, 600 is not about me,” Krizancic said. “600 is a tribute to my players and the guys that have coached alongside me. That’s how I would script my 600.”

Jason Ioppolo met his new basketball coach in the summer of 1993. A rising senior point guard, Ioppolo aspired to play college basketball.

One of the Cardinals’ top returning players, Ioppolo was eager to meet Bob Krizancic.

Fresh off a state championship, Krizancic brought a new perspective to Mentor basketball.

“I thought I was working hard,” Ioppolo said. “Then I met Coach K.”

That year, the Cardinals moved into the Lake Erie League from the Greater Cleveland Conference. That meant teams like Mayfield, South and North were replaced by Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights on the team’s basketball schedule.

The work began immediately.

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Krizancic sent Mentor to play with its new league-mates in a challenging summer circuit that included Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights and Bedford.

“It was a culture shock,” Ioppolo said. “There were no fouls called in open gyms. He put us in the toughest summer league he could find. It was going to be uncomfortable. But that’s what he needed to do to change the mentality of the program.”

Twenty-five years later, Krizancic has guided the Cardinals to a state championship and more than 400 wins.

“I’m really glad he came here,” Ioppolo said. “I feel like he transformed the basketball program, and the community.”

Krizancic hails from Girard, Ohio, where he was born to Mickey and Frances Krizancic. The Krizancics moved to Kansas City, Mo., when Mickey, a minor-league baseball player, caught on with the Kansas City Blues and his mother worked for Boeing. They later moved to Pennsylvania, where family resided near Pittsburgh in Ambridge and Aliquippa. Mickey Krizancic’s brother, Johnny, resided in western Pennsylvania and gained international notoriety as a polka performer in the 1960s. Krizancic’s family returned to steel country near Youngstown, where Bob graduated from Girard High School.

Before that, Mickey Krizancic sent his son to St. Rose Catholic Church in sixth grade to join his first basketball team. Bob Krizancic admits he was scared at first, but played pretty well by the time he was an eighth-grader.

Before Krizancic’s sophomore year, Glenn Bower took over as the Indians’ head basketball coach. Bower brought a hard-nosed philosophy to Girard based around full-court pressure and an up-tempo style — a paradigm shift from the Indians’ slower offense and zone defense — and Girard’s roster underwent upheaval.

“Looking back, it was a huge advantage on my part,” Krizancic said. “He was really tough, a lot of people left the team, and I ended up starting for three years. He was fundamentally extremely sound.”

One of few holdovers from the previous season, Krizancic took the reins as the Indians’ starting point guard. By his senior season, he secured a scholarship to play basketball at Youngstown State, as the Penguins moved from NCAA Division II to D-I.

Krizancic played at Youngstown State for Dom Rosselli, who amassed 589 wins in 38 years as the Penguins’ head coach. From his college coach, Krizancic learned no detail was insignificant — execution in games and especially practices required perfection.

Krizancic digested an equally enduring lesson during the most arduous game of his career.

Youngstown State hosted the University of San Francisco during Krizancic’s sophomore season. The Penguins inbounded to Krizancic following the Dons’ first basket and when he turned upcourt, he was met by two defenders prepared to harass Youngstown State’s guards.

“Every single possession they were in my face,” Krizancic said. “They were good, and we lost the game, I think. I just said right there, if I ever, ever coach, I want to make life as miserable for the opponents as they made. And it stuck with me.”

Krizancic graduated from Youngstown State in 1976 with a degree in psychology alongside minors in math and science. Next to his on-court experience, Krizancic assimilated different pressure defenses learned from clinics featuring Jim Valvano and Bobby Knight into his own system.

A few years later, at 25, Krizancic was hired by his alma mater.

Once again, the Indians needed change. As it was during Krizancic’s playing days, the process was unpleasant. Ten of 12 seniors quit the program before the season began, and the team’s best player left after two games.

Krizancic’s finished his first high school coaching season with a 1-20 record. Halfway through a two-year contract, on advice from an older coach, Krizancic resolved if he’d be fired, it’d be for running the program on his terms.

Year 2 began bleakly. The Indians were 1-5 and the town’s ire grew for its 26-year-old head coach.

Then Girard won nine games in a row and knocked off two top 10-ranked teams in the process.

“Somebody said, it stuck with me, do it for what you believe in,” Krizancic said. “Your philosophy. A lot like Mentor, changed the culture, changed the mentality. Believe in yourself and have your players believe in themselves.”

Such belief mounted into a 13-year tenure as Girard’s head coach, capped by a Division II state championship in 1993. Girard’s state title under Krizancic separated a pair of back-to-back state titles by Villa Angela-St. Joseph, in 1991-92 and 1994-95.

Krizancic was prepared to resign from Girard prior to the 1992-93 season.

He’d spent previous summers coaching as an assistant in Canada’s World Basketball League. In the summer of 1992, Krizancic was offered the head coaching job of the league’s Montreal franchise.

Before Krizancic could resign and accept, the league folded. Youngstown native Michael Monus, the president of deep-discount drug and grocery chain Phar-Mor, owned a stake in the league’s 10 franchises. He was convicted of fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement and other crimes.

The WBL folded in the fallout, and Krizancic returned to Girard for a final, championship season.

After the Indians’ state title, Krizancic continued his search for another coaching position to better accommodate his now ex-wife’s career working in the airlines. He targeted jobs near Cleveland or Pittsburgh, near hub airports.

Mentor offered Krizancic a job after he interviewed with the Cardinals. Krizancic turned them down. Rather, he nearly became the head coach at Shaler High School, eight miles outside Pittsburgh, which featured future NBA player Danny Fortson.

Krizancic informed longtime friend and current West Virginia coach Bob Huggins of his interview. Huggins enlisted Billy Donovan and a handful of other college coaches, who all called the Shaler athletic director to vouch for Krizancic.

“I’m walking out and the AD goes ‘I don’t know how the hell you have this pull, but if you want the job, it’s yours,’ ” Krizancic said. “He said, ‘Listen, call me first thing in the morning.’ ”

When Krizancic called the next day, he learned the school board looked to shift focus from its athletic program. The job would be fantastic for a year, Krizancic was told, but would become difficult from there.

The job fell through and Krizancic panicked. Then, he was contacted again by Mentor.

The phone call ended with him in place as the Cardinals’ new head coach, asking Mentor’s athletic director to put him in touch with a realtor.

“I had gone through about five or six interviews and schools and the whole bit,” Krizancic said. “The Shaler thing kind of soured me so I said, I think Mentor’s a good job. ‘Boom, I’m going to take it.’ ”

After the Cardinals won 13 games combined the previous two seasons, Krizancic instilled a new mentality.

Mentor started 2-3 before the Cardinals won eight games in a row. Their winning streak was tested with a matchup against a 9-0, No. 5-ranked Shaw team. Halfway through his first year, Krizancic tucked a signature win under his belt.

“It just built this different mindset that we never had,” Ioppolo said. “We never believed we could compete with those teams, and he expected us to beat them, that was the beauty of it.”

Conversely, Ioppolo remembers running the night before Mentor’s next game against Shaker Heights like the Cardinals were back in the preseason.

Mentor finished the season 14-7, a year that was a springboard into Krizancic’s tenure at Mentor. The Cardinals have endured losing seasons just twice in his 25 seasons, the last in 1998.

Krizancic’s tenure at Mentor includes one other blemish. He was suspended for the final three regular-season games and entire postseason of 2004. The OHSAA ruled Mentor violated Bylaw 9-2-3 when the Cardinals missed school time to participate in the Smith’s Ragu Classic at Utah Valley State College.

During the 2000s, Krizancic spent his summers speaking next to college coaches at Nike clinics and working internationally with Sports Ambassadors. Krizancic’s travels took him to the Eiffel Tower, Vatican, Athens’ Acropolis and luging in the Alps.

One year, Krizancic coached in Hawaii, where teams were provided with a van and two hours of free time each day. Each day, Krizancic’s players asked to take the same trip. They didn’t want to go to Pearl Harbor or any of Hawaii’s tourist destinations.

Each day, Krizancic’s team lobbied to go to the beach, where episodes of “Baywatch” were being filmed at the time.

“It was hilarious,” Krizancic said. “I must have watched the set of Baywatch four or five times, I said, ‘(you get) one hour.’ ”

Krizancic led Mentor to the program’s first final four berth in 2010, and the Cardinals won their first state title in 2013.

Before the 2010 season, Krizancic almost left Mentor to coach in the New Zealand’s Professional League. He was offered a three-year contract with a sizable salary, car and housing. His sons, Cole and Conner, could attend prep schools and play basketball.

But as Conner began playing football at Mentor that year, Krizancic couldn’t pull the trigger. In another fortuitous development, Krizancic’s next season resulted in the Cardinals’ first state trip.

Krizancic considers himself fortunate to coach his sons, as it allowed him to form relationships with their friends.

“I based their upbringing on their friendships more than education,” Krizancic said. “You can have a great job, you can be as educated as you want. You’ve got to share it with somebody and have a relationship.”

Now at 605 wins and counting, Krizancic’s victories resemble more to him than how many times his teams scored more points than an opponent. Countless relationships forged and maintained during the past 38 seasons are what he holds dear.

Collin Barth transferred into the Mentor Public Schools district from Olmsted Falls for his senior season, the 2010-11 school year. Currently a second-year graduate assistant at the University of Detroit Mercy, Barth led the Cardinals to a regional final berth, where Mentor lost to Garfield Heights.

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He received a valuable piece of advice from one of Krizancic’s former players before he arrived at Mentor: Listen to what Krizancic says, not how he says it.

Nearly seven years after Barth graduated from Mentor, he credits Krizancic for his passion to pursue a coaching career.

“My only regret is not being there earlier,” Barth said. “After having dealt with him, obviously he has different tactics and different strategies than other people may have. Outside of my family, I haven’t been impacted, both basketball and life, more than anyone other than him.”

The following season, Mentor fell in a regional semifinal. That year, Justin Fritts was awarded Mr. Basketball.

After playing at Wheeling Jesuit, Fritts works in Fort Wayne, Ind., as a medical device salesman for Stryker. With the benefit of hindsight, Fritts reflects on his time playing for Krizancic in a similar fashion to many Mentor alumni.

“It was a good experience for about 90 percent of the time,” Fritts said. “Ten percent of the time I wanted to kill him. But 90 percent of the time it was good, you don’t really realize the lessons and the way he coaches until you graduate.”

Before Kade McClure became an All-American pitcher at Louisville and sixth-round draft pick of the White Sox, he was a member of Mentor’s 2013 state championship team. The year prior, McClure’s sophomore season, the Cardinals lost to Warren Harding in a regional final and the team returned to Mentor from Cleveland State.

In the gym hallway, Krizancic told McClure his expectations for the next season. He didn’t need 25 points per game from the rising junior, but held McClure to a high standard.

“Coach, I don’t want that feeling ever again,” McClure told Krizancic. “Before we’re done here, we’re going to win you a state championship.”

Alongside Conner Krizancic and Brandon Fritts, McClure and the Cardinals defeated Toledo Rogers in the final game of the 2013 season.

When McClure arrived at Louisville, he found himself well-prepared for the rigors of Division I athletic training after playing for Krizancic and football coach Steve Trivisonno.

“I was athletic and a pretty good athlete for my age,” McClure said. “I think that if I would have went to a smaller school or I wouldn’t have had as much guidance from him and Triv, I don’t know if I would’ve gotten as much out of myself as I’m able to get.”

Krizancic estimates he received between 200 to 300 texts and calls after won his 600th game on Jan. 16 at North.

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To his former players, the wins speak to Krizancic as much as their own.

“He’s old,” Fritts joked. “No, it’s a testament. I called him after 600 and congratulated him. Yes, he’s a good coach. Yes, he’s got a great program. Yes, he has good people working for him. But he puts in a lot of hours, he puts in a ton of hours. It doesn’t come easy to build the program that Mentor has.”

A refrain — beside stories of being kicked out of practice or film study — among Mentor’s basketball alumni is that Krizancic extracts the best from his players. Superior work ethic and mental fortitude are the core of what assistant Neil Grantz coined the “Mentor Mentality.”

Krizancic’s success derives from relationships with players as well as with parents. Krizancic’s practices are open and he’s involved with Mentor’s youth and middle school programs, which run similar systems to the high school teams.

The Cardinal Cage booster club hosts social gatherings throughout the school year, starting with cookouts in August. After most home games, many are welcome at Krizancic’s home for postgame celebration. Above all, Krizancic hopes parents understand his vested interest in their sons’ present and future success.

“When those all collide,” Barth said, “it’s obvious that he’s successful because he gets the most out of his players and his coaches without a doubt. I’d say arguably better than anybody else in the country.”

Krizancic retired from teaching in 2015. The school allowed him to continue coaching, a decision that required no hesitation on Krizancic’s behalf.

“I still love it,” Krizancic said. “I still love the adrenaline, I still get nervous before a game.”

Krizancic shows no signs of slowing down. He works out two to three times a day, participating in “boot camp” or Tae Bo classes at Heisley Racquet and Fitness Club in Mentor. His workouts aren’t a new habit. When his Girard teams lost, Krizancic’s coped by running in the night’s late hours.

A recent physical indicated his numbers are “off the charts.”

At least for the near future, Krizancic figures to remain a fixture on Mentor’s sideline — vociferous as ever in his requests for referees to blow their whistle so an opposing defender will “get his hands off” when guarding Mentor’s players.

“I know he’s a little different,” Ioppolo said. “He was a little more fiery back then but he’s the same guy. He still holds the cup of water, he’s the same guy. It’s great to see on a Friday night you can go to the gym, and you know what to expect.”