Minneapolis ? You go in thinking Jay Wright is just too good to be true. You come away convinced he’s too true to be anything but good at what he does.
“He’s a real person,” Villanova forward Will Sheridan said about his coach. The accent on the key word – real – said more than that sentence conveys in print. Sheridan was paying Wright as high a compliment as he could.
Real.
If the Wildcats win today, if they become the first Philadelphia team to reach the Final Four since their 1985 forefathers, Wright is going to be on the biggest stage his sport offers. He is going to take that enormous, life-changing step from Very Good Coach to National Prominence.
And the whole country will no doubt go through what most people do when they first encounter Wright. You see the perfect hair and the expensive suits, and you suspect you’re dealing with the standard-issue slick, phony college coach.
Then you realize that Wright isn’t anything like the stereotype. The coaches who are pretending to be good guys reveal themselves eventually. It’s inevitable. The more time you spend with them, the less you like them.
Wright is exactly the opposite. The more you’re around him, the more you have to like and respect the way he runs his basketball program.
“He’s very sincere,” guard Mike Nardi said. “He’s very real. You can tell when someone is trying to be cool, when it’s not real, but he’s very sincere about it. He’s always trying to help someone out.”
Just as you can tell a lot about people by the way their children turn out, you can learn a lot about a college coach from the way his players conduct themselves.
Billy Donovan, whose Florida team is ‘Nova’s final obstacle to the Final Four, said an interesting thing Saturday. More than wins and losses, he said, he would want to be judged as a coach by what his players someday told their children about the impact he had on their lives.
“If their mind-set is, ‘I didn’t learn anything from that guy for life, he never prepared me after I left Florida, I don’t have a relationship with him, he was all about him,’ then you know what? I am a bad coach if my players say that,” Donovan said.
So here’s Randy Foye talking about Jay Wright:
“He is not really talking about basketball most of the time,” Foye said. “He is talking about the big picture and life in general. He always tells us basketball only lasts for 12 years and you have 50 more years to live after that. He’s a father figure to us.”
Foye, Ray, Jason Fraser and the other Villanova seniors were scheduled to graduate on time, Wright said.
Oh, and they also happen to be the core of one of the best basketball teams in the country, one of the final eight playing for the NCAA championship. Don’t think for a moment that Wright isn’t a big reason for that.
His coaching ability is a little like his personality. He’s deceptively good. When you first watch his substitution patterns, you think he’s overmanaging his team. It doesn’t seem possible that his players can stay in any kind of rhythm when there’s a change in the lineup at nearly every stoppage of play.
In Friday night’s 60-59 overtime victory over Boston College, Wright made 72 substitutions, by CBS’s count – and Foye played all 45 minutes.
But it works, because of the feel Wright has for his team, for the other team, and for the flow of the game. Villanova always seems to have the right five guys on the floor at any given time.
And it works because the players understand and trust what he’s doing, even if it means they sit for longer than they might like.
“He never promises anything he doesn’t deliver,” Sheridan said. “We know we have to earn what we get. At the same time, he was a ballplayer himself, so he understands where we’re coming from.”
The other thing Wright understands is Philadelphia basketball, which is no small thing. The Big Five (and we’re including Drexel here) has its long history and complex politics, and each school has its own lore and traditions. Coaches have to find a way to stand out while also fitting in.
Wright has succeeded there, too. When it comes to the Big Five, he gets it. And when it comes to Villanova’s own history, he gets that, too. His inclusion of Rollie Massimino, the coach of the 1985 team, is remarkably generous. A coach with an oversize ego, and there are plenty of them out there, wouldn’t share his limelight that way.
Maybe that’s why his players are so unselfish on the court. Maybe that’s why they’re all here, together, with a chance to make more Villanova and Philadelphia history.