Villanova coach knows he has it good
When the Villanova Wildcats got home from their successful trip down the long tunnel of the Big East Tournament, Jay Wright started noticing all this stuff in the papers and on television about the Philadelphia Eagles. Apparently, there had been some moves or something.
“I said, ‘Arch, did you know they traded [Nick] Foles?’ ” Wright said to point guard Ryan Arcidiacono. “He keeps up with all that. He just looked at me and nodded.”
It’s easy for a coach to get lost in the basketball at this time of year, particularly one at a relatively small school in a relatively new conference alignment that happens to become the second-seeded team in the entire country. That sort of thing rarely happens, but it happened this season for Villanova, which has about one-third the enrollment of top-seeded Kentucky and lacks many of the amenities that are supposed requirements for elite programs.
“We understand our place in the atmosphere,” said Whitey Rigsby, who played at Villanova and is now the school’s director of development for athletics as well as the color commentator for basketball radio broadcasts. “We don’t have a huge endowment. We don’t have the money that a lot of the big state schools do. But the culture here, not to be pompous or arrogant, is different from other places. You’ve got to embrace it. You’re not getting the most money. You’re not getting the most facilities. But we’re number two in the country this week. That’s pretty good. And Jay deserves the lion’s share of the credit.”
Wright would deflect that praise and shift the focus to the university at large and the other people within the program specifically, and he would use all those buzzwords that are truly embraced on campus, but tend to elicit eye-rolls everywhere else. Playing “Villanova basketball” was a banner that was waved long before Wright became head coach, but he has perfected a blending of that tradition with the new realities of what it takes to win in the current game.
Villanova has only had five coaches since 1936, so continuity is nothing new. Wright, who is in his 14th season, followed Al Severance (1936-1961), Jack Kraft (19611973), Rollie Massimino (1973-1992) and Steve Lappas (1992-2001) into the job. They were all good — and Massimino had the great fortune to win the biggest college upset of alltime in 1985 — but Wright is better. In the school’s last 10 trips to the NCAA Tournament, the Wildcats have been a No. 5 seed or higher six times. That takes more than coaching. It takes a program that hums along very efficiently in all phases.
Wright is 53, in the absolute prime of his career, and if there is another challenge out there that intrigues him in the next few years, he could almost certainly name his ticket. He could also stay at Villanova for the rest of his coaching career, if he chose, but that seems unlikely. Wright has a healthy self-confidence and maybe he’d like to test that somewhere else. Maybe at a college program that can recruit the one-year wonders. Maybe in the pros. But, then again, maybe not.
This week and this month, it is a good time to coach Villanova, and Wright knows exactly how good he has it right here, right now.