Marquette’s Smart voted Associated Press Coach of the Year
Shaka Smart has packed an entire career's worth of experiences into 14 years as a college head coach.
He led VCU to an improbable Final Four as a 30-something wunderkind in 2011, guided mighty Texas to a Big 12 Tournament title during six otherwise tepid years in Austin, and now has turned Marquette into a Big East beast.
It's sometimes easy to forget he's still just 45 years old.
Yet his work with the Golden Eagles this season might have been his best: Picked ninth in the 11-team league by its coaches, they won the regular-season title going away, then beat Xavier to win their first Big East Tournament championship.
That earned Smart the Associated Press Coach of the Year award Friday. He garnered 24 of 58 votes from a national media panel to edge Kansas State's Jerome Tang, who received 13 votes before guiding the Wildcats to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, and Houston's Kelvin Sampson, who earned 10 before taking the Cougars to the Sweet 16.
Voting opened after the regular season and closed at the start of the NCAA Tournament, where the No. 2 seed Golden Eagles were knocked out in the second round by Michigan State and Smart's longtime mentor, Tom Izzo.
“I'm very grateful to win this award,” said Smart, the second Marquette coach to take it home after Hall of Famer Al McGuire in 1971.
“But obviously it always comes back to the guys you have on your team. Early on, we had a real sense the guys had genuine care and concern for one another, and we had a very good foundation for relationships that we could continue to build on.
“And over the course of seasons you go through so many different experiences as a team, and those experiences either bring you closer together or further apart. Our guys did a great job, even through adverse experiences, even through challenges, becoming closer together.”
It's hardly surprising such cohesion is what Smart would choose to remember most from a most memorable season.
The native of Madison, Wisconsin, who holds a master's degree in social science from California University of Pennsylvania, long ago earned a reputation for building close bonds with players and a tightknit camaraderie within his teams.
No matter how high or low the Golden Eagles were this season, those traits carried them through.
“Everything that we go through, whether it be the retreat that we went on before the season, all the workouts in the summer, he's preaching his culture,” said Tyler Kolek, a thirdteam All-American.
“And he's showing his leadership every single day, and just trying to impart that on us, and kind of put it in our DNA. Because it's definitely in his DNA.”
That's reflected in the way Smart, who accepted the Marquette job two years ago after an often bumpy tenure at Texas, has rebuilt the Golden Eagles program after it had begun to languish under Steve Wojciechowski.
Purdue’s Edey AP’s top player
Zach Edey spent the days following Purdue's historic NCAA Tournament loss lying low, his phone turned off, along with the rest of the outside world.
The disappointing finish did little to diminish the season the Boilermakers big man had.
Dominating at both ends of the floor during the regular season, Edey was a near-unanimous choice as the AP men's college basketball Player of the Year. Edey received all but one vote from a 58-person media panel, with Indiana's Trayce Jackson-Davis getting the other.
“The season ended in disappointment, which really sucks, but it's always nice to win individual accolades,” Edey said. “It kind of validates your work a little bit. The last three years I've played here, I've seen my game grow every year.
“AP Player of the Year is a great feeling. It just kind of stinks the way the season ended.”
That ending came in the NCAA Tournament's first round, when Purdue lost to Fairleigh Dickinson, joining Virginia in 2018 as the only No. 1 seeds to lose to a No. 16.
Before that, the 7-foot-4 Canadian was named a unanimous AP All-American and the Big Ten Player of the Year.