Jerry Wainwright and Blaine Taylor won five CAA championship games.
After combining for eight CAA championship game appearances as head coaches, Blaine Taylor and Jerry Wainwright have a unique understanding of what last night must have been like — and what today will be like — for Pat Kelsey and Takayo Siddle as they prepare to coach Charleston and UNC Wilmington in the championship game of a one-bid league in which the winner and his team will head off to the pageantry of the NCAA Tournament while the runner-up and his squad exits for a far quieter postseason or off-season destination.
They also understand what the other 364 days and nights of the year have been like for Kelsey and Siddle, and how today is the pop quiz they’ve been preparing to take all season.
“I think you can overdo it — I think you can feel the magnitude of the moment and I think you can overdo the shoot-arounds and the film work and the walkthroughs,” said Taylor, who retired from coaching in 2020 after four seasons as an assistant at UC Irvine and rejoined Old Dominion — whom he coached to three CAA titles and four NCAA Tournaments from 2001 through 2013 — in an athletic fundraising role last June.
“I think you’ve got to, on game day of a championship, build the belief that we’ve got all it takes,” said Taylor, who went 3-0 in CAA title games at Old Dominion and was 5-1 as a head coach in conference championship games overall. “We don’t need some magic potion. We’ve been preparing for this all year — our plays, our defenses, our players. You don’t want to be doing a bunch of rewriting the playbook and trying and having some magic serum just because it’s the championship game. What you’ve done all year should build to that moment.”
Wainwright, whose five CAA championship game appearances as UNC Wilmington’s head coach are matched or exceeded by only George Mason’s Jim Larranaga (six), Northeastern’s Bill Coen (five) and Richmond’s Dick Tarrant (five) and said he thought coaching high school basketball in Illinois — where every team qualified for a single-elimination tournament — prepared him for instilling into his players the urgency needed to succeed in the postseason.
But then Wainwright spent nine seasons as an assistant coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference at Wake Forest, which made the NCAA Tournament four times despite never winning the league’s regular season or tournament championship. Wainwright said he recognized he’d forgotten the urgency of a single-elimination format when his first team at UNC Wilmington finished second in the CAA in 1994-95 but was upset by seventh-seeded Richmond in the quarterfinals.
“I didn’t have the mindset of a one-bid league — I just didn’t have it, because I’d been spoiled by going to the NCAAs by just competing in the ACC,” Wainwright said. “It was my fault because I hadn’t mentally prepared our guys, really, for (the) single-elimination (format), meaning one bid.
“We never ever, after that, in my next seven years, ever lost in the first round, because my mindset from day one was we were going to play tournament basketball all year.”
Wainwright directed UNC Wilmington to a 13-5 record in CAA Tournament action, including 2-3 in the title game, over his final seven seasons at the school. He said he had the Seahawks review plays from every team throughout their regular season practices so that nothing they saw at tournament time would come as a surprise or require a crash course.
“When I was at Wilmington, Paul Westhead was at George Mason (and) they played the Loyola Marymount fast break — well, you don’t get ready for that in a day, you don’t get ready for that in two days,” Wainwright said. “So we practiced against the best plays and the most common actions of everybody in our league.”
Taylor said his staffs at Montana, where he coached the Grizzlies to two Big Sky championships in seven seasons, and Old Dominion would arrive to the conference tournament with scouting plans already in place for whomever they might face.
“You would have things you did — good things you did, bad, you would have some pre-prepared highlight tapes for your team, for your staff,” Taylor said. “During the course of the year, you’re trying to get yourself ready for about anything you might see.”
For Taylor and Wainwright, the biggest task on the day of a championship game was keeping everyone else loose and calm — easy enough objectives to meet for a pair of men who have never been short with a quip or an ability to spin a raconteur-like tale.
“I see teams play so tight once all the marbles are on the line,” Taylor said. “I always told a story before the championship game. I’d walk in and say ‘Hey, this is how I see it unfolding.’ It might be wacky, it might be funny, it might have some sort of a message. But I always told a story and I thought that kind of relaxed us, kind of took away the ‘Hey, we’ve got to win at all costs’ kind of thing.”
“I did all kinds of crazy stuff," Wainwright said, “I gave a pregame talk standing on my head against a wall. I did a pregame talk wearing a Seahawk mask. I think sometimes kids can be tight. It really is a game, right?”
While there’s no eliminating nerves and anxiety with an NCAA Tournament berth at stake, Taylor and Wainwright said they were able to watch their teams take the court understanding the preparation was as complete as it could be — or, in a classic Taylor-ism, understanding he got “…the hay in the barn” — and there’d be no wondering what might have been, even in defeat.
“We were 27-4 one year and I felt like it was an all-or-nothing deal,” Taylor said, referring to his first NCAA Tournament team at Montana in 1991-92. “So it can crowd you. But you’re almost better off not thinking that way, kind of acting more confident than you really are. We’re going to do fine, let’s put our best foot forward here and the thing I always said is no regrets. Let’s lay it on the line, no regrets. Whatever you do, let’s not leave here with some regrets that we’re worried about something or we didn’t quite do everything we could within our power to perform.”
“You never want them to lose the significance of the game,” said Wainwright, who later served as the head coach at Richmond and DePaul and is conducting clinics following after stints as an assistant at Marquette, Fresno State and Tulsa. “But the significance of the game is that you do what you practiced to the best of your ability. That’s really the significance of the game, because isn’t that what we’re supposed to try and do each day of our lives?”
No comments:
Post a Comment