Swinging for the Fences Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on pinterest_share More Sharing Services 13 Dan Colliins | Posted 5 hours ago Sitting here on Friday, March 28, 2014, Ron Wellman appears to be in a pickle. He needs a basketball coach to replace the one that didnt work out. To say Jeff Bzdelik didnt work out at Wake is like saying the latest film adaptation of Gullivers Travels (the one starring Jack Black) didnt quite live up to the book. His fan base is tired of losing. No, the word tired is not strong enough. The fan base is sick of losing, and for good reason. Four years have now passed since Wake accomplished anything more than an occasional home-court upset. The really good teams of college basketball, the kind Wake was during the days of Dave Odom and Skip Prosser, dont consider any home victory an upset. The home venue, Joel Coliseum, is probably somewhat too large for Wakes purposes and needs extensive renovation. Whoever is the next coach has a roster problem, in that theres a bottleneck of eight sophomores-turning-juniors passing through the program that will tie up efforts to bring in fresh, upgraded talent. Whoever is the next coach is going to be recruiting to a school where players are required to go to class and get their work done. And were not talking about dummy classes and 148-word final papers marked A-minus. Whoever is the next coach is going to be thrown into the shark tank of the expanded ACC and find themselves going nose to nose with four Hall-of-Fame coaches (Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams and Rick Pitino), two others (Leonard Hamilton and Jim Larrananga) who were good enough to win ACC titles at such remote locales as Florida State and Miami and yet another (Tony Bennett) who might be the hottest coach in college basketball as I write this. And to up the ante on Wellman, he knows that if he gets this one wrong, itll be pretty much all anyone will ever remember him for. On repeated occasions Ive referred to Wellman as a smart man. Im not being patronizing, or in any way disingenuous in doing so. His is a hard job and he has done it well enough to see, during his tenure, the football team win an ACC title and play in the Orange Bowl, the basketball team ranked No. 1 in the nation and the school build a picture-perfect football stadium. To do so takes brains, and Wellman is not lacking for bytes on the hard drive. Heres the point Im setting up. As a smart man, Wellman realizes that life always dynamic, never static. Nothing remains the same. Its always changing, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Everything remains in flux. By looking at it this way, Wellman can see that the greatest challenge of his time at Wake is also his greatest opportunity. If he can get this one right -- and if, indeed, is the operative word -- then the sky can be the limit for Wake basketball. And by the sky, were talking not just ACC prominence but shooting the moon and landing in the Final Four for the first time since Bones McKinney. Were talking One Shining Moment stuff. Hey, if Villanova 1985, then why not Wake Forest 2018? If he gets it right, the fan base will rally around a proven coach with energy and charisma. There will be an outpouring of support and passion the likes of which the school has never seen. If he gets it right, and said support and passion follows, then he can shake out the funds to turn Joel Coliseum into a true showplace. one owned lock-stock-and-barrel by a school free to do with it what it likes. If he gets it right, then the Deacons can be competitive by next season and the season after. And then when the bottleneck of sophomores-turning-juniors passes through, the new coach will have all the leeway and opportunity he needs to bring in the kind of players he feels he needs to win championships. If he gets it right, hell find a coach committed to turning Wakes perceived liabilities into strengths, the same tack Dave Clawson has taken in his first three months as the new football coach. Just yesterday it occurred to me what a special place Wake really is. I was standing there at the wall watching spring football practice with a flock of my wall-bird buddies, and we were all gathered around Randolph Childress and Alphonso Smith, two of the schools favorite all-time sons. And while we were there, another of the all-time greats, Michael Campanaro, passed by to say hello. Theres an intimacy at Wake that few other schools who compete in major-college sports can match. Yes its small, but why does small have to be less than? If he gets it right, then the new coach can not only compete with the four Hall-of-Fame coaches in the ACC, he can outlast them. In five years Krzyzewski will be 72, Williams 68, Boeheim 74 and Pitino the spring chicken among them at 66. Its not hard to see a power vacuum developing, and if the right coaches spends the next five years getting it right, then he can build a program that all the others in the ACC are judging themselves by. There are folks pretty close to this search who are telling me that Wellman is swinging for the fences on this hire. Theyre the same people who are telling him he should. Im actually hearing from certain quarters that to lure Shaka Smart away from VCU would be settling. Personally, I think Shaka would be a home run, even if others see it only as a sharp double off the wall. I know there are those reading this who are dying for details of the search. Im dying to learn them well enough to report them. When I do, I will. But in the meantime, what I can tell you is that Ron Wellman knows better than anyone all that is riding on this coaching search. He recognizes that nothing short of the future of Wake basketball -- as well as his own personal legacy -- is on the line.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 22:31:30 +0000
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