{"id":71,"date":"2010-11-09T18:03:02","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T22:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=71"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:19:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:19:04","slug":"more-than-just-a-game-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2010\/11\/more-than-just-a-game-2\/","title":{"rendered":"More than just a game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The way Coach Kevin Willard sees it, basketball imparts important lessons about life \u2014 on and off the court.<\/p>\n

Kevin Willard\u2019s ascent as a basketball coach has been both rapid and unusual.<\/p>\n

Seton Hall\u2019s new men\u2019s coach, just 35, grew up in Northport, Long Island, the son of Ralph Willard, a high-school basketball coach who went on to fame as head coach at several universities, including Holy Cross, Western Kentucky and the University of Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n

Coaching basketball, it seems, runs in the Willard family. Though nothing about Kevin\u2019s coaching career was preordained, it may seem that way in retrospect.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first memories of childhood were being in St. Dominic High School\u2019s gym, chasing down balls and helping [my Dad] varnish the floors,\u201d he says. With his older brother Keith (\u201cmy best friend for as long as I can remember\u201d), Willard would play hide-and-seek in the bleachers, take shots along the side of the court while the team practiced, and share a family pizza in the\u00a0 gym if the evening ran long. \u201cIt was a huge part of my family\u2019s life, like going to all the away games.<\/p>\n

It was what we did,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His father, now an associate coach at Louisville,<\/p>\n

agrees, noting that Kevin\u2019s mom, Dorothy, was a physical education teacher at St. Dominic\u2019s and that Kevin\u2019s younger sister, Pamela, acted as a combination mascot and cheerleader. \u201cWe always had the kids in the gym.<\/p>\n

Our whole family lived around sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean the Willards were obsessed. \u201cMy Dad didn\u2019t force basketball down my throat,\u201d Willard emphasizes. \u201cHe never pushed the game on me. In fact, he didn\u2019t seem to give a hoot if he saw me make a terrible layup.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t really start learning about my father as a coach until I began playing for him [at Western Kentucky],\u201d Willard says, noting that his own focus was on becoming an NBA player.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it hit me at around age 19 that I wasn\u2019t going to be the next John Stockton,\u201d Willard says with a laugh, referring to the Utah Jazz great.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when he started to look closely at how his father led young men to do their best. His first discovery: \u201cI was amazed at the amount of respect they had for him. They always told me how much they enjoyed playing for my father.\u201c<\/p>\n

The lesson was \u201cto treat players like men and expect a great deal from them.\u201d Both Willards today seek to recruit young men who are not only great basketball players, but who also have potential off the court, Willard says.<\/p>\n

How does a coach build that kind of life success? Several ways: \u201cYou give them great structure in their lives. You give them the responsibility of being prepared and on time. And you talk to them a lot about being sharp off the court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basketball, Willard believes, is a microcosm for the human experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really does teach young men everything they need in life to be successful,\u201d he says. And it does it in a pressure-cooker atmosphere. \u201cEvery time they step on the court, they are right in front of 15,000 fans who can see their every facial expression. They can see when things go bad and well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some character development occurs outside the gym, as Willard knows from personal experience. \u201cWhen Kevin was a freshman at Western Kentucky, he wasn\u2019t playing much,\u201d his father recalls, \u201cbut he wasn\u2019t moping around, either. Every Monday, I\u2019d want to start studying the films, but they\u2019d be gone. I\u2019d ask everybody, \u2018Where the heck are they?\u2019 And they\u2019d say, \u2018Check with Kevin.\u2019<\/p>\n

So I\u2019d head to the dorms and there he\u2019d be, watching them, telling me what we needed to do. That\u2019s when I started to understand how passionate he was about the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, while Willard was averaging 2.6 points a game at Pitt, family friend Rick Pitino offered him the job as an advance scout for the Boston Celtics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI jumped at the opportunity,\u201d Willard says of the experience he describes now as the equivalent of getting a Ph.D. in coaching.<\/p>\n

As Pitino later told the The Star-Ledger, \u201cThe thing that stuck out to me was how much the pro players liked him. All the great players loved Kev. They\u2019d sit and talk together, but he would turn around and teach the pro guys and he was very comfortable doing that. That\u2019s very unusual for a young man who was 22, 23, to interact with the pros like that. They had a lot of respect for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Willard\u2019s father notes that his son can motivate players when they\u2019re down, yet also apply strict discipline when necessary. \u201cKevin can handle people, as well as X\u2019s and O\u2019s. He has always been attuned to people\u2019s feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Willard calls his time with the Celtics \u201cthe greatest experience I could have had to become a coach.\u201d Not only was it an advanced course, it was a concentrated one: the pros play about 100 games a season, instead of the 30 in college. But after four years with the Celtics, he was ready to start his own coaching career. The opportunity came as an assistant to Pitino at Louisville.<\/p>\n

Eventually \u2014 with encouragement from both Pitino and his father \u2014 Willard made the jump to head coach at Iona in 2007. There, he led the Gaels to an overall record of 21-10 in the 2009-10 season.<\/p>\n

Now that he\u2019s at Seton Hall, basketball and family remain tightly entwined. After all, this season, the Pirates will play Louisville\u2019s Cardinals, where his father is an associate coach for Pitino.<\/p>\n

At home, Willard\u2019s wife, Julie, and their two sons are big fans. \u201cThey\u2019re already ball boys,\u201d he says of Colin and Chase, who are 4 and 2.<\/p>\n

But following another family tradition, he\u2019s applying no pressure. \u201cI also have a golf club in their hands,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Bob Gilbert is a freelance writer in Connecticut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The way Coach Kevin Willard sees it, basketball imparts important lessons about life \u2014 on and off the court. Kevin Willard\u2019s ascent as a basketball coach has been both rapid and unusual. Seton Hall\u2019s new men\u2019s coach, just 35, grew up in Northport, Long Island, the son of Ralph Willard, a high-school basketball coach who…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingMore than just a game<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":1009,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,257,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2010-2014","category-articles-2010-2014","category-sports","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3725,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/3725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}