Kevin Willard has ridden grit and tradition to early success at Maryland

Kevin Willard inherited a large number at his first head teaching job. He needed to fully rebuild Iona’s roster after it took an opportunity on an up-and-coming candidate with no prior expertise because the chief of a school basketball program.

And simply as irritating — the partitions within the locker room have been maroon.

They have been too darkish. An excessive amount of of a reminder of the crew that had gained simply two video games the season prior. It wanted to vary.

“I wish to repaint the locker room,” assistant coach Dan McHale recollects Willard telling him one evening.

McHale, in his early twenties and hoping to impress in his first assistant teaching function, was fast to agree.

“OK Coach, you recognize, we will name a upkeep particular person or someone —”

“No, no,” Willard minimize him off. “I’m going to the shop.”

Off he went and again he got here, returning with two cans of cream-colored paint. It was a brighter, extra constructive hue that promised to open the locker room up and usher in a brand new period of Iona basketball.

Willard rolled up his sleeves and started working, rolling paint onto the partitions by means of the wee hours of the evening. He refused to cease till sufficient coats had been utilized to ensure none of that boring, bleak maroon would bleed by means of. This was his crew now, and no job was going to be too small for him. He would take no shortcuts to show himself. He would do it the precise manner — his manner.

“He wished his imprints on this program from the bottom up — actually,” McHale mentioned.

Fifteen years after getting his head teaching begin, Willard’s laborious work paid off when he accepted the Maryland job in 2022, a place he referred to as a “top-10 job in faculty basketball, fingers down” when he was launched.

He was the alternative for Mark Turgeon, who coached seven full seasons within the Large Ten and by no means completed under eighth place. However after incomes only one regular-season title — a three-way tie — it grew to become clear a change was inevitable. Simply eight video games into the 2021-22 season, Turgeon and Maryland break up methods.

Even in a world the place different colleges are ready in line to hitch the Large Ten or SEC, there’s nonetheless a way of estrangement for Terps followers in a primarily Midwestern league. Maryland was a founding member of the ACC. After all it’s going to really feel like a misfit within the Large Ten for some time.

There’s a pure chip that Maryland followers proudly put on on their shoulder. And if you need a coach with a chip on their shoulder, Willard’s your man.

That’s the identification his first crew at Maryland has embraced. The Terps have been stuffed with query marks coming into the season, however they answered sufficient to play an NCAA Match sport on Thursday.

This yr’s Terps are bodily, steadily press after made baskets and depend on the pick-and-roll. Nothing flashy, however they get the job achieved. A basic Kevin Willard crew.

Issues about guard play have been quelled by the explosion of Jahmir Younger, who transferred from Charlotte and earned second-team All-Large Ten honors. Julian Reese shortly grew to become one of many Large Ten’s most promising younger forwards. Even Patrick Emilien, a fifth-year journeyman who made earlier stops at Western Michigan and St. Francis (NY), blossomed into one of many crew’s most essential gamers.

Willard’s status is a coach that will get absolutely the most out of his gamers. In comparison with their competitors, his Seton Corridor groups have been by no means chock-full of elite prospects. However Willard made the NCAA Match 5 of his final six seasons there, not together with the tournament-less 2020 season by which he had his finest squad. Contemplating what he inherited, the consistency he coached with was outstanding.

Pair that with the sources and recruiting base that Maryland possesses, and the sky’s the restrict. That’s the imaginative and prescient athletic director Damon Evans should’ve had when he employed him final April.

“I feel I made Damon Evans look fairly good,” Willard joked after listening to his crew’s title referred to as on Choice Sunday.

Willard’s made it clear that he took the Maryland job to compete for convention and nationwide championships. “No different expectation is allowed on this program,” he as soon as mentioned. There are many rungs on the ladder left to climb previous an NCAA Match berth and highly-regarded recruiting class, however these are some promising first steps.

“I really feel like that is all only a reflection of the work we put in as a crew and the brand new tradition, with the coaches,” Reese mentioned. “And I really feel like all of us purchased into the brand new system and it paid off.”

Willard’s unparalleled work ethic — and equally intense love for the sport of basketball — was instilled in him from the day he was born. That comes with the territory of being Ralph Willard’s son.

Ralph coached at St. Dominic Excessive College on Lengthy Island, New York, the place Kevin was born. Kevin would grasp round his father’s practices as a younger baby, absorbing what he may. He noticed firsthand what it took to achieve success within the sport of basketball. You possibly can’t accept something lower than one of the best.

That lesson clearly caught with him. When Willard was a guard for Bowling Inexperienced Excessive College — his father was by then the top coach at close by Western Kentucky — he earned a possibility to check out for the state’s all-star crew. When he wasn’t chosen, he angrily scribbled “NOT GOOD ENOUGH” on a bit of tape and slapped it on his rest room mirror. By the point Ralph got here throughout it, his son was already on the park engaged on his leap shot.

Even as soon as he was enjoying in faculty for his father, Willard made a behavior out of studying recruiting letters from colleges that didn’t observe up with him every time he wanted some additional motivation. After video games, he could possibly be noticed working the steps and taking pictures on the courtroom of the world. When he couldn’t sleep after a loss, he dribbled up and down the courtroom as quick as doable.

Willard, the identical younger man who self-depricatingly proclaimed that “it could be silly” for his father to “waste a scholarship” on him, ultimately joined the household enterprise by making the swap to the teaching realm. As an alternative of enjoying his senior season at Pittsburgh, he graduated and took a task with the Boston Celtics. The pinnacle coach there was Rick Pitino, one in every of his father’s foremost mentors and shortly to be one in every of his as nicely.

It was whereas working in Boston, on a Thursday evening in 1999, that Willard fell in love with the College of Maryland basketball program. He turned on his tv to see Steve Francis throwing down dunks as Gary Williams bolted up and down the courtroom, dripping with sweat as he commanded the sideline with unmatched depth.

“I bear in mind watching Maryland basketball and I bear in mind considering to myself, ‘I wish to play for that man.’ … The swagger was one thing {that a} child that grew up in Huntington, Lengthy Island, turning on ESPN and watching a Maryland sport all the sudden needs to go play on the College of Maryland,” Willard recollected at his introductory press convention.

Willard adopted Pitino from the Celtics to Louisville in 2001, the place he grew to become a full-time assistant coach. He ended up working for him for seven years, one thing that Willard as soon as joked took “49 years off [his] life.” Maybe his father’s makes an attempt to persuade him to take a job promoting pure gasoline as an alternative of teaching could have been the precise transfer lifestyle-wise.

Regardless of its demanding nature, Willard excelled in his new place. He shortly rose in this system’s ranks; when Pitino took a quick depart of absence in 2004, Willard grew to become the crew’s interim head coach.

McHale, who held three different assistant jobs and was a Division I head coach for 3 years since working for Iona, claims to at the present time he has by no means seen anybody dissect an opponent higher than Willard. Willard’s aggressive nature took no video games off, not even when he devised a sport plan that led to his Cardinals taking down his father’s Holy Cross Crusaders simply days after they bonded at Christmas dinner.

It was clear Willard was a budding star within the basketball world, and it was solely a matter of time earlier than he can be heading his personal program. When Iona athletic director Patrick Lyons gave him an interview for the college’s opening, everybody at Louisville knew it was a achieved deal earlier than he even landed.

That evening, Willard referred to as up McHale, a graduate assistant on the Louisville workers, and supplied him an opportunity to grow to be an assistant at Iona with one situation.

“He provided me a job and mentioned ‘Begin scouring each accessible senior within the New York metropolitan space proper now as a result of we’ve obtained to construct a roster,’” McHale recollects.

Inside a day, Willard was establishing store in New Rochelle earlier than he even had time to get a spot to remain. For the primary few weeks and months, the workers was nomadic. Willard’s spouse and first baby have been nonetheless in Kentucky, so he alternated between sleeping in his workplace and his brother’s conveniently positioned sofa in Manhattan.

Most coaches show their acumen with photos and trophies hanging on their partitions and sitting on their desks. Willard had journey luggage and dry-cleaned shirts. His partitions have been barren. Time spent meticulously inserting memorabilia on his desk could possibly be spent recruiting or understanding with gamers. You don’t win basketball video games for having the best-decorated workplace, do you?

After three years at Iona and a MAAC Coach of the Yr award, Willard jumped to Seton Corridor in 2010. It was there the place he actually made his title within the trade. At a Large East program that had befallen laborious occasions, it was an uphill battle from the beginning.

“It was form of a home on fireplace,” mentioned Jerry Carino, a staple within the New Jersey basketball media and firsthand witness to Willard’s Seton Corridor tenure. “There’s not many high-major locations the place you possibly can go 5 years with out making the NCAA Match and are available again for a sixth yr.”

Ultimately, Willard obtained the grasp of teaching in one in every of faculty basketball’s prime conferences. He’s a contemporary coach, one which isn’t afraid to get on his gamers however is much more dedicated to treating them with respect. At Seton Corridor, he discovered tips on how to expertly toe the road between basketball coach and parental determine.

When ahead Michael Nzei obtained an internship at Goldman Sachs that might require 40 to 50 hours of labor per week, Willard let him miss summer time exercises. He let ahead Braeden Anderson enroll in legislation faculty whereas on the crew. He put guard Shavar Reynolds Jr. on scholarship when Reynolds Jr. informed him he was going to need to give up the crew as a result of he couldn’t afford tuition. By the point he was a senior, Reynolds Jr. had grow to be a key member of the rotation.

Willard additionally accepted Derrick Gordon, the primary brazenly homosexual Division I males’s basketball participant, as a switch from UMass after most thought of him a locker room distraction. Gordon shortly was a frontrunner on a crew that gained the 2016 Large East Match title.

“He wasn’t simply attempting to win video games. He was attempting to assist younger folks develop on the finish of their early life. … By the tip of his time at Seton Corridor, he actually struck the steadiness between figuring out his function as a mentor and being profitable. And I feel if he does that in Maryland, individuals are going to be actually pleased with him,” Carino mentioned.

Pleasure is the phrase that finest describes the tradition surrounding the Maryland males’s basketball program. Each sport, the scoreboard suspended above the courtroom performs a montage of former gamers expressing their “Maryland satisfaction,” to the followers’ delight.

Tapping into that immense connection folks really feel towards this system grew to become one in every of Willard’s highest priorities as soon as he arrived in School Park. He made an effort to attach with Gary Williams and a litany of former gamers, whether or not or not it’s a easy chat or working scrimmages between his present gamers and former Terps enjoying professionally.

Exterior Maryland’s locker room hangs a matte black silhouette of the state, signed in daring silver marker by a deluge of Terrapin legends whose jerseys grasp within the rafters. Above it in easy, blocky and highly effective lettering reads “A Lasting Legacy.”

It’s a reconnection with the previous, put in by Willard as a symbolic try and show his intent to return Maryland to its glory days. Len Elmore, Lonny Baxter and Greivis Vásquez are only a few of the ever-growing variety of autographs that may be discovered on the set up.

“Our guys know who constructed this program each time they stroll previous that wall,” Willard mentioned in a September tweet.

One signature at a time, Willard is realizing the imaginative and prescient he had for Maryland when he took over. Thursday marks an enormous step in that improvement. When he takes the courtroom at Legacy Area in Birmingham, Alabama, it’ll be his first likelihood because the face of Maryland’s program to make his mark on faculty basketball’s largest stage.

Win or lose, Willard is laying the inspiration for his imaginative and prescient of the longer term.

That imaginative and prescient contains frequent locker-room celebrations and hoisting trophies. No person can say for certain if or when that’ll occur. But when it does, you could be assured the partitions in that room gained’t be maroon. Not if Willard has a say in it.