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 .
That earned Smart the AP coach of the year award Friday. He garnered 24 of 58 votes from a to edge , who received 13 votes before guiding the Wildcats to the Elite Eight of the , 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 by Michigan State and Smart's .
鈥淚'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, 鈥渂ut obviously it always comes back to the guys you have on your team.
鈥淓arly on,鈥 Smart said, 鈥渨e 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.鈥
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 tight-knit camaraderie within his teams.
No matter how high or low the Golden Eagles were this season, those traits carried them through.
鈥淓verything that we go through, whether it be the retreat that we went on before the season, all the workouts in the summer, he鈥檚 preaching his culture,鈥 said Tyler Kolek, . 鈥淎nd 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.鈥
That's reflected in the way Smart, who 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.
Sure, Smart landed his share of transfers 鈥 Kolek among them 鈥 in an era in which the portal has become so prevalent. But he largely built a team that finished 29-7 this season around high school recruits, eschewing a quick fix in the hopes of long-term stability. Among those prospects were Kam Jones, its leading scorer, and do-everything forward David Joplin.
鈥淗e teaches us lots of things about the importance of each other,鈥 Joplin said. 鈥淗e lets us know, time and time again, that we can鈥檛 do anything without each other, but together we can do anything.鈥
That sounds like a decidedly old-school approach to building a college basketball program.
One embraced by a still-youthful coach.
鈥淚 think being a head coach has never been more complicated, never been more nuanced, and never more all-encompassing," Smart told the AP in a wide-ranging interview last week. 鈥淒oes that mean it's harder? You could say that.
鈥淲hat makes your job less hard," Smart said, "is having a captive audience in your players, and guys that truly understand and own what goes into winning, and that's what we had this past year. But those things just don't happen. There are a lot of steps that have to occur on the part of a lot of people, not just the coach, to get to where you have a winning environment.鈥
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