Gottfried Focused Through the Storm

This was originally published in the Summer 2011 edition of The Wolfpacker, shortly after Mark Gottfried was hired as NC State's basketball coach. 

BY TIM PEELER
Coman Publishing, © 2011

RALEIGH, N.C. –When the severe storms that rolled through Raleigh on the afternoon of April 16, 2011, new NC State men’s basketball coach Mark Gottfried was on the treadmill doing his daily workout, oblivious to the winds that were blowing around him.

With his earphones in, he probably didn’t hear the tornado alert going off in the workout room he was in, but he surely saw several members of the athletics staff and a handful of student-athletes scurrying about, trying to find the right place to wait for the storm — which touched down less than two miles away in downtown Raleigh — to pass.

What better way to describe Gottfried’s mental makeup than someone who can keep calm and focused through a storm?

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind for the new coach, who was hired on April 5. It was the same day he interviewed with athletics director Debbie Yow and one day after the NCAA Championship game. In fact, Gottfried was in Houston with three of his sons waiting for the tipoff between Connecticut and Butler when he got the call asking him to come to Raleigh.

He hopped on a plane that night and was introduced that next day in the Dail Club Level of Vaughn Towers. Since then, Gottfried has carefully arranged the pieces of his program the way he wants. Transitions are never easy, and Gottfried has had to deal with several moves that on the surface will make things challenging next fall. He granted incoming freshman Joseph Uchebo from Raleigh’s Word of God Academy his release and reached the mutual decision with rising sophomore guard Ryan Harrow to transfer out of the program.

This is within the normal course of events of a college basketball coaching change. When Sidney Lowe was hired in May 2006, it wasn’t long before he lost three highly touted signees from Herb Sendek’s final recruiting class. The cupboard was lean over the next two seasons, but in many ways that is expected.

What’s more important for Gottfried at this point are the other things that are going well for his program. Rising sophomore C.J. Leslie plans to return. With Harrow on his way out, it opens up the possibility for Lorenzo Brown — who impressed while playing the point at times last season — to have a chance to run the offense.

Most important of all, Gottfried hired a coaching staff worthy of the praise Yow gave him when she hinted at his introductory press conference that he had some impressive candidates. In order, he hired former Alabama assistant Orlando Early, former Charlotte and Pfeiffer head coach Bobby Lutz and former Charlotte assistant Rob Moxley.

Early and Moxley are well-respected throughout college basketball for their recruiting abilities. Lutz knows the state inside and out. He not only grew up here, coached here and recruited here, he knows well the history and tradition of NC State basketball.

The staff spent much of its first three weeks on campus getting to know the players who will be returning in the fall. In the limited time they were able to conduct some individual workouts, they like what they see in Leslie, Brown and rising juniors Scott Wood, Richard Howell, DeShawn Painter and Jordan Vandenberg.

But they are still in the get-to-know you phase that will last through the summer until practice officially begins in the middle of October.

They staff also spent time looking over its incoming recruiting class and taking a look at next year’s class. Obviously, they are a little behind on both counts, since they haven’t been here long enough to recruit either. There will be time for that.

Gottfried will spent the next couple of months making the rounds with the Wolfpack Club Caravan, letting people get to know him a little better and letting him become more aware of the fan base that gets so much attention for its passion and enthusiasm.

So far, Gottfried and his staff like the support they have gotten, now that those Wolfpack fans have gotten to know him, and what his vision for the program is, a little better. He is embracing the honeymoon period, while knowing he has lots of work to get done between now and the start of next season.

The Wolfpack’s new mentor is relying on his experiences of the last two years of working for ESPN as a television analyst. Since he was last a head coach, he has seen a variety of new things from other programs, gotten new ideas from other coaches and recharged himself to face the challenge that lies ahead. He’s ready to run a program again, to teach the game to young players and to have the relationships he missed while he was out of coaching.

"I think, when I was coaching [before], I got going so fast ... I'm not sure my family I appreciated as much; I'm not sure I appreciated my job as much," Gottfried said in one of the many interviews he did after he settled into his job. "My team, my players: I think I've learned to appreciate those more. ... That's the thing when you're out of coaching, you miss it - just getting back to having that kind of relationship with everybody."

As someone who was successful competing in the Southeastern Conference, leading a football school to a No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press poll and a regular-season SEC championship, he’s certainly not afraid of the competition that rests on the western vertices of the Triangle, in Chapel Hill and Durham. He and everyone on his staff know the recent success of Duke and North Carolina. They are also quite sure they can eventually match it.

Gottfried was still quite young when he was part of the UCLA staff that won the 1995 NCAA title. There is no place to better learn how to live up to difficult expectations than the school where John Wooden went from wizard to basketball deity. Most of Wooden successors had difficulty living in the shadow of all he accomplished, but the ’95 Bruins proved with Tyus Edney’s full-court drive at Seattle’s Kingdome that success could follow legend and new championships can enhance tradition.

That will be his charge at NC State, one of a handful of schools that can boast two national championships, to go along with 17 conference titles in 100 years of basketball.

He’s still in the middle of transition at the moment, but he knows that the winds will calm, success will come and the legacy he inherited will be enhanced.