Former Coach's Ties That Bind
by Mike Harris, Richmond Times-Dispatch
November 1, 2004
GREENSBORO, N.C. - Pete Gillen couldn't resist busting on Seth Greenberg's tie.
It was actually a nice-looking tie, a mostly blue number with little geometric things that perfectly matched Greenberg's pale yellow shirt.
That didn't keep Gillen, the basketball coach at Virginia, from ribbing his pal and counterpart at Virginia Tech when the two took part in the ACC's Operation Basketball yesterday.
"He's the best-dressed coach in the ACC," Gillen said. "He puts the cologne on, you can smell that through the TV if you watch carefully. He's got the gear and gear is the key to life."
Greenberg may be the new kid on the ACC block as the Hokies prepare for their first season in the league. He's hardly a stranger. The coach fraternity is small and tight, and there's not another head coach he didn't know before Tech made the move from the Big East Conference.
When he was the coach at Long Beach State, Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt was an assistant at nearby Southern California. Greenberg and Gillen have worked camps together and still combine to do some charity work. There's some sort of tie with all the others as well, even if it is only chatting while attending the myriad of summer camps coaches visit while recruiting.
This is Greenberg's third stop as a head coach, following Long Beach and South Florida.
"I'm older than dirt. I've known a lot of these guys for a very long time," Greenberg said. "I grew up with Pete in the 'five-star family.' I remember way, way back in the day when I had hair on my head and [Duke] Coach [Mike] Krzyzewski was at Army and I was an assistant at Columbia, we'd go up there and just talk basketball. Skip Prosser [Wake Forest] has been a friend for years.
"The people in this league aren't the problem. It's those guys in the shorts and the jerseys. We are a new kid on the block. But in terms of actual relationships, they're bigger than actually being in the ACC."
A year ago, Greenberg sat in the same room as Connecticut's Jim Calhoun and Syracuse's Jim Boeheim. Yesterday at the Grandover Resort, he took a table in the same room with, among others, Gillen and Prosser and Krzyzewski and Maryland's Gary Williams and North Carolina's Roy Williams.
There's no initiation process, at least off the court.
"He was coached by one of the great teachers of man-to-man defense, Al Lobalbo, at Fairleigh Dickinson," Krzyzewski said. "Coach Lobalbo was an assistant at Army with Coach [Bobby] Knight when I played. That's probably the first connection that we have.
"He's a good basketball man. He has the respect of everybody. He's paid his dues. He's done really good jobs wherever he's at. I think he'll build a really good program there. But, even at the meetings today, he has insights that are very valuable to what we're trying to do as a conference."
Prosser said he noticed Greenberg's South Florida teams when he was watching tapes of other teams.
"You can say in some ways Seth has played off-broadway a lot," Prosser said. "I think he'll do very well on the stage of the ACC. Basketball people respect him as a good basketball mind."
Said Clemson coach Oliver Purnell: "He's an excellent coach, a lifer. He knows the game, knows how to build programs. He'll do just fine."
And he'll get his chops busted along the way. Before they left the room yesterday, Gillen and Greenberg shared a laugh and a palm slap.
"We get along well. I like to tease him, and it is all in good fun," Gillen said. "I've known him a long time. He fits in great. He's a good man, and Virginia Tech did a good job when it hired him." |
