https://theathletic.com/142069/2017/11/02/could-this-really-be-minnesotas-moment-oh-you-betcha/
The walk to the Minnesota men’s basketball offices takes a visitor through the grand entrance to the forthcoming Land O’ Lakes Center for Excellence. By the looks of it, things are not quite yet grand or excellent. A lobby area that will feature abundant natural light and 1,850 square feet of projector screens and fancy granite fixtures contains, at the moment, construction materials, tools and dust. On this early October day, the main doors are cordoned off, unavailable for public ingress and egress. None of this is surprising. Projects with $190 million price tags take time. Eventually, they offer a way in.
Only four years ago, Richard Pitino was a 30-year-old head coach in the Big Ten who thought better of complaining about anything, including an infrastructure inferior to peer programs. Now, he sits in an office just steps away from literal and figurative progress, with a team primed to contend behind an emerging homegrown star. Now he runs the only Division I hoops program in a state experiencing an up-cycle in basketball talent. This looks like Minnesota’s moment. Well, this looks like it could be Minnesota’s moment if it can seize upon some new advantages while fending off recruiting predators from all sectors of college basketball. “People always ask, if you win, are you going to leave?” Pitino says. “We got it all here. We didn’t have that. We now have it.”
Yes, some of it is in place, like the good vibes from a curative 24-victory season and Amir Coffey, the Hopkins, Minn., native who is a candidate to be one of the Big Ten’s breakout performers. Yes, some of it is still on its way, like the sparkling new facilities and another trio of promising in-state recruits. It’s a piece-by-piece process. That’s how it works when you’re trying to build something significant.
But you do have to finish the job.
===
The gym at Las Vegas’ Spring Valley High School hosts The 8, one of the many frenetic AAU events that occur during the final weekend of the July evaluation period. Last summer, the venue also housed a scene perfectly encapsulating Minnesota’s promise and the obstacles to cashing in on it: Rising senior Tre Jones, a five-star guard from suburban Apple Valley, Minn., was on the floor for the Howard Pulley All-Stars, one of the state’s premier AAU clubs. At one long sideline table sat Richard Pitino and one of his assistants, Ben Johnson, reaffirming their interest in the state’s most coveted player. But there was another consequential presence, at another table, at the other end of the court: Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.
By mid-August, Jones announced his commitment to play for the Blue Devils, following fraternal footsteps set down by older brother Tyus, whose lone season in Durham ended with the 2015 national championship. In truth, while Tre Jones gave Minnesota fair consideration, the climb may have been too steep for Pitino and Co. to overcome. “Duke’s always been his favorite school,” Apple Valley coach Zach Goring says of Jones. “And then when Tyus went there and had the storybook season he had — just that relationship they developed, getting close to that staff and getting a good feel — it’s a pretty simple process of them knowing what to expect.”
It’s instructive to note that same Howard Pulley team featured three Minnesota commits in the Class of 2018: four-star forward Daniel Oturu and three-star prospects Jarvis Thomas and Gabe Kalscheur. And the line of elite talents doesn’t end with Tre Jones. Matthew Hurt, a 6-9 forward from Rochester, Minn., is five-star, top 5 recruit from the Class of 2019. Cast your eye even farther toward the horizon, and you find 6-3 guard Jaylen Suggs of Minneapolis, another national top 5 prospect in the Class of 2020.
While basketball always has had an ardent following in Minnesota, the state itself produced just six McDonald’s All-Americans from the event’s inception in 1977 through 2013. (Hibbing, Minn., native Kevin McHale graduated high school in 1976.) Four of them opted to stay home and play for the Gophers. While Jim Petersen helped the team win the 1982 Big Ten title, in-state talent simply hasn’t offered a program-altering paradigm.
Then came 2014. Three Minnesotans — Tyus Jones, Rashad Vaughn and Reid Travis — earned McDonald’s All-America honors that spring. A fourth member of that class, J.P. Macura, ranked just outside the top 100. None of them chose to play for Minnesota. The current batch of high schoolers was far along their basketball paths by then, but that quartet was nevertheless representative of an emerging dynamic in the high school ranks as well as a sign of things to come. “You really started to see Minnesota more on the map from a national perspective,” says Spencer Tollackson, a former Mr. Basketball from Chaska, Minn., and now a radio analyst for Minnesota basketball. “A little of it was lightning in a bottle, where there’s that many five-star recruits in one class. It’s not like Minnesota is producing a class like it did in ’14 year-in and year-out. That being said, you don’t even have that once-in-a-20-year opportunity if there isn’t an increase in interest and the sheer number of people that are playing.”
Or put another way by Richard Hurt, the father of Matthew Hurt and part-owner of D1 Minnesota, one of the state’s premier AAU programs: “Success breeds success, and [kids] want to be a part of that.”
Between the 2014 group and the forthcoming 2018 class, Minnesota has produced 11 top 150 recruits. Anecdotally, the increase in top talent generally distills to this: An increased demand for youth basketball outlets met with supply. D1 Minnesota, for example, has been in existence for nine years. Richard Hurt joined the ownership group three years ago, when the program comprised three teams. “As of this year,” he says, “we have 11.” Per a Minneapolis Star-Tribune story in May, clubs statewide fielded more than 80 teams that played at least five games in the AAU 17U circuit during the summer of 2016. And according to Hurt, eight Class of 2017 players on D1 Minnesota’s top team collected a total of more than 130 offers from Division I schools. Growth in the availability of year-round basketball for players as young as eight or nine seemingly has improved the depth of talent available at the high school level. And the highest-level players may have opened eyes for everyone else.
“We’ve kind of experienced this at Apple Valley — when you’re around really good players and you see how they do things, the amount of time they put it in, it rubs off on other kids,” Goring says. “When those four kids [from 2014] were being recruited at a major, major level, coaches were coming to AAU games and then noticing other kids that were starting to come up. You get in front of those eyes and then it gets rolling.”
In all, it creates for Minnesota the possibility of a heretofore non-existent dynamic: Homegrown talent that sustains high-level success over an extended period of time. The school maybe needs only to win a couple scraps for high-end players given the depth. “The high school scene has gotten a lot better,” Pitino says. “The AAU programs have gotten a lot better. The more success we have, the easier it is to get the in-state kids. That’s really, really important. And Minnesotans are really prideful of their state.” Pitino, in fact, arrived just in time to try his hand at some bountiful basketball harvesting. And it has started already, with another player who probably made up his mind a long time ago.
Amir Coffey arrives at the athletic complex with growth on his mind, and the means to achieve it in his hands: A bag full of chicken wings and fries for lunch, to complement the shakes foisted upon him by the basketball staff, hopin git will add more bulk to a generally wiry 6-8 frame. (Or at least to ensure he doesn’t shed too many of his 195 pounds.) “I’m at a good weight,” Coffey says. “It wouldn’t be a problem if I stayed there.”
No, nobody at Minnesota argues with the sophomore forward’s inclination to stay put. He was the nation’s No. 52 prospect in the Class of 2016, the first significant recruiting win of Pitino’s tenure, and, as such, a lodestar for other local talents. He grew up in Hopkins, Minn., a near-west suburb of Minneapolis, intimately linked to both basketball and the university itself: His father, Richard, played for Minnesota from 1986 to 1990. While Coffey cannot recall the first college basketball game he attended, he knows it was at Williams Arena — “There really wasn’t much of a choice of games to go to,” he says — and he does remember being on hand for an upset of No. 1 Indiana in 2013 and the ensuing court-storm that he did not participate in. “It was just cool to me at first,” Coffey says. “Growing up, I just kept getting more excited about it.”
Family ties to the school weren’t inviolable. Coffey’s older sisters, Sydney and Nia, left the state to play basketball at Marist and Northwestern, respectively. And Coffey says his father kept his preferences to himself during the recruiting process. So Minnesota had some work to do, and it began early. Johnson, the assistant coach, began regular contact with the family when Coffey was a high school freshman, soon after Pitino’s first staff came together. “That showed me a lot, that they believed in me at such a young age,” Coffey says. Minnesota staffers then became regulars at open gyms and practices and at Hopkins games. As the recruiting process truly revved up, Minnesota coaches showed Coffey film of a screen-heavy offense that would present him opportunities to make plays no matter what position he filled on the floor. As the program nosedived to an 11-win campaign in 2015-16, the pitch included the opportunity for plentiful minutes once Coffey arrived. “I always felt like the way that he played fit,” Pitino says. “And I thought we could show him that. When you go through a tough year, it’s hard. But I did feel we had the playing time. We had the style of being able to use him versatility-wise.”
Minnesota secured Coffey’s first official recruiting visit and his immediate commitment. He insists it was actually a choice, after being pursued by the likes of Miami and Oregon. But the visit reaffirmed the relationship built over time. “It was hard to pass up,” Coffey says. He became the biggest in-state recruit to sign with Minnesota since McDonald’s All-American Kris Humphries in 2003. It was the booster shot the program needed to validate the argument that staying home was viable — that the program not only offered a chance at success but that the adulation of a grateful populace. Minnesotans, after all, like nothing more than other Minnesotans. “Walking around with Amir and Mike [Hurt], just for 30 minutes, it’s quite the spectacle. Kids will come up to them and ask them to sign a shoe. [Fans] getting selfies and whole family pictures and stuff like that. It’s pretty interesting,” says junior forward Jordan Murphy, a native of San Antonio.
Indeed, in 2016, Pitino snagged the top two vote-getters in Mr. Basketball balloting in Coffey and Hurt, the older brother of Matthew Hurt and a consensus top 250 recruit himself. Both players felt the draw upon which Minnesota must capitalize to build a regular contender; while driving to practice for his 16U AAU team, before he received a single scholarship offer, Michael Hurt told his father, unsolicited, that he wanted to play for Minnesota. And while limited scholarship availability impacted the program’s ability to land homegrown talent from the 2017 class — one went to Texas, two went to Wisconsin — Minnesota now has three commitments from in-state prospects in the 2018 class, including Oturu, top 100 forward from St. Paul’s Cretin-Derham Hall High School. There seems to be a local-lad-makes-good motivation at work for that trio, which includes Thomas and Kalscheur. In announcing his pledge in July, Thomas told the assembled media, “It’s kind of hard for it not to feel right when you’re at home.”
Coffey winces a bit at the suggestion that he is responsible for any of this. “A lot of people tell me that I started it, and all that,” he says. “I made a decision that was best for me. It happened to be home. Hopefully the homegrown kids will make the decision that’s best for them, and hopefully it will be home. That’s the way I look at it. There’s so much that goes into a college decision — it’s not just, ‘I’m from here so I should go here.’”
He’s not wrong, but he absolutely can affect recruiting decisions in one way: Helping his team win. Coffey logged more minutes in Big Ten play (641) than anyone else in the league last winter and averaged 12.2 points for an NCAA Tournament squad. Attendance at one October practice suggests something beyond an encore. There’s the laser-guided pass to a cutter from the 3-point line. There’s the pull-back lefty jumper that borders on sheer cruelty. If Coffey is as consistently aggressive, instead of floating in and out of plays as he admits he’s wont to do, he can be an All-Big Ten performer. And Minnesota could make a run at the top of the table.
Which would underscore the program’s capacity to cultivate top-of-the-line local talent. “It was just a matter of somebody stepping forward and saying, I want to do this and I believe in that,” Pitino says, “and Amir was that guy.”
As ever in basketball, so much will be determined by who’s got next.
===
By the time construction on Minnesota’s new athletes’ village is complete, and the lobby looks like a lobby and not a storage shed for tools, there will be a new academic center with a state-of-the-art technology lab, a nutrition center and a new indoor football practice field. Minnesota men’s and women’s basketball, meanwhile, will enjoy their own new practice facility, which will include 1.5 courts of space apiece and new coaches' offices and strength and conditioning rooms. Venerable Williams Arena may not be the most modernized venue in college basketball, but realistically, it isn’t going anywhere. And anyway, no one will have to jump snowbanks and run across a road in subzero temperatures to get from the gym to a weight room — a trek Tollackson not-so-fondly recalls from not-so-long-ago playing days from 2004 to 2008.
All in all, Richard Pitino has little to kvetch about these days. “You show recruits from an institutional standpoint that you mean business from a commitment standpoint,” the fifth-year coach says. “All those things have really, really helped. If you want to compete with those other guys, you have got to commit.”
The “other guys,” of course, are the complication. There is no surefire fix for the “other guys.” No general contractor can erect a firewall against the rest of college basketball paying attention to Minnesota high school basketball. And they are paying attention.
If Roy Williams has not often looked to Rochester, Minn., to restock his rosters, he does now; the North Carolina coach has visited the area six times as part of wooing Matthew Hurt, the coveted Class of 2019 forward. Krzyzewski has visited twice and his top Duke lieutenants, Jeff Capel and Jon Scheyer, also have come through. Kansas coach Bill Self has stopped by. Indiana, Kentucky and UCLA also are among schools Richard Hurt identifies as “working the hardest” to recruit his son. Minnesota, naturally, is on that list, too, and while Matthew is able to view that experience through the lens of his older brother’s time on campus, and while there is a draw to once again playing with an older sibling at the college level, pragmatism drives this dynamic above all. “He’s looking for the right fit, in terms of programs that can help him,” Richard Hurt says of Matthew. “I think there are things he’s going to have to tap into to get the most out of himself. He’s looking for the right fit in terms of coaching staff, in terms of players. But it goes back to he wants to be able to win at a high level, he wants to go some place that has tradition, and he wants someone to facilitate his goals to be a professional.”
Without the on-court revival of last season, without the millions of dollars invested in infrastructure improvement across the entire athletic department, Minnesota would be left to play to emotion and hope with a top-flight recruit. It almost assuredly wouldn’t be enough. The challenge is that the entire package still might not be enough. The challenge of Minnesota truly living its moment is everyone else in the way. But at least the place is equipped to try to nudge them aside.
Richard Pitino didn’t necessarily anticipate this fortuitous timing four Aprils ago, when he jumped at the opportunity to run a Big Ten program after just one season as head coach at Florida International. He hadn’t thoroughly investigated an ascendant talent pool thousands of miles away. But the job has evolved, he says. It has become better. He has sufficient talent nearby. He has the means to recruit it. He has the resources to compete at a high level. And, in what is no minor point, he has the opportunity to be a Pitino once again doing something big in college basketball.
At least on this day, it is an idea he chooses not to entertain. He obviously has been affected by his father Rick’s abrupt firing in light of the federal probe into college basketball and allegations of Louisville’s recruiting improprieties with prospect Brian Bowen. But Richard Pitino shrugs off the rest. He remembers how the fans who loved his father when he was the coach at Kentucky suddenly hated him when he was the coach at Louisville. So what does that say about how people view you? “All that stuff is absurd to me, so I don’t really focus on that,” Pitino says. “Like, I coach this program — it’s my program. I’m not coaching it for legacies or names. I’m doing my job. And I’m going to try to do it to the best of my ability. I’m not trying to change the world here, I don’t look at it like that. I got three kids under the age of six, I’m trying to do my best to be the best father I can be, best husband I can be, best coach I can be. So I don’t know. I want to win because I think I got a good team.”
The winning of games and high-stakes recruiting scrums is the hardest part. But if that happens in the current Minnesota basketball environment, at all levels? If it happens, Pitino may extract potential from this program in a way that no one has for a while. If it happens, all sorts of doors open.
The walk to the Minnesota men’s basketball offices takes a visitor through the grand entrance to the forthcoming Land O’ Lakes Center for Excellence. By the looks of it, things are not quite yet grand or excellent. A lobby area that will feature abundant natural light and 1,850 square feet of projector screens and fancy granite fixtures contains, at the moment, construction materials, tools and dust. On this early October day, the main doors are cordoned off, unavailable for public ingress and egress. None of this is surprising. Projects with $190 million price tags take time. Eventually, they offer a way in.
Only four years ago, Richard Pitino was a 30-year-old head coach in the Big Ten who thought better of complaining about anything, including an infrastructure inferior to peer programs. Now, he sits in an office just steps away from literal and figurative progress, with a team primed to contend behind an emerging homegrown star. Now he runs the only Division I hoops program in a state experiencing an up-cycle in basketball talent. This looks like Minnesota’s moment. Well, this looks like it could be Minnesota’s moment if it can seize upon some new advantages while fending off recruiting predators from all sectors of college basketball. “People always ask, if you win, are you going to leave?” Pitino says. “We got it all here. We didn’t have that. We now have it.”
Yes, some of it is in place, like the good vibes from a curative 24-victory season and Amir Coffey, the Hopkins, Minn., native who is a candidate to be one of the Big Ten’s breakout performers. Yes, some of it is still on its way, like the sparkling new facilities and another trio of promising in-state recruits. It’s a piece-by-piece process. That’s how it works when you’re trying to build something significant.
But you do have to finish the job.
===
The gym at Las Vegas’ Spring Valley High School hosts The 8, one of the many frenetic AAU events that occur during the final weekend of the July evaluation period. Last summer, the venue also housed a scene perfectly encapsulating Minnesota’s promise and the obstacles to cashing in on it: Rising senior Tre Jones, a five-star guard from suburban Apple Valley, Minn., was on the floor for the Howard Pulley All-Stars, one of the state’s premier AAU clubs. At one long sideline table sat Richard Pitino and one of his assistants, Ben Johnson, reaffirming their interest in the state’s most coveted player. But there was another consequential presence, at another table, at the other end of the court: Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.
By mid-August, Jones announced his commitment to play for the Blue Devils, following fraternal footsteps set down by older brother Tyus, whose lone season in Durham ended with the 2015 national championship. In truth, while Tre Jones gave Minnesota fair consideration, the climb may have been too steep for Pitino and Co. to overcome. “Duke’s always been his favorite school,” Apple Valley coach Zach Goring says of Jones. “And then when Tyus went there and had the storybook season he had — just that relationship they developed, getting close to that staff and getting a good feel — it’s a pretty simple process of them knowing what to expect.”
It’s instructive to note that same Howard Pulley team featured three Minnesota commits in the Class of 2018: four-star forward Daniel Oturu and three-star prospects Jarvis Thomas and Gabe Kalscheur. And the line of elite talents doesn’t end with Tre Jones. Matthew Hurt, a 6-9 forward from Rochester, Minn., is five-star, top 5 recruit from the Class of 2019. Cast your eye even farther toward the horizon, and you find 6-3 guard Jaylen Suggs of Minneapolis, another national top 5 prospect in the Class of 2020.
While basketball always has had an ardent following in Minnesota, the state itself produced just six McDonald’s All-Americans from the event’s inception in 1977 through 2013. (Hibbing, Minn., native Kevin McHale graduated high school in 1976.) Four of them opted to stay home and play for the Gophers. While Jim Petersen helped the team win the 1982 Big Ten title, in-state talent simply hasn’t offered a program-altering paradigm.
Then came 2014. Three Minnesotans — Tyus Jones, Rashad Vaughn and Reid Travis — earned McDonald’s All-America honors that spring. A fourth member of that class, J.P. Macura, ranked just outside the top 100. None of them chose to play for Minnesota. The current batch of high schoolers was far along their basketball paths by then, but that quartet was nevertheless representative of an emerging dynamic in the high school ranks as well as a sign of things to come. “You really started to see Minnesota more on the map from a national perspective,” says Spencer Tollackson, a former Mr. Basketball from Chaska, Minn., and now a radio analyst for Minnesota basketball. “A little of it was lightning in a bottle, where there’s that many five-star recruits in one class. It’s not like Minnesota is producing a class like it did in ’14 year-in and year-out. That being said, you don’t even have that once-in-a-20-year opportunity if there isn’t an increase in interest and the sheer number of people that are playing.”
Or put another way by Richard Hurt, the father of Matthew Hurt and part-owner of D1 Minnesota, one of the state’s premier AAU programs: “Success breeds success, and [kids] want to be a part of that.”
Between the 2014 group and the forthcoming 2018 class, Minnesota has produced 11 top 150 recruits. Anecdotally, the increase in top talent generally distills to this: An increased demand for youth basketball outlets met with supply. D1 Minnesota, for example, has been in existence for nine years. Richard Hurt joined the ownership group three years ago, when the program comprised three teams. “As of this year,” he says, “we have 11.” Per a Minneapolis Star-Tribune story in May, clubs statewide fielded more than 80 teams that played at least five games in the AAU 17U circuit during the summer of 2016. And according to Hurt, eight Class of 2017 players on D1 Minnesota’s top team collected a total of more than 130 offers from Division I schools. Growth in the availability of year-round basketball for players as young as eight or nine seemingly has improved the depth of talent available at the high school level. And the highest-level players may have opened eyes for everyone else.
“We’ve kind of experienced this at Apple Valley — when you’re around really good players and you see how they do things, the amount of time they put it in, it rubs off on other kids,” Goring says. “When those four kids [from 2014] were being recruited at a major, major level, coaches were coming to AAU games and then noticing other kids that were starting to come up. You get in front of those eyes and then it gets rolling.”
In all, it creates for Minnesota the possibility of a heretofore non-existent dynamic: Homegrown talent that sustains high-level success over an extended period of time. The school maybe needs only to win a couple scraps for high-end players given the depth. “The high school scene has gotten a lot better,” Pitino says. “The AAU programs have gotten a lot better. The more success we have, the easier it is to get the in-state kids. That’s really, really important. And Minnesotans are really prideful of their state.” Pitino, in fact, arrived just in time to try his hand at some bountiful basketball harvesting. And it has started already, with another player who probably made up his mind a long time ago.
Amir Coffey arrives at the athletic complex with growth on his mind, and the means to achieve it in his hands: A bag full of chicken wings and fries for lunch, to complement the shakes foisted upon him by the basketball staff, hopin git will add more bulk to a generally wiry 6-8 frame. (Or at least to ensure he doesn’t shed too many of his 195 pounds.) “I’m at a good weight,” Coffey says. “It wouldn’t be a problem if I stayed there.”
No, nobody at Minnesota argues with the sophomore forward’s inclination to stay put. He was the nation’s No. 52 prospect in the Class of 2016, the first significant recruiting win of Pitino’s tenure, and, as such, a lodestar for other local talents. He grew up in Hopkins, Minn., a near-west suburb of Minneapolis, intimately linked to both basketball and the university itself: His father, Richard, played for Minnesota from 1986 to 1990. While Coffey cannot recall the first college basketball game he attended, he knows it was at Williams Arena — “There really wasn’t much of a choice of games to go to,” he says — and he does remember being on hand for an upset of No. 1 Indiana in 2013 and the ensuing court-storm that he did not participate in. “It was just cool to me at first,” Coffey says. “Growing up, I just kept getting more excited about it.”
Family ties to the school weren’t inviolable. Coffey’s older sisters, Sydney and Nia, left the state to play basketball at Marist and Northwestern, respectively. And Coffey says his father kept his preferences to himself during the recruiting process. So Minnesota had some work to do, and it began early. Johnson, the assistant coach, began regular contact with the family when Coffey was a high school freshman, soon after Pitino’s first staff came together. “That showed me a lot, that they believed in me at such a young age,” Coffey says. Minnesota staffers then became regulars at open gyms and practices and at Hopkins games. As the recruiting process truly revved up, Minnesota coaches showed Coffey film of a screen-heavy offense that would present him opportunities to make plays no matter what position he filled on the floor. As the program nosedived to an 11-win campaign in 2015-16, the pitch included the opportunity for plentiful minutes once Coffey arrived. “I always felt like the way that he played fit,” Pitino says. “And I thought we could show him that. When you go through a tough year, it’s hard. But I did feel we had the playing time. We had the style of being able to use him versatility-wise.”
Minnesota secured Coffey’s first official recruiting visit and his immediate commitment. He insists it was actually a choice, after being pursued by the likes of Miami and Oregon. But the visit reaffirmed the relationship built over time. “It was hard to pass up,” Coffey says. He became the biggest in-state recruit to sign with Minnesota since McDonald’s All-American Kris Humphries in 2003. It was the booster shot the program needed to validate the argument that staying home was viable — that the program not only offered a chance at success but that the adulation of a grateful populace. Minnesotans, after all, like nothing more than other Minnesotans. “Walking around with Amir and Mike [Hurt], just for 30 minutes, it’s quite the spectacle. Kids will come up to them and ask them to sign a shoe. [Fans] getting selfies and whole family pictures and stuff like that. It’s pretty interesting,” says junior forward Jordan Murphy, a native of San Antonio.
Indeed, in 2016, Pitino snagged the top two vote-getters in Mr. Basketball balloting in Coffey and Hurt, the older brother of Matthew Hurt and a consensus top 250 recruit himself. Both players felt the draw upon which Minnesota must capitalize to build a regular contender; while driving to practice for his 16U AAU team, before he received a single scholarship offer, Michael Hurt told his father, unsolicited, that he wanted to play for Minnesota. And while limited scholarship availability impacted the program’s ability to land homegrown talent from the 2017 class — one went to Texas, two went to Wisconsin — Minnesota now has three commitments from in-state prospects in the 2018 class, including Oturu, top 100 forward from St. Paul’s Cretin-Derham Hall High School. There seems to be a local-lad-makes-good motivation at work for that trio, which includes Thomas and Kalscheur. In announcing his pledge in July, Thomas told the assembled media, “It’s kind of hard for it not to feel right when you’re at home.”
Coffey winces a bit at the suggestion that he is responsible for any of this. “A lot of people tell me that I started it, and all that,” he says. “I made a decision that was best for me. It happened to be home. Hopefully the homegrown kids will make the decision that’s best for them, and hopefully it will be home. That’s the way I look at it. There’s so much that goes into a college decision — it’s not just, ‘I’m from here so I should go here.’”
He’s not wrong, but he absolutely can affect recruiting decisions in one way: Helping his team win. Coffey logged more minutes in Big Ten play (641) than anyone else in the league last winter and averaged 12.2 points for an NCAA Tournament squad. Attendance at one October practice suggests something beyond an encore. There’s the laser-guided pass to a cutter from the 3-point line. There’s the pull-back lefty jumper that borders on sheer cruelty. If Coffey is as consistently aggressive, instead of floating in and out of plays as he admits he’s wont to do, he can be an All-Big Ten performer. And Minnesota could make a run at the top of the table.
Which would underscore the program’s capacity to cultivate top-of-the-line local talent. “It was just a matter of somebody stepping forward and saying, I want to do this and I believe in that,” Pitino says, “and Amir was that guy.”
As ever in basketball, so much will be determined by who’s got next.
===
By the time construction on Minnesota’s new athletes’ village is complete, and the lobby looks like a lobby and not a storage shed for tools, there will be a new academic center with a state-of-the-art technology lab, a nutrition center and a new indoor football practice field. Minnesota men’s and women’s basketball, meanwhile, will enjoy their own new practice facility, which will include 1.5 courts of space apiece and new coaches' offices and strength and conditioning rooms. Venerable Williams Arena may not be the most modernized venue in college basketball, but realistically, it isn’t going anywhere. And anyway, no one will have to jump snowbanks and run across a road in subzero temperatures to get from the gym to a weight room — a trek Tollackson not-so-fondly recalls from not-so-long-ago playing days from 2004 to 2008.
All in all, Richard Pitino has little to kvetch about these days. “You show recruits from an institutional standpoint that you mean business from a commitment standpoint,” the fifth-year coach says. “All those things have really, really helped. If you want to compete with those other guys, you have got to commit.”
The “other guys,” of course, are the complication. There is no surefire fix for the “other guys.” No general contractor can erect a firewall against the rest of college basketball paying attention to Minnesota high school basketball. And they are paying attention.
If Roy Williams has not often looked to Rochester, Minn., to restock his rosters, he does now; the North Carolina coach has visited the area six times as part of wooing Matthew Hurt, the coveted Class of 2019 forward. Krzyzewski has visited twice and his top Duke lieutenants, Jeff Capel and Jon Scheyer, also have come through. Kansas coach Bill Self has stopped by. Indiana, Kentucky and UCLA also are among schools Richard Hurt identifies as “working the hardest” to recruit his son. Minnesota, naturally, is on that list, too, and while Matthew is able to view that experience through the lens of his older brother’s time on campus, and while there is a draw to once again playing with an older sibling at the college level, pragmatism drives this dynamic above all. “He’s looking for the right fit, in terms of programs that can help him,” Richard Hurt says of Matthew. “I think there are things he’s going to have to tap into to get the most out of himself. He’s looking for the right fit in terms of coaching staff, in terms of players. But it goes back to he wants to be able to win at a high level, he wants to go some place that has tradition, and he wants someone to facilitate his goals to be a professional.”
Without the on-court revival of last season, without the millions of dollars invested in infrastructure improvement across the entire athletic department, Minnesota would be left to play to emotion and hope with a top-flight recruit. It almost assuredly wouldn’t be enough. The challenge is that the entire package still might not be enough. The challenge of Minnesota truly living its moment is everyone else in the way. But at least the place is equipped to try to nudge them aside.
Richard Pitino didn’t necessarily anticipate this fortuitous timing four Aprils ago, when he jumped at the opportunity to run a Big Ten program after just one season as head coach at Florida International. He hadn’t thoroughly investigated an ascendant talent pool thousands of miles away. But the job has evolved, he says. It has become better. He has sufficient talent nearby. He has the means to recruit it. He has the resources to compete at a high level. And, in what is no minor point, he has the opportunity to be a Pitino once again doing something big in college basketball.
At least on this day, it is an idea he chooses not to entertain. He obviously has been affected by his father Rick’s abrupt firing in light of the federal probe into college basketball and allegations of Louisville’s recruiting improprieties with prospect Brian Bowen. But Richard Pitino shrugs off the rest. He remembers how the fans who loved his father when he was the coach at Kentucky suddenly hated him when he was the coach at Louisville. So what does that say about how people view you? “All that stuff is absurd to me, so I don’t really focus on that,” Pitino says. “Like, I coach this program — it’s my program. I’m not coaching it for legacies or names. I’m doing my job. And I’m going to try to do it to the best of my ability. I’m not trying to change the world here, I don’t look at it like that. I got three kids under the age of six, I’m trying to do my best to be the best father I can be, best husband I can be, best coach I can be. So I don’t know. I want to win because I think I got a good team.”
The winning of games and high-stakes recruiting scrums is the hardest part. But if that happens in the current Minnesota basketball environment, at all levels? If it happens, Pitino may extract potential from this program in a way that no one has for a while. If it happens, all sorts of doors open.
