North Carolina State University Athletics
Tony Haynes: Sendek Did What He Was Hired to Do
4/3/2006 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
April 3, 2006
By Tony Haynes
Raleigh, N.C. - NC State's next men's basketball coach should place a call to Herb Sendek and say "thank you." He should thank Sendek for leaving for Arizona State, thus opening up one of the most attractive jobs in college basketball. He should also thank Sendek for abandoning his office in the beautiful new Dail Basketball Complex, a facility that has been operational for only one year. But most of all, the new coach should thank Sendek for building a program that has been winning on a consistent basis, while also maintaining a squeaky clean image. Very few coaches get an opportunity such as this.
A column written in Monday's Arizona Republic newspaper quoted Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg as saying Arizona State got a "complete steal" in securing Sendek's services. In the same column written by Paola Boivin, Billy Donovan, who led his Florida Gators to their first national title on Monday, said "when you talk about the complete package of a coach, he's it."
Donovan's coaching counterpart, Ben Howland of UCLA, said this: "Our league is a great league. Herb just made it tougher."
So it is that 43-year old Herb Sendek is leaving the tall pines of Raleigh for the mountainous desert land of Tempe, Arizona. But the landscape will be more different than just what he sees when looking out the window. While still high, the expectations he will encounter will be far from those that always hung over his head during his 10-year stay in Raleigh.
Should he ever lead Arizona State to five straight NCAA Tournament appearances and an average of 20-plus wins during that same stretch, Sendek's popularity in the scorching desert will be right up there with a swimming pool in August.
Another big difference will be the amount of exposure he and his program will receive. Consider the fact that Arizona State appeared on television a Pac-10 low THREE times this season. During his 10 years at NC State, Wolfpack games were televised almost as often as Andy Griffith reruns.
The program Sendek inherits was 11-17 overall and 5-13 this past season, so yes, there will be a rebuilding job to be done. However, it's highly unlikely that it will be as difficult as the scenario he jumped into when, at the age of 33, he took over NC State's storied but crippled program in 1996.
With its reputation bruised by sanctions imposed by both the NCAA and the school five years earlier, NC State basketball had become a perennial bottom of the ACC basement afterthought. Les Robinson had been successful in restoring the Wolfpack's academic reputation, but was forced to do so at the expense of the on-court product.
Sendek was asked to win both on the court and in the classroom, a combination that many of his NC State predecessors had found to be elusive.
It wasn't going to be easy.
NC State was riding a streak of five straight losing campaigns when Sendek stood on the sidelines, watching the Pack down Florida Atlantic in his first game on November 22nd of 1996. That first year ended with Sendek becoming the toast of the town when the Wolfpack became the first and still only team in league history to go from the ACC Tournament play-in game to the title tilt four days later.
From there, the progress was like the man himself: meticulous, steady and consistent.
Still, Sendek was at a crossroads following a "Murphy's Law" type of season that ended with a 13-16 record in 2000-01.
The moment was ripe for disaster. But it didn't turn out that way.
The first shift change occurred when Sendek landed his best and most important recruiting class to date. High School All-American Julius Hodge led a group that also included Jordan Collins, Levi Watkins, Josh Powell and late bloomer Ilian Evtimov.
Then in the late spring and early summer of that year, Sendek started tinkering with a new offense, one that was based on the actions used so successfully by Princeton. Many wondered if an offense so structured and regimented could actually be adaptable to ACC-level talent.
In the end, however, Sendek made it work and got better and better at loosening the strings just enough so that creative players like Hodge and Anthony Grundy could have the freedom to make plays for both themselves and their teammates.
Since that crucial moment at the crossroads, NC State has landed five straight NCAA Tournament trips, four upper division ACC finishes, two trips to the ACC title game, while also averaging more than 20 wins per season.
And perhaps just as importantly, most of the players who stayed at NC State for their entire careers also walked away with degrees.
All of the things that make the NC State coaching position so attractive are also the same things that make it demanding. The ghosts of Everett Case, Norm Sloan, Jim Valvano and two national titles are always in the air. And never to be ignored by State fans is the tremendous success enjoyed by the two college basketball behemoths just down the road. Wolfpackers are the only supporters in the country who have to deal with such a geographic irony.
Some of the comments made about Sendek and his program have indeed been unfair, but those heated feelings only stem from the desire to return to the glory days and the yearning to compete with Duke and North Carolina.
It's a phenomenon that NC State's next coach will have to deal with.
But thankfully for him, the program he'll inherit is a lot better off than the one Sendek started constructing from scratch 10 years ago.
From that standpoint, Sendek did exactly what he was hired to do.
