Wake Forest Athletics
Dave Odom Q And A
4/18/2000 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
April 18, 2000
Gold Rush Front Page
Wake Forest's first bid to a postseason men's basketball tournament came after the 1939 season, when the 18-5 Demon Deacons were one of eight teams invited to the first NCAA Tournament. That upstart event in Philadelphia took a while to become "March Madness," though. Back then, the established big event was the NIT. This season, the Deacons made their fifth trip to the oldest national postseason basketball tournament, and for the first time, they came out as champions. Gold Rush contributing writer Jay Reddick talked to Deacons' coach Dave Odom about the year just past and the year ahead after the team returned from Madison Square Garden. The following is their conversation:
Gold Rush: It's got to be quite gratifying to come through and win the NIT after the season you had. You seemed to put it all together there at the end.
Odom: Well, I think any season, there's going to be some ebb and flow to it. A season's just like a game: you don't play flawlessly from beginning to end in any one game and certainly a season is even more dramatic in the changes, the ebb and flow, the up and down, the high and low, those kinds of things. And this season certainly had significant shifts. We operated at two different poles almost throughout. There for awhile, you didn't know which team was going to show up.
To see the team come together and begin to share the responsibility rather than singularly take on the game and the season, I think, is particularly gratifying. As a coach, that's what you want to see your team do, come together and take on the season from a "we" standpoint, instead of an "I, me, my" standpoint.
Gold Rush: Was there a point when you saw that come together?
Odom: No. It began to happen the weekend that we played Virginia here (Jan. 30). I had been talking with my staff about making some changes because I didn't like the direction the team was going in at that point. It's just awfully hard to make changes in midstream. Still, I knew deep in my own heart that I needed to make those changes. I was a little reluctant to do it. I kept saying, "One more game with it. One more game."
We had the ice storm that weekend, a poor crowd of 4,000 people, a lifeless performance. Virginia was lucky to get out of here because they didn't have to face a Wake Forest crowd. Then, that night, we met and decided to begin to make some changes. I knew it would be a painful experience, but I thought it was one that we had to make in order to salvage the season.
The changes I felt were necessary were we needed to restructure our offense, we needed to share the ball more, share responsibility more, and I felt we needed to lessen the pressure on Robert (O'Kelley) to deliver each game himself. And so, I thought one way to do that was to take him off the point and put him on the wing.
That's easy enough to say, but it's hard to do, because now you've got to put somebody there, and who do you put there? I thought the best choice was Jim Fitzpatrick on a short-term basis, because I knew that Robert and he got along very well and while we groomed Ervin (Murray) in practice, we would use Jimmy in the games, and Jimmy did quite well. It was an important time for us, because using Jim, we began to improve, but that time when Jimmy was playing a prominent role for us gave us time to get Ervin ready in practice.
And then, in three or four games, we decided to go ahead and make the change, put Ervin in, and things gradually began to take a turn for the better. The offense began to take shape and there was more rhythm. The ball was being shared. The winds began to calm. Balance returned to our offense, inside-outside, when Darius (Songaila) began to play better. So really, I think the change started well before anybody saw results in a game. It started in practice, I, our coaches and our team began to feel better about it. We were playing better, we knew it, it was just a matter of time before it became evident to people watching games.
Gold Rush: So Ervin was always a plan, starting that night.
Odom: Yeah, but we needed time. I thought inserting him right away would be discouraging because he wasn't ready to do that. He needed time in practice to get his confidence up and learn his assignments where Jimmy already knew his assignments. So that was the ultimate goal, to get him there, but we needed time to do that.
Gold Rush: You said earlier in the season that it took you awhile to get to know this team and connect with them. How did that process evolve through the year?
Odom: One of the problems with a veteran team, even though we were a young veteran team, is that maybe they feel like they know enough. I don't mean they were hard to coach, I'm just saying that most of us had been together for a couple of years, and they felt like they knew what needed to be done. But I'm the kind of coach that needs to connect with my team every day, I need to direct them, and I need to know that they're listening to me, hearing me, responding to me, and I didn't get that feeling. I felt it was a team that was going its way, and I didn't feel as much of a part of it as I needed to be.
I just kept working and working and working at it and finally I think it got to the point where they realized they needed the coaching staff, and the coaching staff needed them, and it didn't happen. It's not one of those things where somebody doesn't want it to happen, it's one of those things that kind of evolves. As a coach, I know the difference between when things are going that way and when they're not.
Gold Rush: Did the shots that beat you at the ends of the Georgia and Oregon games have anything to do with getting off course?
Odom: I think those turned out to be more than shots that cost us games. They very well could have cost us the season. I think one of the problems with being a veteran coach is that you learn that one game doesn't make a season. You learn to move on. I think I did that. I moved on, and I was thinking our team was moving on with me - only to learn that in mid-January, there were still some players on our team who were thinking about those two games. "What if we hadn't lost those two games?" And they were very sensitive to that. It almost cost them some of their self-esteem. So those shots weren't just game-winners. They were almost devastating in terms of our season.
Gold Rush: You got the ship righted, obviously, in time for postseason. If it had happened a couple of weeks earlier, you might have gotten an NCAA bid. But now, looking back and comparing that against an NIT championship, where do you stand?
Odom: You don't know. I'm not one to worry about it. I'm not one to think about it, because in the end, it worked out fine. I'm not one to say "Would I trade that NIT championship for two wins in NCAA, or one win in NCAA?" I'm not going to answer that because reality says that's not something that I have a choice over. What happened happened. This university now has a national championship to its credit, and I'm very pleased to have been along for the ride. Now, we look to next season as another opportunity, a different opportunity, and we'll have to work to make it the best it can be. I don't worry too much about that.
Gold Rush: Tell me a little bit about New York. You went in on a pretty good roll.
Odom: We went into New York with a lot of confidence, but so did the other three teams. We'd all won virtually the same number of games. The biggest problem going into New York was that we were facing North Carolina State for the third time, and that's always hard. I thought our team was confident.
The one thing that buoyed us was that we had been the road mavericks. We had been the one chosen, seemingly, to take the difficult route. It wasn't hand-carved for us, there was no road map handed to us to follow. It was one that we had to really earn. From finding out late Sunday night that we had to be in Nashville on Tuesday night with no preparation, getting a plane and all that stuff ready.
We went up there and played very well, put whatever disappointment we had aside in one of the toughest venues around. Then we came home to play a good New Mexico team in front of a good Winston-Salem crowd. Then, we went over to Greensboro and had an excellent crowd over there that spurred us, excited us, supported us and got us to New York. But then, you're looking at North Carolina State all over again.
That was a difficult game for both teams. You almost had to know it was going to be that way, much like the Wisconsin-Michigan State game in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. Teams that know each other so well are not going to let each other do what each other does best. We were in a situation where we had to get our knee pads on and our elbow pads and know that you're going to spend more time on your hands and knees on the floor than you are upright playing basketball. That's the way it turned out. We almost lost it there at the end, but our kids made some great timely defensive plays, they missed a couple of free throws and we made a couple, and we ended up winning the game.
And of course, the Notre Dame game was one of our better games of the year. It was truly one of those games where you come out at the end really feeling like you're the better team. We attacked their zone very well, defended them very well, didn't let them penetrate on us, didn't let Troy Murphy absolutely dominate us. In a championship atmosphere, our team played very very well.
That all leads to a great feeling after the game. I told the team before the game, there is no shame in playing in New York City, arguably the most talked-about city in the world, in arguably the most popular and well-respected basketball arena in the world, Madison Square Garden, and playing for a national championship, the oldest national championship in the country. There's no shame in that. Our team got excited about that and played very well and earned everything they got.
Gold Rush: Sometimes it seems like the teams that play well in the NIT are the teams that want it more, the teams that get past the disappointment of not making the NCAA tournament. Was that something that this team had more than the last two?
Odom: We've always won our first game, so we've come out of the chute well. This team, being a little bit older, was maybe able to handle it a little bit better. It is something we talked about. We gave them buzzwords like: The team that gets the most excited has got the best chance of winning. The team that plays the hardest has the best chance of winning. Things like that. They seemed to identify with that, and it had a big bearing on how they played.
Gold Rush: You talked about restructuring the offense, but the defense stepped it up down the stretch as well, holding down Murphy in the NIT final and several other big guns after allowing a few 30-point games early on. How did that develop?
Odom: I think our defense was solid through most of the year, though we did have some unusual scores rolled up on us. I think it did get better down the stretch. One of the ways I think it did is that we played more people, a nine-man rotation, which meant that our players would be fresher going down the homestretch of each game. I think Craig Dawson made a difference in our defense, he started rebounding the ball better, because he was in better shape at the end of the year than he was is at any point in his first two years. Our defense on the wing was better than it had been, Josh Howard gave us a good lift there. And our point guards, because we were rotating them, stayed fresher. Our defense inside, Songaila, (Rafael) Vidaurreta, (Josh) Shoemaker -- Antwan Scott certainly got better defensively -- always remained strong.
Gold Rush: And most of that rotation comes back.
Odom: It does. There's reason to be excited about that and to look forward to a new year. I told the team, just because we've got virtually everybody back guarantees nothing other than we have the nucleus for success. But every year requires that you redefine your team, you learn from the experience of the past and you take it to the next level. That's the challenge that lies before this team.
It's also worth noting that in our league next year, this year's top six teams lose only three senior starters. Duke loses (Chris) Carrawell, Maryland loses nobody, Virginia loses nobody, North Carolina loses (Ed) Cota, we lose nobody, North Carolina State loses (Justin) Gainey. That's it for the first six teams. What you're likely to find next year is that the challenge to get better, though it's possible, may be very difficult because of the challenge of returning players on every other team.
Gold Rush: Your one fall signee was Dshamal Schoetz, a 6-foot-11 center from High Point. Talk a little bit about him.
Odom: Dshamal had a good senior year. Sometimes I find that it's easier to play as a college post player than it is as a high school post player because they just don't have a tendency to guard you the same way. I went to see him play a couple of times, and he always had two guys on him. It's hard, but his numbers were good. I thought he improved greatly, he's in good shape. We look forward to having the chance to watch him play here and work with him here. We'll continue to recruit, and look for more people who can help us.
Gold Rush: So with all that, obviously there's a lot of optimism going into next year.
Odom: And that's good. We want a university that's optimistic and looking for another good basketball season, and I think we will have a good team. But again, it's not guaranteed. We have to make it happen, and the way you do that is you work hard in the offseason, you stay together, you encourage each other, and you stand the test. There's lots of them coming at us.
