TEN QUESTIONS WITH...

You open up your home season on Tuesday with Fairleigh Dickinson, a school that beat you 79-64 last year on the road. What do you expect this year as UB shows off the renovated Alumni Arena, with a large crowd on hand to see the most anticipated team possibly in school history?
I expect a lot of energy in the building, a lot of enthusiasm. It would be hard for me to expect anything different in terms of atmosphere than what was here as we closed last season. From our standpoint, we have to prepare each and every day like we always have been, with the thought that we need to get better.

It’s no secret that you are a local guy who has grown up around all the teams and schools you’ve coached around Buffalo, including Sweet Home High School and Erie Community College. Are you excited to see the stir that UB basketball has created lately considering this is a Bills-first, everyone-else-third kind of town?
I would be excited even if I weren’t coaching here. It would probably be more of a thrill because I could sit back and enjoy it and watch it. It is an exciting thing because there are so many coaches, families and student-athletes who have put so much into the sport of basketball and it’s great that more people (in Buffalo) are learning how to appreciate the sport.

Last year, after starting out 5-3, you lost six straight games. What did it take to turn the table, as your team went out and won 12 of its final 15?
I think it took the psychology to persevere. That’s what it took for us to be able to go through the ups-and-downs and go through all the things that we needed to go through in order to be able to compete. We had to learn how to respond at difficult times and certainly, when you lose six straight, those are difficult times. We’re playing at a level where, in most cases, you’re going to have to go through some difficulties in order to get good.

After struggling for four years, to finally turn the corner, with kids you recruited and kids you taught, how fulfilling was that?
It’s fulfilling from a standpoint that I think they’ve worked hard. We’ve all been around in this arena together where we’ve taken some shots. We’ve been on the road where we’ve been told, ‘We can’t win. We’ll never win. We don’t belong in this conference.’ Anytime you go through struggles, if you go through it in the right mindset, it makes you stronger, so from that standpoint, it was very fulfilling.

After the season, a lot of praise, deservedly, was heaped on you for turning the corner with the UB program, but a lot of that credit also belongs to the guys you brought in for your first recruiting class. What can you say about what Turner Battle, Mark Bortz, Daniel Gilbert and Jason Bird have offered this program?
First of all, I got a lot of attention, but it wasn’t just me. Our whole coaching staff deserves a lot of credit. Anytime an award or attention is thrown my way, it’s not really thrown to me; it’s thrown to the entire program, the entire coaching staff and the wives of the coaches. We really envision this as a program that’s run like a family.

Certainly, the seniors are members of our family. When they’re gone for the summer or Spring Break, we miss them. We’re used to seeing them every day and talking to them. They deserve an awful lot because they came here. (When we recruited them,) we talked about them coming here and establishing here a legacy. All of them were recruited by schools with a better tradition for basketball than UB had, yet they understood the opportunity to come here and leave a legacy.

This year, there is a lot of hype for your team. You were predicted to finish first in the MAC East in various national publications. You got a front cover story on ESPN.com’s college basketball page. How do you keep your players focused on the road ahead rather than looking back at the last year?
We’ve told them that all of those things that people are talking about in terms of expectations are based on predictions. We’ve got to be more about preparation than we are about predictions. We have to keep our practice environment a very competitive environment and an environment where you have to be at your best in order to have any success. If we do that, then we’re about preparation—and it’s going to take a lot of preparation to have any success because of the level we’re playing at. None of the preseason stuff has ever won a game for anybody. We’re going to have to outwork people.

In the ESPN.com article, it said that people told you that UB could never be a winner in basketball. What made you make the jump from ECC to UB anyway?
I heard that before. When I got to ECC, they said, ‘Your best days are done. You’ll never be as good as you guys were before.’ When I was coaching at Sweet Home, people said, ‘Suburban kids don’t really care about sports. They’re spoiled and have no desire to compete.’

I’d heard those things about life before, that, ‘You guys are moving out to the suburbs. They don’t want you there.’ I’d heard those things. My parents had heard those things and passed on their values. I think it has more to do with how I was raised. I had the advantage of being raised here, in this area, understanding that there were times that the wheels were coming off the wagon a little bit. But when you’re brought up and you’re raised here, you have a chance to take a look at the college basketball programs, as you’re growing up, and begin to say, ‘Maybe if we do this or that, it might work.’ I think that gave me a great view of some of the things we could do to enhance a program, so it never dawned on me, they couldn’t. Just like they tell you in Kindergarten, ‘I can’t’ means ‘I won’t.’

There’s been one guy who’s taken every step with you during your coaching career. How did you and assistant coach Jim Kwitchoff first meet and what made him that one piece of the coaching puzzle that’s always been by your side?
We attended the same high school (Sweet Home), but I’m older than he is. I graduated in 1979 and he graduated in 1984. I started coaching and it was kids like him who were going to summer camp and I came back to work summer camps at Sweet Home. Sweet Home happened to have a very talented group of athletes and he happened to be one of them, so I got to meet him when he was in about eighth or ninth grade. He was always an extremely hard worker in whatever sport he took in. He ended up being all-state in track and field and all-state in basketball. He was a Division I major college (Boston College) football player so I understood that he had a vision that he was going to work until he got what he wants.

I saw him every summer and followed his football career. I told him, ‘When your football career is over, you’re going to play on my rec league team.’ I just thought he’s a great teammate. We did that a little bit, we played in a few tournaments and we won our share of trophies doing that. Then we got to know each other as adults, because we were both kids when we met. Trust, I think, is a big part of what you’re looking for when you’re trying to build something. Certainly the trust was there.

He compliments me very well. He’s very organized. He pays attention to some details that are outside of basketball that might slip by me. It allows me to sink myself into a great many of the basketball things. I always knew he’d be great at recruiting, because he believes, like I do. We grew up not very far from this campus at all. When we talk about why they should come to UB, it isn’t a belief that we just came up with a couple years ago. It’s something that we grew up with so that always helps.

As a Buffalo guy, you would know as well as anyone else. What is really the best place to get chicken wings in this town?
La Nova Wings are probably the best wings you can get in Western New York from my perspective. I haven’t had all of them and I’m trying to stay away from them, but they taste very good.

What has been your favorite moment at the University at Buffalo?
Probably my favorite moment was coming out and seeing the Mighty Maniacs all dressed in blue. Seeing them take up that whole section behind our bench and seeing them stand for the whole game and there have been several of those moments. That’s my favorite moment because I’ve been on other campuses where there’s that level of enthusiasm, that level of excitement for intercollegiate athletics. I’ve always believed that this would be a great place for it to be. I always thought it could happen and coming out and seeing that gets you excited and gives you goosebumps, that level of spirit on this campus.

“The 10 Questions With…” feature is compiled by Joe Guistina.