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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: SAN DIEGOMarch 15, 2018Gregg MarshallSan Diego, California THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Wichita State head coach, Gregg Marshall. GREGG MARSHALL: We're gad to be here. Tremendous, tremendous city and four-team pod for us. We have a lot of friends playing here, guys I've known for many, many years. We're excited to be in San Diego playing Marshall University and look forward to the challenge of competing to advance tomorrow. Q. Coach, Chris Jans, one of your former assistants also here in San Diego. Can you talk about the success he's had at New Mexico State this season? GREGG MARSHALL: Well, Chris is a tremendous coach. I met Chris way back when. He won a National Championship at the junior college Division I level at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. Tried to hire him in 1998 at Winthrop University, but coming after that National Championship he was moving to Independence Junior College, Division I and his goal was to try to be the first coach to win back-to-back National Championships in the junior college level from Division II and Division I. He turned me down. Fast forward nine years I became the head coach at Wichita State and he had just been a head coach at Illinois State in the Missouri Valley Conference, and, again I invite him to become my head coach. At this point he was unemployed. He took me up on the offer and is was vital in helping us get this program to where it is today. He served two tenures, nine years total and is just a dynamic coach, great, great X and O guy, tremendous recruiter and tough enough to get the guys to buy into defense and rebounding like the Aggies have and I say no surprise at all that he's doing as well as he is. Q. Is this the most experienced team you've had in your tenure here at Wichita? When you have a team that experienced, what do you not have to do with them? GREGG MARSHALL: I'm assuming you're Charleston, West Virginia when you say Charleston you've got to be clear! Yeah, this is a very experienced group. When you have six seniors, Markis McDuffie and Landry Shamet are in their third years. So we have a lot of college basketball experience a lot of NCAA Tournament experience. This group, you know, they know what we're trying to do as well as the coaching staff. So hopefully they will play well and make a deep run inside tournament and make a legacy of their own. We've had a lot of good senior classes in the last seven, eight years and this group has been very special in their own right and now it would be nice for them to put a bow on top and make a deep run in the tournament. Q. I know you got a game you're preparing for, but to follow up on Mark's question about Chris Jans, I'll get one more out of the way. I'm curious what you think Chris did on your staff that maybe you learned from, that you learned from Chris, and as a former head coach do you feel pressure watching him or any of your assistants go off and be head coaches when you follow them? GREGG MARSHALL: Chris is a very good basketball coach. We certainly would banter about game plans, defensive schemes to try to stop the other team. We had some really nice runs, both in the regular season and in postseason play while he was on my staff. He's a big part of that. He was always in the center of our decisions on how to attack a team, remember the Final Four run it was his idea to go underneath the ball screens on Aaron Craft because Aaron did not want to shoot the jumper at the point of attack and that worked out really well. This will be the first time I've seen in person one of my guys coach in the NCAA Tournament. Last year Steve Forbes, another guy that was on our staff made his NCAA Tournament head coaching debut at East Tennessee State and almost won. But I was somewhere else in another regional. But to have Earl Grant and Chris Jans here in San Diego I can't wait to watch them and I'm sure there will be butterflies and anxiety wanting them to win so badly. Q. You will watch? GREGG MARSHALL: If I can, yes. Q. Do you think what Earl has done has proven that someday he could be a successful head coach with a major college program? GREGG MARSHALL: Oh, yeah, there is no doubt. Earl's got the whole package, similar to Chris. He can recruit, he can X and O. He's great with people. He's a relationship builder. I remember recruiting him as a high school kid, Midnight Basketball on the east side of the peninsula, way back in the day. Then when I became a head coach two years later he's coming out of junior college, and I should have pulled the trigger and recruited him to Winthrop on my first team there. But I didn't, so I watched him. He becomes a coach. He is at Citadel and I lure him to Winthrop and he was with me for three years at Winthrop, good teams there and he comes with me to Wichita State and is there for me three years there and did a great job, again, helping us build this program. He's got the whole package. I know he's very happy in Charleston, it's home for him, it's home for Jackie, obviously a wonderful place to live and go to work each day, but this guy can really coach. He'll have opportunities just like Chris Jans will have opportunities if they continue to win at the rate they're winning and maybe advance in this NCAA Tournament. But I'm happy for both of them with the success they're having at their current jobs. Q. Earl said last week that he carried on a tradition he got from you of taking all of his assistants to buy a new suit at a store downtown. Do you remember starting that tradition? What does it mean that he's carrying that on? GREGG MARSHALL: I remember when I first started at the College of Charleston making $19,000 a year. Late February was my birthday and that was when the winter clothes were going on sale and Tim Shaw the proprietor of 319 Men, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife Lynn would go in and negotiate to try to get, he called it the half of halves sale, 75% off and we could afford a tie at the time. Then once I became a head coach is the Winthrop and was making $60,000, I could afford a suit. Once we won that year in the NCAA Tournament and we had a week off between the Big South Tournament Finals and Selection Sunday, you don't practice all those days, you give your guys their legs back and we dray down to Charleston and I bought them a suit. We did that every year. So seven out of nine years we were able to go down there and Tim was great. He worked with me on the price. Again, I'm not making a whole lot of money. But I love the fact that Earl has done it. It's easier for him. It is not a road trip. It is walk down George Street and turn left on King and there is Tim's shop. I go back every summer when I'm in Charleston and look to keep my wardrobe updated and Tim does a wonderful job. I know his staff will look really good in San Diego, but my staff now at Wichita State I gave them suits at Christmastime because I want them to look good as well and Johnston's Clothiers in Wichita, Kansas will make us look very good as well. GREGG MARSHALL: You got rid of the glasses? Q. I'm getting old. I still need them to read! What impact has Donnie Jones had on your program? GREGG MARSHALL: Donnie is a great person. When I try to recruit coaches, and this goes for players, too. But for coaches, I want men that are great examples and great role models and leaders. Donnie Jones is all of those. He's a great basketball coach, but he's a better person. He's a wonderful husband, father, spiritual man and a guy that you want in your fox hole. You want a guy like Donnie Jones that you can depend on, that you like to be around and he's had to come in and follow some really good coaches which we've talked about and he's done a very good job blending in with Isaac Brown and Kyle Lindsted, Dominic Okon and Devon Smith and forming a cohesive coaching staff. Q. Shaq has been through some ups and downs in his career and now he's one of the best players in the conference if not the best player in the conference. Why did you stick with him through all that and how rewarding is that for you as a coach to watch that progression? GREGG MARSHALL: I remember Chris Jans and I evaluating him and he was really heavy, and somewhat lazy, and the crazy thing about Shaq was he wore the fact that he was lazy like a badge of honor, that was something that he was proud of. And I had to explain to him that's not something that you need to be proud of. That's something that you need to shed from your personality or your modus operandi. He did that, to his credit. It was slow-mo. He probably missed more practices his freshman year, the year that he redshirted than anyone has every missed in the history of college basketball. There was no serious injuries but hang nails and sniffles and whatnot and he's out for several days. You know, I told him when he went home for Christmas that freshman year, I think he had missed about 35 days of workouts, and our trainer, Todd Fagan, I went to him and documented all the things that he had wrong with him in that fall semester and before he left to go home for Christmas I said, Son, you need to go by the doctor's office and check out a medical Thesaurus and he said what is that? And I said you're going to have to come up can new ailments in the spring semester, but the guy had tremendous potential and we saw that. I think all of us in Shocker Nation have now been the beneficiaries of watching him develop. It's been gratifying to see. Obviously he's helped us win and when he's on and hopefully he will be on the rest of his career, staying out of foul trouble, really energized and focused, he's a load and he's hard to handle. Q. Gregg, I was wondering if you had a chance to catch up with Coach Kresse while you were in town and if you've seen him? Last conversation, what that was like? GREGG MARSHALL: We went back and forth after he was leading the cheers there in the Colonial Conference Finals, I watched at least half of the William & Mary Semifinals and he and Sue looked great as they were leading the cheers in the comeback. Is he here? I didn't know if he was going to make the trip. I'm just glad he's here. He's told me how much he appreciates Earl, what a job Earl has done with the team. And obviously when Earl was hired there was a divide, if you recall at the College of Charleston like we hadn't seen in a while and it was a tough situation that Earl was walking into. When I was asked by Coach Kresse and others, Mr. Hull about Earl I said, listen, Earl can bring everything together. He's a healer, and I'm not talking about snake oil, I'm just talking about relationship and getting people to like him and trust him and getting the players back in the right frame of mind and obviously he's done that and more. It's just been really gratifying to see not only how well they're playing as a team but how that university has now completely healed and hitting on all cylinders. Q. Coach, you've played against two of the quickest teams in the nation, Savannah State and Oklahoma, obviously you have another one in Marshall. How much do you think that's going to help tomorrow? GREGG MARSHALL: We also played against South Dakota State, add them in the mix. Teams that get up and shoot threes, we struggled with all three of them. It's hard to guard. When they play at that tempo and have that type of skill across the front line and into the backcourt it's difficult to guard. You have to be a tremendous defensive team. We didn't do a great job against any of the three but we outscored two of them. We're going to have to defend and rebound at a high level and hopefully our offense is clicking as well. Marshall has our full and undivided attention and then if we're fortunate enough to get beyond them you have the antitheses of Marshall with West Virginia, and Murray State I've heard is a tremendous team as well. I have not delving into Murray State. I'm not delving into West Virginia. Marshall is the team we're focused on and they can score the basketball and we're going to have to play at a high level to win. Q. Going back to Donnie Jones, did he seek you out or did you seek him out in getting him back in the college game? GREGG MARSHALL: Actually, when I was hired at Winthrop in 1998 I tried to hire Donnie. At the time he was the Director of Basketball Operations for Billy Donovan and you could not recruit in that third position at that time. The rules changed. But the night that I offered him the job, the day that I was hired, he went to Billy Donovan and asked Billy if he had an opportunity to go on the road as a full-time assistant coach when and if Anthony Grant or John Pelphrey took a job and at that time Billy promised him that he would, in fact, have that opportunity. He was smart. He stayed with Florida. They won two National Championships. Fast forward from 1998 to 2017, and 19 years later I'm in my tenth year at Wichita State and he had been a scout for the Los Angeles Clippers and was looking to get back in and I don't know whether I called him or he called me to be honest with you. I just knew when Chris Jans was able to get the head coaching job at New Mexico State I needed a guy that was really good to fill that void. My familiarity with Donnie and his expertise, not only with coaching at a high level, but also coaching in the American Athletic Conference was something that made an impression on me. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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