City of Basketball Love

By David Comer
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Phil Martelli Jr. vividly remembers watching Selection Sunday in his family’s living room when he was growing up in Drexel Hill. 

The TV would be turned to CBS. The blank NCAA tournament bracket torn from the sports section of that day’s Philadelphia Inquirer would be in one hand. A pencil would be in the other.

As each school’s name was called, he would quickly add it to the bracket. That bracket would be his life for the next three weeks.

“I love Selection Sunday,” Martelli said. “It’s something special.”

This year, Selection Sunday was even more special than usual for Martelli. He is in his second season as the head coach of the men’s basketball team at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., and his team — the America East champion — would be playing in this year’s NCAA tournament.

“To have your name pop up is pretty cool,” Martelli said.

He and his team gathered Sunday to watch Selection Sunday to learn who, when and where they would be playing in the NCAA tournament. They didn’t have to wait long. 

The Bulldogs were the 15th-seed in the South region — the first region revealed — and they would be traveling to Cleveland to play second-seed Michigan State on Friday in the first round. 

It would have been at this point, as a kid watching Selection Sunday at home, that Martelli would have turned toward his partially filled-in bracket and quickly jotted down “Bryant” to complete the South region. 

This time was different. The now 43-year-old Martelli saw his school’s name appear on the oversized TV during Selection Sunday and then quickly turned to observe his players — the ones he would be coaching in just a few days in the game that was just announced to the approximately 5.7 million viewers watching from home.  

“I wanted to see their faces and their reactions,” Martelli said. “I was just excited for our group.”

~~~

All Martelli ever wanted was to be part of a team. That’s why as a teenager he started coaching, first the local 5th/6th grade CYO team and then in the Sonny Hill League and Narberth Summer League as he got older. That is why he played basketball growing up and in high school at St. Joseph’s Prep and then during college at St. Joseph’s University. That’s why he’s still coaching.

“I want to be part of a team,” he said. “I am part of a team, and I just love being part of a team.”

Martelli, son of legendary basketball coach Phil Martelli Sr., said he always wanted to coach. Some of his earliest basketball memories are from his father’s decade as an assistant coach at SJU.

“He was a struggling assistant coach,” Phil Jr. remembers. “I saw that side of it — I saw the struggles of it, but I wanted to do this. I was pretty locked in to this is what I wanted to do.”

After his playing days were over at SJU — he played for his father for four years and was a co-captain with Jameer Nelson during his senior year in 2002-03 — he jumped right into coaching and has not stopped.

His path to Bryant included stops at Central Connecticut State — when he was only 22 years old and the nation’s youngest full-time Division I assistant coach at the time — followed by Manhattan, Niagara, Delaware, the Delaware 87ers (of the G-League), and SJU before he became an assistant at Bryant in April of 2018.

Bryant is a long way from SJU; it is approximately 300 miles and just under five hours from campus to campus. Smithfield, R.I., home of Bryant, is a town of about 22,000 located roughly 20 miles from Providence. 

Bryant is a private university founded in 1863 with a reported endowment of $232.6 million and approximately 3,750 students. 

“Bryant is a really great place with incredible people,” Martelli said.

One of its notable alumni is Earl Silas Tupper, inventor of Tupperware, who in 1967 donated to Bryant the 428 acres upon which its campus now sits.

On that campus is the basketball team’s home, the Chace Athletic Center, which seats about 2,000. Bryant is a newcomer to Division I basketball, making the move from Division II to Division I for the 2008-09 season. Martelli was an assistant the first time the Bulldogs reached the NCAA Division I tournament during the 2021-22 season. He is now in charge for the second time.

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It was one of those hot and humid summer days that makes you grateful Willis Carrier invented air conditioning in the early 1900s. Martelli was in his office overlooking the gym, packing up his bag, getting ready to head home for dinner, looking forward to spending time with his family. 

His players had already completed a full day that started at 7:30 AM — a day filled with strength and conditioning, basketball workouts, and classwork — that officially ended at 4:30 PM. Then Martelli heard one basketball bounce, and then two, and then three, and so on.

“I look, and every single guy is in the gym on their own getting work in,” Martelli recalled. “I was standing there thinking, ‘We’ve got something.’”

Bryant’s roster has nine transfers — including several from high-profile programs such as Memphis, St. John’s, and Miami.

“We wanted highly talented players and good character pieces,” Martelli said. “We got the right pieces. The new guys were very open to what we are about. We knew we had special players, and we have a very determined group.”

The Bulldogs are led by 6-foot-6 guard Earl Timberlake, a transfer from Memphis and the America East Player of the Year; he is averaging 15.5 points and a team-best 8.2 rebounds per game. Another 6-foot-6 guard Rafael Pinzon, a transfer from St. John’s, leads the team in scoring at 18.5 points per game. Yet another transfer, 6-foot-8 forward Barry Evans from St. Bonaventure, is averaging 13.5 points and 6.9 rebounds per game.

“I’ve been very impressed,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said. “They’re big. They’re a very experienced and older team. They are very well coached. This is a very fast tempo team.”

Bryant is tied with Michigan as the second tallest team in the NCAA tournament, averaging 79.1 inches — or approximately 6-foot-7 — per player. And Bryant can score; their 82.4 points per game rank 17th in the nation.

It all starts with Martelli. The Bulldogs went 20-13 during his first season and improved to 23-11 in his second, winning the America East regular-season title with a 14-2 league record and then the postseason playoffs to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Martelli was named the America East Coach of the Year and earlier this week the NABC Mid-Atlantic Coach of the Year.

“First, he’s very normal. He’s very normal,” said Bryant assistant coach and former SJU standout Ryan Daly. “He’s extremely family-oriented; he’s serious; he’s organized. He’s just a really good person, and I think the guys kind of understand that. He’s fair with our time, with his time, with his expectations. He’s just really, really easy to be around, and he commands everyone’s, I’d say, respect and attention. 

“I’ve only been here since May, mid-May, so it’s only been 10 months, but the way he leads, it’s pretty high level. He’s extremely stable — not fake, no fluff, he’s as genuine as they come, and everyone I see on the road who knew him as he was going through his own journey as an assistant for multiple different spots, they always say ‘your boss is one of the best people in the business.’”

Martelli is quick to give credit to his staff. The assistant coaches — including associate head coach, Chris Cole, who joined the Bryant staff in June of 2018, just a few months after Martelli, and assistant coach Brendan Phelps, who is also Martelli’s brother-in-law — have been an important part of the team’s success.

They will be working tirelessly — “Every minute counts,” Martelli said — preparing for Michigan State and the 10 PM tipoff Friday night at the Rocket Arena. The game will be broadcast on TBS. The Spartans started the season unranked and were ranked eighth in the latest AP poll. They are 27-6 overall and won the Big Ten regular season with a 17-3 conference record. Izzo, who was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016, will be coaching in his record 27th consecutive NCAA tournament.

“He’s somebody I have the utmost respect for,” Martelli said. “To go against him is an honor; it’s an absolute honor.”

The elder Martelli was SJU’s head coach for 24 years and then spent the next five seasons as an assistant at Michigan; he and Izzo grew closer during that time both were in the Big Ten.

“He’s one of my better friends in coaching,” Izzo said.

Said Phil Sr. about his friend: “He could come to Philadelphia, and he would fit in right with us. He’s one of us, and that’s the greatest compliment I could pay somebody. You could not only survive, but you could thrive in Philly.”

Izzo has gone out of his way to embrace the younger Martelli for many years now.

The younger Martelli said that when he was named the head coach at Bryant, Izzo was one of the first people who called to wish him good luck. When Bryant won its America East semifinal game last week, Izzo called to congratulate him. When Bryant won the conference title on Saturday, Izzo texted Martelli to congratulate him again. And when Martelli’s oldest son, Phillip, broke his arm a few years ago, Izzo sent a care package filled with Michigan State gear for the youngster.

“He’s such a good guy,” Martelli said.

Martelli knows a challenge awaits — Michigan State is an 18.5-point favorite — but he said his team will be ready.

“They’re a very confident group,” Martelli said. “They’re not going to be overwhelmed.”

There have been 15-over-2 upsets 11 times in NCAA tournament history, including three in the last four years. 

“I’ve been part of a 2-15 loss,” Izzo said, recalling when his team fell to Middle Tennessee State in 2016. “Been there, done that.”

The elder Martelli offered his thoughts on the matchup.

“You’re not a 15 when you go out to play the game on Friday night,” he said. “It’s not 2-15. It’s MIchigan State-Bryant. What’s the plan? What do you have to stay with in order to make it a 40-minute contest? What are those couple of things? Up close and personal with Michigan State, you have to rebound the ball, and you have to get back in transition defense. Those are a big deal. ... Both of these teams earned to be in this game. Michigan State didn’t earn more because they’re a two-seed, and Bryant didn’t earn less because they’re a 15. You earned your right — go play the game.”

~~~

Bryant played Maine at 11 AM Saturday in the America East championship game. The days leading up to the game were not fun ones for Martelli.

“The last week was probably the most stressful week of my life,” Martelli said. “I didn’t want to let them down. I knew they deserved to be champions.”

And they were crowned champions, a 79-59 victory secured it.

“Having been on the other side of those moments, living and dying in those games, it was pretty cool to be on the other side of it,” Martelli said. “It was wonderful.”

And even more wonderful because he was able to celebrate with his family.

“I was much tighter and more, I would say, uptight, Friday and Saturday, than I can ever remember in preparation for any of our Atlantic 10 championship games or an NCAA tournament,” Phil Sr. said. “And just being able to move back a little bit and watch the excitement of his in-laws and his wife and his children, the amount of adulation that he was getting, because of the person that he is, it was just a remarkable feeling. And then knowing, there was a point in time when he said OK, they had their A game going, but this other team doesn’t really have much of a chance. Just to watch him soak it in and to know where those players have come from and it was, yeah, it was almost to the point of as proud as I was of all of my children on the day of their weddings, that’s what it was like, that kind of emotion.”

Bryant will fly by charter to Cleveland on Wednesday morning. On the plane will be Martelli’s family — wife, Meghan, who was a star basketball player at Eastern Connecticut State, and their three children, Phillip (15), Marra (12), and Nathan (7).

His father and mother, Judy, who herself was part of two national championship basketball teams at what was then called Immaculata College, will be in Cleveland, but first they will stop in State College to pick up their other son, Jimmy, an assistant men’s basketball coach at Penn State. Martelli’s in-laws will be there, including his father-in-law, a high school basketball coach in Connecticut. Martelli said that he has heard in the past week from so many people he has met during his life in basketball, people like former SJU player and Cleveland native, Harold Rasul, who will be at the game.

“We’ll have a large crew there,” Martelli said. “We sacrifice a lot of family time for basketball. We don’t have a regular Christmas. We don’t have a regular Easter. We have some time together in the summer in Avalon. This is a chance to get everyone together around basketball.”