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Mastroianni returns home to take Marywood job

09/09/2015, 8:30pm EDT
By Josh Verlin

Enrico Mastroianni (above) takes over a Marywood program that went 14-11 last year. (Photo courtesy Georgian Court athletics)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The first few weeks of Enrico Mastroianni’s new head coaching job quite different from the first few weeks of his last.

Marywood University’s new head men’s basketball coach spent the last three seasons at Georgian Court University, where he was the Division II school’s first-ever men’s basketball coach. When Mastroianni took over at GCU in 2012, he had a year to put his entire roster together before the team began competition in 2013-14.

At Marywood, a Division III program located in Scranton, he inherits a program that won 14 games last year, with five of its 11 losses coming by fewer than 10 points. Three of the six players who started 10-or-more games for the Pacers last year were freshmen.

“I have a team that’s ready to win right now,” Mastroianni said over the phone on Wednesday afternoon, a day after he was formally announced by the school. “I’m looking at the next two weeks I have to really dig in and evaluate who we have on our roster, where guys fit in, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work with a team like this as far as strategy goes.”

Mastroianni takes over for Bob Simmons, who departed for the same position at Allegheny College (Pa.) at the end of July.

It's a return home for the Scranton native, who graduated from West Scranton high school in 1994 before going to Penn State's main campus, where he didn't get involved in basketball beyond playing in rec leagues.

But the coaching bug inspired him to coach at St. Paul Middle School in Scranton, which led to an assistant gig at Misericordia in Dallas, Pa., 40 minutes away.

"I commuted from Scranton, it was a part-time assistant job and i worked full-time at the school," Mastroianni said. "It was close to Scranton, but it wasn’t in Scranton.”

Also plenty familiar to Mastroianni is the Colonial States Athletic Conference (CSAC), thanks to his time at Centenary College (N.J.), where he was head coach for four years prior to his taking over at Georgian Court. The 10-school conference has a heavy Philadelphia-area presence with Cabrini, Gwynedd Mercy, Immaculata, Rosemont and Neumann forming the South Division; Cairn University joins Marywood, Summit, Keystone and Centenary in the North.

While Mastroianni led Centenary to 45 wins in his time there, making him the school’s all-time leader in that category, he found the going much tougher at GCU. The Lions won two games in 2013-14 and five last year, and Mastroianni was relieved of his duties at the end of the season; former Monmouth assistant Brian Reese is the program’s second-ever head coach.

“I thought we did some really good things...I’m not regretful for what transpired there,” Mastroianni said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity, it was tremendous at the time I was involved in it, to be able to build a program and have the whole experience, gaining the knowledge of what it takes to do that.”

Though Mastroianni isn’t missing out on any practice time--Division III coaches are prohibited from working with their teams until October 15--he knows that the clock is ticking until his team hits the floor, and there’s much to be done in the five weeks before the preseason gets underway.

In addition to getting to know his new roster, he also needs to find a staff; former Marywood assistant Jon Showers took the same position at York this week.

And once he figures out what his roster and coaching staff looks like this year, Mastroianni will already need to start recruiting and preparing for the future.

“I have a set idea in mind of what I want to do, but I need to know whether or not these guys can operate that way,” he said. “I think once we figure out how we look, our evaluations of our own current roster, then we’ll decide to move forward...that’ll dictate the recruiting direction that we take.”


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