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La Salle AD Bill Bradshaw begins search for Giannini's replacement

03/23/2018, 9:15pm EDT
By Josh Verlin

Isiah Deas (above) and the rest of La Salle's roster are waiting to see who their next coach will be. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Bill Bradshaw is well aware by this point that hiring a Division I men’s basketball coach is a decision that can be neither rushed into nor drawn out for long.

The La Salle athletic director has made several high-profile hirings in his four decades in charge of the athletics programs at three different universities. And now he’s got to make one more, as the school announced on Friday afternoon that it was parting ways with head basketball coach Dr. John Giannini after 14 years.

Bradshaw’s been around long enough to know there’s already a clock that’s ticking, even if not too quickly just yet.

“John Wooden used to say this about his guards, he’d say ‘be quick but don’t hurry,’” Bradshaw told CoBL on Friday night. “And I say that because we need to be quick, we need to get out there, we need to get a pool of candidates that we believe can take La Salle to different levels in a relatively short period of time.

“And yet,” he continued, “we can’t hurry it, because it’s more like a painting than a sprint. A sprint is when you need to get out and get a recruit to get it done, and the painting is done when it’s done, when you’ve painted and it’s done. And I make a parallel between that and the search, because the search isn’t done until you get the right candidate, the right fit.”

Bradshaw wouldn’t discuss the details of Giannini’s removal, saying it was out of “fairness” to the former head coach, who led the Explorers to the Sweet 16 in 2013 but had only one winning record in five years since.

But Bradshaw was plenty happy to discuss his plans moving forward in the hiring process, something he’s plenty familiar with throughout his many years in collegiate athletics.

A 1969 graduate of La Salle, Bradshaw first served in his current position at his alma mater from 1978-86, at which point he left for DePaul, where he spent the next 14 seasons. But before leaving, he led the Explorers’ search to replace Lefty Ervin, though it wasn’t a typical one; Bradshaw passed over a hiring committee and went straight to the school’s women’s head coach, William “Speedy” Morris, for the job.

“I recommended that we did not have a search, because of a couple fears that I had,” Bradshaw said. “One was that we could lose what I thought was the best hire we could make which was Speedy, if we went too long and got a committee and went through weeks of applications and all of that stuff, and sitting in front of us was the best candidate in my opinion.

“Secondly, Lionel Simmons was available and ready to commit, but I feared that any loss of time that we would have had on a search most definitely would have led to either Temple or Villanova getting Lionel. So those two things to me were major considerations of not having a search, and I think it worked out okay on La Salle’s behalf.”

It did indeed: Simmons, known as the “L-Train,” became one of the best players in Explorers history, scoring over 3,200 points in four years at 20th and Olney before becoming the No. 7 overall pick in the 1990 NBA draft. He spearheaded a run that saw La Salle make the tournament four times in five years (1988-90, ‘92); Morris lasted 15 years with the La Salle men’s team.

At DePaul, Bradshaw helped the Blue Demons go through their first real college basketball hiring in over 50 years, following the tenure of Ray Meyer (1942-84) and his son Joey Meyer (1984-97); in came Pat Kennedy (1997-02), who got DePaul into the NCAA Tournament in 2000 but departed two years later after a nine-win campaign.

Bradshaw returned to Philadelphia in 2002, taking over as AD at Temple University, where he oversaw not only the hiring of Fran Dunphy as the Owls’ basketball coach in 2006 but also brought on board a succession of football coaches -- Al Golden, Steve Addazio and Matt Rhule -- who helped bring that program from a laughingstock up to a respectable Division I program which broke a 30-year postseason drought with a bowl appearance in 2009 and has gone to a postseason game in five of the last nine seasons overall.

In Kennedy and Dunphy, Bradshaw brought on coaches who had established experience and success at the Division I level. Kennedy had taken Iona and Florida State to a combined eight NCAA Tournaments in 17 seasons before going to DePaul; Dunphy had led Penn to nine NCAA Tournaments in 17 seasons before his hiring at Temple. But his football hires were all former assistants, getting their first opportunities to be collegiate head coaches.

Bradshaw said this search could go either way.

“In some instances you need stability and you need somebody that’s been experienced as a head coach, and that’s the best barometer to judge a coach,” he said. “It’s more difficult to judge an assistant coach because they might have been terrific recruiters and they might help in practices, but you just don’t know until that person sits in that head chair how they’re going to be.

“If we find a terrific assistant who we believe can do it, if we look at a sitting head coach somewhere in Division I who’s maybe at another level and wants to get to Philadelphia, we’ll consider all of it. Right now, at the stage we’re in, it’s casting a wide net around the nation.”

Bradshaw said that he wasn’t entering into the search with any specific names in mind, though there’s several candidates that would seem outwardly to make sense. Villanova assistant Ashley Howard has long been seen as a future Division I head coach, and this could be his opportunity to follow Baker Dunleavy, who left Jay Wright’s staff and took over at Quinnipiac last offseason. Or it could go to someone like Hofstra head coach Joe Mihalich, a Philadelphia native and La Salle assistant from 1981-98 who’s won over 350 games in 20 seasons between Niagara (1998-2013) and his current position.

Though Bradshaw didn’t want to say a specific timeline, he acknowledged that the more than 30 days it took to hire Dunphy was “too long,” and the nature of the Division I recruiting timeline would lead one to believe the hiring would be completed within a month. The first live recruiting periods of 2018 take place the last two weekends of April, and Bradshaw knows it would be a great detriment to the program if the new staff isn’t somewhat in place by that point. But with the NCAA Tournament still going on for the next 10 days, Bradshaw also knows that he might need to wait on several potential candidates until after it’s all said and done.

In addition, there’s a group of four high school seniors -- center Osun Osunniyi (Putnam Science, Conn.), power forwards Ed Croswell (St. Joseph's Prep, Pa.) and Jared Kimbrough (Neptune, N.J.) and shooting guard Jack Clark (Cheltenham, Pa.) -- who have signed National Letters of Intent to play at La Salle this fall, but would almost certainly be released from those letters if they don’t approve of the hire or if the school takes too long.

Bradshaw’s aware of all of it. And he’s rushing, patiently, to find Giannini’s successor, putting into place a small search committee -- he wouldn’t say exactly who was on it -- just like he did at DePaul and Temple.

“Again, be quick, but don’t hurry,” he said. “We don’t want to hurry to make mistakes or overlook someone, and at the same time with the recruiting coming up and wanting to keep the people that we’ve signed, we want to move as quickly as we can.”


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