WATCH: Will Wade’s Q&A at Introductory Press Conference (with transcript)

NC State Head Coach Will Wade and Athletic Director Boo Corrigan had a question and answer session with the media this afternoon at Wade’s introductory press conference. You can watch it ABOVE, and read it BELOW.

You talked about the passion of the fan base. Seeing everything that’s happened over the past year plus with this program, how much did that kind of re-energize you and let you know that this is the place for you?

You know, I’m not on social media, but Reed Vial, who’s with me, is my social media guy. He runs all my Twitter and all that stuff.

But he would show me the updates on all the #WadetoState stuff. Now you’ve got to change it to #WadeatState now.

I mean, we have passionate fans. We’ve got fans that care. When people care, that’s a good thing.

Now, it hurts when you lose, you know, when folks care, but we’d much rather have it that way than being invisible and nobody caring. So I think the fan base is a huge reason that we’re here.

And, you know, we want to ignite this thing. We want to sell out the Lenovo Center, and we want to sell it out consistently. We want 19,500 people in there..

We’re very, very excited about the possibilities. I think everybody’s hungry for a consistent winner. That’s our job is to build a consistent winner, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start immediately, and we’re going to get it done at a fast pace.

What type of reassurance have you received from the administration? I know a lot of coaches around the ACC that I’ve spoken to that wanted to remain anonymous, have spoken about NIL and not being able to compete with the top of the top when it comes to NIL and getting those players out of the transfer portal. We know that the transfer portal is like the Wild, Wild West right now, but how have you been able to kind of get that reassurance from NC State that you will be able to compete with the top of the top?

There’s no doubt we’re going to be able to compete nationally. We have robust NIL. Are we going to have the most in the country? No, we don’t need that. You don’t have to have the biggest house in the neighborhood. You’ve got to have the nicest house in the neighborhood with the most manicured lawn.

You’ve got to know how to spend the resources properly that you have. So I think the commitment from our collective, the commitment from the revenue share standpoint from Boo and his staff is just phenomenal. So we are going to be competitive at the upper end of this league, and we’re going to be competitive nationally with our NIL package and with the revenue sharing.

Like I said, we don’t have to have the most. You get the most, sometimes you buy some lemons out of the portal. So that’s not what this is about.

This is about being able to efficiently use the resources that we have, and we’re going to have enough resources to efficiently build a very, very good basketball team in short order.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from the past two years?

The great part about being at McNeese is I could try some stuff out. We changed some things offensively. I really learned.

I was really more in tune with the total player experience. We probably had a little more fun than I did before everything happened, so I think there’s some stuff that we can carry over to NC State that we’ve learned.

Look, I’m not the same coach I was when I started at Chattanooga when I was 31 years old or 30 years old. I’m not the same coach I was then. You’re always growing and getting better.

I think I’ve grown and gotten better from VCU to LSU, certainly from LSU to being fired to McNeese, and I’ll be better from McNeese to here. NC State is getting the best version of Will Wade right now.

Who are some of the coaches throughout your career that have had the biggest impact on you and what have you learned from them?

I think you take from everybody that you’ve worked with, so I’ve worked for – I’ve been fortunate to be around some great coaches.

I worked with a guy, Larry Shyatt, who’s one of the best defensive coaches in the country. I worked for a guy, Oliver Purnell, which is where we got the structure of our program from. I still run the day-to-day structure just like Coach Purnell did.

I worked for a guy, Tommy Amaker at Harvard. I worked at Harvard, didn’t go to Harvard, but I’m sure that was pretty clear listening to me speak. I know Chancellor-elect Howell’s got a daughter up there. I learned a lot about recruiting from Coach Amaker. Then from Coach Smart, I learned a lot about the player relationships, the interpersonal relationships.

So you take all that from those folks and you put your own twist on it. You’ve got to be yourself. That’s a big part of it.

We’re not trying to be anybody else or anybody that we’re not, but you take those influences and put your own spin on it and go from there.

You talked about how much excitement there is. How do you build trust and buy-in not only with your incoming players, but with the fan base as a whole?

Well, we’re going to be engaged in the community. The next month to six weeks we’re going to be holed up getting this roster together and getting this right, but once we get that right, I mean, we’re going to be out in the community. We’re going to be out with the students on campus. I look forward to engaging with the students.

We’ve got almost 40,000 students here, 28,000 undergrad and 11,000 graduate students. We look forward to getting out and engaging with the student community. We look forward to getting out and engaging with our fan base.

I’m excited about that. I think if you’re accessible and you’re out there, I think people are more likely to come to the games and people feel like they’ve got a stake in the game.

That’s really, really important to me. We certainly spend a ton of time with our student athletes and a ton of time with our players, and we’re going to do that as well to build the team how we need to.

Boo, you heard Coach Wade talk about some of the mistakes that he made and some of the arrogance that he maybe had at LSU. Who did you talk to? How did you dig into his character and what he’s been through to decide that he was the right person here? Then for Will, you mentioned some of the mistakes and some of the arrogance. How have you changed as a coach and as a person from that experience?

Corrigan: There’s a value in gray hair. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know a lot of people, and consistently in talking to people about Will and how he’s grown, I think the biggest thing for me was sitting with Will. I don’t know if anyone knows this, but we were in Houston…based on the tracking of the airplane…we were in Houston, and we went down there and were able to sit, I don’t know, two and a half hours?

And I asked a lot of really tough questions about what occurred. He was open. He was honest.

Talked about how he’s grown, what he’s looked at, how he’s reflected on it, and you’ve heard it today. We’re getting a more mature version of Will Wade.

I mean, think about the idea of being 35 years old or younger as a head coach, and I imagine your head gets a little big as you’re going through it, and the guy wins everywhere he goes, and all of a sudden, there’s a break. It’s an opportunity to grow, and I think that’s what we’re about.

I think we’re about second chances, and as everyone’s heard here today, that’s what it’s about. It’s about what can we do to bring this program back on a consistent basis and win.

Wade: I think that certainly, you know, you don’t lose your competitive fire. I’ve always had that competitive fire.

But really what that experience taught me was just to have a little bit better perspective on things. Everything’s not, you know, life or death. Every recruit’s not life or death. We can move on. There’s other people. Everything’s not nearly as important maybe as I thought it was at the time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, basketball and winning is very, very important, but I have a little bit better perspective now on where that fits in the grand scheme of things.

It was important to me to learn about the university. Before I took jobs, we were just there to win at basketball. I want to help build stuff around the university and help other departments in the university.

Be a good team member, and that wasn’t always how you would describe Will Wade. I’ve spent a lot of time on that.

When you get, as Boo said, you climb up that ladder pretty quick. Well, they take those legs out on that ladder real quick too. When you get knocked off that thing, you’ve got to do some, you’ve got to have some hard conversations with yourself.

I think that that allows you to change and allows you to move forward and be better.

Tim Peeler from University Communications here at NC State. Two of the 15 coaches that have been at NC State since World War II did not play college basketball. They’re both in the Naismith Hall of Fame.

Wade: Let’s make it three.

Can you tell me what you learned by watching?

Wade: I’m glad you asked this question. That’s why you’re in University Communications. I like that. I like that.

Can you tell me what you learned and why you wanted to be on this kind of stage, why you wanted to do this, motivationally, when you first got started?

Yeah, so I never dreamed of doing this. My parents are here today. My mom is an educator for 30-plus years, since retired.

My degree is in secondary education, history, and geography. My whole goal when I started on this was to just be a high school history teacher and coach a little high school basketball and impact some lives that way. And then Coach Purnell, who I spoke about earlier, gave me an opportunity to be a graduate assistant at Clemson, and I stayed on. He’s like, ‘Hey, if you’re going to be a teacher, at least let me get you a graduate degree so you can make a little bit more money,’ and I stayed on as a graduate assistant, just kind of realized you can do the same service, you can do the same thing in college basketball, and I never left.

So here we are.

There was a lot of enthusiasm in that, for many in the fanbase, you were the first choice they wanted. Then when the release came out, you were quoted as calling this a destination job. That generated much more enthusiasm. Could you please explain why you consider this a destination job?

I think we’ve got everything we need to win at the highest level. I give Boo a ton of credit. He is intentionally like this, I believe, but he undersells everything.

I walked in some of the facilities yesterday. I mean, it was incredible. Way better than he described.

But, you know, I’ve worked for ADs that oversell things, and you get there and you’re like, ‘What in the world is going on?’

But, I mean, I was blown away. You’ve got to have facilities. You’ve got to have infrastructure, and getting to know Michelle and his senior staff, I mean, he’s got everybody, Todd and everybody who came to the meeting, he’s got everybody singing off the same page in music.

We don’t have somebody singing a different tune, and if you’ve got that, you’ve got great facilities, great infrastructure, you’ve got great fans, I mean, we should be able to do this. This should be done and done at a high level and done quickly.

We’ve just got to maximize what we have. If we worry about maximizing what we have, being the best at our market on what we do, nobody can touch us. We’ve got stuff nobody else in the country has.

We’re in a really fertile recruiting area. We’ve got a tremendous university. We’ve got tremendous facilities, tremendous fan base, passionate fans.

I mean, what else do you need? It’s on me to get it done, and we’re going to get it done.

You talked about competing at the highest level. I know you’re an ACC guy. I’m curious of your thoughts of Triangle basketball, what you knew before you got here, and what it is that you know now that you are here in this area with some national powers around as well.

Well, I haven’t been here that long. I flew in yesterday at 3, went right to meet the team at 4. So I haven’t been here that long. But certainly, I grew up or I was in college in the ACC.

Unfortunately when you’re a coach, I’ve watched a lot of Southland basketball lately. I didn’t really watch much ACC until we started preparing for Clemson in the NCAA tournament. I got to watch five or six of Clemson’s games to prepare for that.

I kind of knew in the back of my head. It was kind of weird. We were showing edits to our guys, and it was Clemson at NC State, and we’d have NC State’s court there, and our guys all kind of knew, it was kind of a little bit of an awkward position when I’m up there showing clips, but, I started to look at it there.

But, look, the ACC is one of the premier basketball conferences in the country, and we’ve got to hold up our end of the bargain. NC State, in my opinion, is one of the major brands in this league, and for ACC basketball to be good, NC State basketball needs to be good, and that’s what we’re going to do. And I think the better we are, the better the league will be.

I know we’ve got some bully neighbors and that sort of thing, but we’re not worried about them. If we worry about ourselves, all that other stuff will take care of itself.

We’re focused on ourselves, and we want them to turn around and be chasing us. So that’s the focus.

If we do what we’re supposed to do, that’s what’s going to happen.

The ACC as a whole has lost a lot of big-name coaches. I just kind of wanted to hear your thoughts on that, and if that played a role into your decision to come here and where you see yourself fitting into the ACC.

Corrigan: They just gained one.

Wade: Look, I like to compete against the best.

I don’t care who’s coaching the other team. We want to compete. We want to play the best.

I mean, you’d be dumb not to recognize that Jim Boeheim left, Leonard Hamilton left, Jim Laranega left. Coach Williams left. Coach Krzyzewski left. Coach Bennett’s left. You’d be crazy not to recognize that all those jobs have turned over in recent memory. But, look, we want to compete against the best.

We’re going to challenge ourselves in the ACC. We’re going to challenge ourselves in the non-conference. We want to compete against the best.

You can’t be the best playing a bunch of bad teams. You get better by playing the best teams in the country. At McNeese State last year, we played the 21st-ranked non-conference schedule in the country.

That was at McNeese. Played the 21st-ranked non-conference schedule in the country. Like, we’re going to play the best.

We’re going to challenge ourselves against the best. So, we’ll go schedule some Hall of Fame coaches if we need to, but we want to go out there and play the best.