NC State Head Coach Will Wade met with Jeff Goodman and Rob Dauster of Field of 68 last week. In their extended conversation, Wade explained his thoughts on NC State fans, the potential of the basketball program with close neighbors like Duke and UNC, his transition out of McNeese St., the evolution of recruiting, managing the opinion of others as well as his thoughts on the current Wolfpack roster.
You can read the transcript below, and watch the videos underneath.
JG: How’s everything going here so far? So good. I know it’s quiet here on campus in Raleigh right now, but I guess the first question is why NC state? I said it when you took this job, like there’s probably not a better marriage that I have seen. I’ve been doing this a long time. Well, 25 years, whatever it’s been, I’m not sure there’s a better marriage than Will Wade and NC state and the fans. There’s lunacy among this fan base and you fit to a T, because you don’t give a shit. And NC state fans, they don’t really give a shit either.
WW: Well, let’s hope it works, or they’re going to turn their pitchforks on me. We’ve got passionate fans. We’ve got everything we need here to win.
We just haven’t been able to do it consistently. It’s our job to be able to do this consistently, but I do agree. I think a lot of times when they look at jobs, people really underestimate the fit. Like you can just throw money at a coach, but there’s certain jobs that the fit is really, really important, and I think NC state’s one of them. I mean, every job’s like that, but I think that, I mean, look, I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. I know that.
JG: What do you mean by that?
WW: I probably wouldn’t be a very good fit at the university of Virginia. I wouldn’t think so. But you know, I think that I am a good fit at NC State, and I think that’s an important that’s an important piece to everything that sometimes gets overlooked in the coaching searches and in the coaching world. So you can throw a lot of money at somebody, but you still gotta have somebody who’s a very solid fit with the fan base, with the area and all that sort of stuff. I’m not a good fit at UCONN either.
RD: You would actually fit in really well up there, man.
JG: You could follow Hurley. You’re about as crazy as Hurley.
WW: No, we had enough of Hurley when he was at Rhode Island and I was at VCU.
RD: Well, what I think makes you a great fit there is that NC state is a program that has tradition and has pride, but also happens to be in the same region as Duke and Carolina, which are two of what, like the five best programs in the history of the sport. That school needs someone that comes in and looks at it and doesn’t look at Duke and North Carolina as Duke and Carolina. It looks at it like, ‘That’s who we got to go beat. That’s our competition right there.’
And I feel like the underdog mindset, not sure that is the right way to phrase it, but this attitude of coming in and saying, ‘I’m going to go take the throne. I’m going to go take what’s yours,’ I feel like you have, and I feel like works perfectly within that kind of athletic department and what that basketball program needs.
WW: Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve spent a lot of time maybe at NC State focusing on the other folks. Like, why don’t we worry about ourselves? I don’t think we’ve spent enough time maximizing what we do and maximizing ourselves, and I think if we maximize ourselves, we’re going to be damn good. You know, in every minute you spend diverting to something else. There’s a coach in the SEC that spent more time worrying about my program at LSU than he worried about his own program. He got fired. Like he spent more time following me around and recruiting and looking at stupid stuff.
I think if you can focus on, on your program and spend time focusing on your program and what you do. We have everything we need here. Like if there’s people that are close to us who have won, then we should be able to win. We’re in the same recruiting area. We’ve got the same basic resources. I mean, look, it’s plus or minus 5-10%, maybe. We’ve got similar levels of resources. I’m not talking about NIL. I’m talking about the money share that everybody has. We’ve got similar, similar resources.
Like we should be able to do it if we focus on ourselves and maximize ourselves. And to Rob’s point, if we find players who have the same type mentality that we have and that our fan base has, and that our school has. We’ve got to find folks who are really, really good fits.
JG: You got any crazy stories yet from NC State fans since you’ve been here? Anything really good? I mean, Chris Corchiani probably will follow you around at this point. I saw him in Vegas, by the way, he was out there when we were out there in Vegas. He was wearing me out during the whole process, whether or not you were going to get the job. These fans are crazy. Anything really good so far, or you think it’ll, it’ll take a little bit of time.
WW: Chris probably knew before me or you knew what was going on. I will say this. One thing that surprised me is to Rob’s point, there’s a lot of schools within 25 miles of us, and I’ve been very surprised at just how many NC State fans there are.
Like every time we go out to eat or every time I go to a restaurant or every time I go somewhere, it’s all NC State…take a bunch of pictures, people come up to you. I thought it would be a little bit more divided, but in this area, and especially when you go east to the coast, it’s all Wolfpack. I think when you go to Charlotte and Greensboro, there’s a lot of NC State people, but it’s a little more split , especially with Carolina folks.
I guess the Duke folks are in Jersey.
I think that there’s a lot of passion and a lot of excitement within our fan base, and we’ve got to capitalize on that.
JG: Is it strange how the perception of you has changed over the last few years? I think it has partially because of how NIL has come into play, but not even that, like when you got fired at LSU, and then what you did at McNeese and how a lot of people that are close to me have said, even how you handled the situation in March with your players and publicly gained a lot of respect. I think you wear your emotions in your sleeve. You really don’t care what most people think of you that are outside of your circle, but how have you seen maybe the perception of you change?
WW: Somebody told me this morning that NIL stood for ‘Now it’s Legal.’ I hadn’t heard that one before. I was on a phone call this morning and a coach told me that. Look, I don’t know how much the perception has or hasn’t changed.
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about all that. So look, we are who we are. We’ve always been who we are.
We’re the same people. If you ask me a question, I’m going to tell you what I think, and I’m not going to sugar coat it. I’m not going to tell you what I think you want to hear. I do go at things probably a little bit unconventional just because that’s kind of just how I am. I’m not going to change a bunch of people’s minds.
So I don’t try to spend a lot of time changing people’s minds or spend a lot of time fighting what people think. The people who know us feel one way about us. A lot of people who don’t know us feel a different way about us and, and that’s fine with me. Early in my career, I would worry about that stuff and try to kiss ass with the media. It doesn’t bother me.
If you like me, great. If you don’t, great. It’s not going to change my life.
It’s not going to change our program. We just kind of go about our business. We are who we are. Take it or leave it.
RD: When you were going through everything with McNeese in the tournament…I mean, it was the worst kept secret in college athletics that NC state wanted you. Why did you decide to be as public as you were and be as frank as you were? I think we’ve seen a couple of different coaches that ended up taking different jobs in this cycle leave a really bad taste in the mouth of the program that they left because of the way that they kind of handled it. I don’t think that it’s necessarily that way with you. What was the kind of thought process there? Do you think it played out the way you wanted it to?
WW: I think the first thing is you want to limit distractions. I think we were able to limit the distractions with the team by just hitting it head on, and that’s how we run our program. We just tackle stuff head on. We don’t run from controversy. We don’t run from tough conversations. Your success in life will be directly correlated to the amount of difficult conversations you’re willing to have every day.
We don’t sit around and think it’s like sunshine and rainbows all day. We have difficult conversations. Now, in fairness, my president and my AD, we were all on the same page. Our board member, like everybody knew. It was two years. They knew that there was a high likelihood that we were kind of building towards this moment. So there was no need to hide.
When you’re in a different environment and a high major environment, there’s no one right way to do it, but you’ve got to do what’s best for your situation. Look, if we’d have lost to Clemson, people would have said ‘Oh, they were distracted. They were playing for themselves and trying to get roster spots other places.’
I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to do it, but I felt like that was best with our group. I mean, half the kids we recruited there came there like, ‘All right, if you go high major next year, can we come?’
We have a couple of kids that came with us. We have some kids who stayed back because that was best for them. There was no need to hide from it, but our situation was very, very unique. My AD was a former basketball coach. He understood this thing as well as anybody. Our president was. And they had a plan going forward. We had mapped things out going forward. They had a really good plan, but they they had a good idea of what was going on. We wanted this to be a smooth transition.
So we had had open dialogue all year on everything. So maybe not when we were 5-5, but you know, once we got rolling, we’d had open dialogue. So it was just, I think everybody’s circumstances are different. So I’m not saying what we did was right. Hopefully we never have to do that again in the future. Hopefully this is it.
But, I’m not going to say anything about another coach who handled it a different way because you can’t judge somebody unless…I try to coach my team. I think a lot of people spend too much time worrying about another team or worrying about what another person does or worrying about another job or worrying about, you know, what they do.
Focus on your situation better than anybody else. All these other people have opinions, but they’re not in your shoes every day. They’re not in your situation.
They don’t know the political firestorm and the politics of your athletic department, the politics of your state, the politics of your school. I don’t judge anybody based on what they did. What we did, certainly you could say it was great. You could say it was awful, but it’s just what we did.
JG: All right. Looking at your roster now, pretty good roster so far. I think you’re hoping to add at least one more piece, maybe two to this roster. Kind of break down for me, the team now, where you want to be, what fair expectations might be for year one?
WW: Yeah, man, I think we’re not backing down from what we said early in the press conference. Top 4 in the ACC, go to the NCAA tournament and have a chance to advance in the NCAA tournament. I think that would be a very good season for us year one.
I think that should be the expectation and I think that’s what we’re going to do and what we’re capable of doing. We really like the guys that we’ve brought in so far. The number one thing we need to add is some proven scoring.
We have some guys who are going to make some big jumps. I feel good about that, but you shoot 62 balls a game and we don’t have all 62 shots accounted for, right now. So we have a steady dose of some shots that we need to give out.
But we’ve got really good guys with Holloman from Michigan State. He was a captain for Tom Izzo. Terrence Arceneaux played in the national championship game.
Jerry Deng was in the ACC, put up numbers. Copeland and Breed came with me. We have a kid from Butler, Langdon, who has a lot of pride in NC State.
He redshirted at Butler, was one of the all-time leading scorers in North Carolina. We’ve signed an international big who we think is really, really good. And he’s got a 7’6″, wingspan, 7’7″, wingspan, 6’10”. We feel good about him. We got a five-star Freshman, Matt Able. We retained, Paul McNeil, who was arguably their best player, particularly the last 10 games.
If we added just one more player, we’re going to be able to reach our goals.
If we add two, we’re probably going to be able to exceed our goals.
JG: That’s what I said before you came on, I said, ‘Listen, if you added the two guys we’ve talked about, I think you could you be a dark horse, elite eight-ish type team? If you add both those guys.
If, if you add one of them, I think you’re talking about being a tournament team that maybe, if things go right, you could get in the Sweet 16.
WW: Yeah, I don’t know who you were talking about.
JG: Well, I’m not going to say their names because you can’t talk about them.
WW: Look, I think there’s some other folks out there, too, that maybe people are missing. But, I think with one, we’ll have a top 25 ball club, and we’ll have a top 10-ish ball club if you add multiple. So, you know, we’ll see what shakes out.
You never know how it shakes. Recruiting changes differently, changes quickly.
JG: Especially now, right? How much has it changed from when you were at LSU, high major, to now? Because I feel like now, nothing’s guaranteed. You may think you have a guy, you may think you’re in great shape with a guy. And years ago, when that happened, you would like relax a little bit. I don’t feel like there were nearly as many flips as there are now, because obviously you’ve got NIL involved.
WW: Well, a lot’s changed, a lot’s stayed the same.
Shoot, I was in that SEC. We slept with one eye open for five years. I don’t know what you’re talking about, they weren’t flipping kids. Slept with one eye open five years straight.
I think what used to be taboo, there used to be a little bit more gentlemen, ‘hey, once they commit, we’re kind of good.’ And there was a stigma attached to multiple transfers. And kids would get real worried about transfer multiple times and what people would say and how it would look.
And now all that stuff’s just gone. That to me is the biggest change is that, look, now it’s all out in the open.
And so everybody kind of has a roundabout idea. And look, I don’t blame the kids. I mean, I think it’s good, but they’re going to make a decision that’s best for them basketball wise, but also the financial component has to be there.
I’m not saying you have to have the most. I mean, some of the kids we have, we were not anywhere near, we were within the ballpark, but not the most. You still got to have relationships and a good basketball situation. But I do think that kids are more apt to move now.
This is why I think some coaches really struggle. It doesn’t bother me a bit. You used to have just total control over everything. And now what happens, and this is why I think basketball, the parity’s really good. You could stack a roster. There were four and five stars going to big time schools to be backups. And they were fine with that.
Now those same kids, you can’t have the depth that you had. So now those same kids are going to get as much or more money to go be a star somewhere else. And so now when that kid becomes a star somewhere else, one of those kids leaves and then he goes, that would never happen before.
You could just stack your roster. Calipari, he’d go 10 deep and the 10th guy might not play.
Like, I think everybody ends up where they’re supposed to be for the most part, where that wasn’t the case before. And people have missed on that, but that wasn’t the case before the kids who went high major, who aren’t high major players, they end up where they’re supposed to be. The kids who went mid-major who are high, they all, everybody kind of ends up within the range where they’re supposed to be.
RD: Last one I got for you. Alyn Breed. He played two games for you last year. I remember he told us before the South Dakota event, he was kind of the guy, right? He came in, you were expecting him to be a big time scorer. How healthy is he? And will he be ready to go at a hundred percent by the time the season starts?
WW: Actually talked to him yesterday. He’s finishing up his rehab. He’s finishing up his rehab actually in Atlanta right now.
He’ll be here this week. I think he’s going to be as healthy as he’s been. I mean, look, he’s coming off a knee surgery.
You know, he’s going to be as healthy as he’s been, but he’s a great kid, great person. And he’s a really, really talented player. And so I feel like he’s going to make a big impact on what we’re doing.
I think he’s going to be somebody that our fans really love. He plays with a blue collar, kind of an edge. We were in Providence for the NCAA tournament.
We walked from our hotel to eat at this Italian restaurant and there were Providence fans like, ‘Where’s Breed? Where’s Breed?’ Like they still knew he was with us at McNeese. I mean, he didn’t play, he played two games all year and they knew, so I mean, he’s one of those guys that everybody’s kind of drawn to. He’s got a magnetic personality.
So we’re excited. I’m excited that he chose to come with us. And I think he’s going to be able to make an impact for us this year.
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