Ed Cooley Named Naismith Coach of the Year
Cooley joins a list of Basketball Hall of Famers and greats with this honor.
Rick Pitino has never won the Naismith Coach of the Year Award.
The same can be said for fellow Hall of Famers John Thompson, Jim Calhoun, Lute Olson, John Chaney, and Tom Izzo.
And no, this particular Coach of the Year award doesn’t typically go to those who have done more with less. Since the honor was first given out to Bob Knight in 1987, it has been awarded to a Basketball Hall of Famer in 15 of the 35 years since its inception. That number will likely increase after Mark Few and Tony Bennett reach the Hall one day.
John Calipari and Mike Krzyzewski have won it three times, while Jay Wright, Few, and Bennett are fellow multi-time winners.
Providence’s Ed Cooley joined elite company when he was named Naismith Coach of the Year on Sunday morning. He became just the fifth Big East coach to win the award, joining Wright, Jim Boeheim, and former Pittsburgh coaches Ben Howland and Jamie Dixon.
He is the sixth Black coach to be named Naismith Coach of the Year.
It was certainly well earned. Coming off of perhaps his most challenging season as PC’s head coach, Cooley and his Friars responded this year in emphatic fashion. Providence went 27-6 and earned a four seed in the NCAA Tournament — the school’s highest seed since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The 27 wins tied for the most in program history.
“First, I want to thank the committee, and those that saw something special in our group,” Cooley said upon accepting the honor on Sunday. “This is not an individual award. I think this is the biggest team award a coach could have. And this year’s team at Providence College was clearly connected, undervalued, and over-performed.”
What more is there to say about Cooley at this point? He has now won 20 games or more in six of his eleven seasons at Providence, and his program is riding a wave of momentum following a season in which they battled Kansas to the wire in the Sweet 16.
What was expected to be a transitional year in Providence turned into a major building block after a season in which the Dunkin Donuts Center became one of the hottest venues in the East, and the Friars spent from Dec. 20 until the end of the season ranked in the AP’s top 25.
Providence was ranked as high as 8th in the AP Poll, and finished the year ranked 13th. The year-end ranking marked the first time Providence has appeared in the AP’s final poll since 2004 — when they closed out the year with a 21st ranking. Prior to 2004, PC had not finished ranked in the AP’s final 25 poll since 1975, when they were ranked 20th. The 13rd ranking is the best for the program since the Marvin Barnes-led Friars wrapped up 1974 as the number eight team in the AP poll.
Along the way, Cooley provided some of the more memorable quotes of his Providence tenure, and in college basketball this season — highlighted by an impromptu speech in a team huddle against Seton Hall in December in which Cooley told his team that the game was a street fight, and reminding his team that they win all the street fights, before imploring them to “Be Them Dudes.”
Yet, for all of his phrases that found their way onto t-shirts, the more lasting quotes of Cooley’s from this season were those in which he shared that he was living a dream. He spoke often about gratitude, about how he would have never believed that he would be in this position, as head coach of the Friars, coming from where he did as a child in Providence.
He’s not only head coach at Providence College, but he’s now honored as one of the elite members of his profession.