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When Players Are More Loyal To Coach Than School

myDeaconmyhand

myDeaconmyhand

First man to get a team of horses up Bear Mountain
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In the last 10 years we've now had 3 basketball coaching changes, and we've dealt with the same issue with each change - players who leave the program when their coach is fired. As a fan, how do you relate to players who are seemingly more loyal and bonded to the coaching staff than they are to Wake Forest? Do they owe it to the school to stay, or is their logical interest to find another coaching staff that suits them?
 
How do I relate?

If they don't want to be at Wake then screw them

Pretty simple
 
They were never a part of the school. Manning and the program saw themselves as us VS Wake Forest and the community. They should leave.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
In the last 10 years we've now had 3 basketball coaching changes, and we've dealt with the same issue with each change - players who leave the program when their coach is fired. As a fan, how do you relate to players who are seemingly more loyal and bonded to the coaching staff than they are to Wake Forest? Do they owe it to the school to stay, or is their logical interest to find another coaching staff that suits them?
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Well, I think when you're recruiting guys from all over the country and especially other countries, it's pretty logical a lot of players would have more loyalty to the coaching staff that won them over to come here, than to a school in some cases they've probably never even heard of before. I love Wake Forest to death, but let's face the fact, it's going to be a rare thing for us to get a player that had any kind of predisposal of love or loyalty to Wake before they came here. So, most guys we get are coming because of the coaching staff. Hopefully after they're here for awhile they grow loyal to the school and fanbase.
 
In our situation, the coach left because the program was failing. I think its different if the program is winning and the coach leaves. There wasn't anything to bond these players to Wake. The basketball players are their own little world on campus, practicing together, travelling together, eating together. If there isn't something bigger, like winning, to tie them to the school I understand why they leave when the coach leaves.
 
Losers commit to losing coaches and are comfortable with losing.

Hiring a winner who will have expectations of them throws them off.

That's why you have to cut ties as soon as you know that you have a loser coach. That was 2 years ago.
 
Wake Forest will be here 25 years from now.....danny manning will be a footnote on college basketball. After this year, Sarr will never see Danny Manning again
 
I took a job. Loved my boss. Great guy. Always answered his phone. Always worked through the problem with me. He got promoted to the corporate office. New boss is brought in, complete opposite. Every call goes to voicemail. Every question I ask is answered with “you’ll figure something out”. They were lazy, hypocritical, and not what I wanted or needed in a supervisor. I gave it a few months and then quit. I didn’t sign up for someone actively building road blocks on my career path.
I am not saying Paint Touches is the good boss and Forbes is the bad boss. What I am saying is students should have the ability to chose for whom they play, and not be handcuffed to whomever the school hires following a transition.
It won’t be long that players will be wanting to leave their programs to come play for Forbes at Wake, and some people on this board are going to look silly when they all of a sudden they start advocating for immediate waivers.
 
Before things went sour, we were all happy with our staff using their college and professional experience as a selling point in recruiting. Selling yourself as a coach is a big part of getting a recruit to commit, and building a trusting relationship over the years is a big part of coaching/player retention in general. If a player committed because they liked the staff, and thought of them as their support system, it shouldn't be a huge shock or a bad thing for them to reconsider their situation when a coaching change happens. Everyone of us chose Wake for our own personal reasons, and stayed based on our own experiences. Each of these kids is different. Cut them some slack.
 
Being a student-athlete is a job. In some jobs, if a boss leaves for another company, they'll take some employees with them. Even at universities, if a professor leaves, often some grad assistants and researchers will leave with them.
 
PhDeac said:
Being a student-athlete is a job. In some jobs, if a boss leaves for another company, they'll take some employees with them. Even at universities, if a professor leaves, often some grad assistants and researchers will leave with them.
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yes. I was thinking of a hypothetical scenario where someone was recruited to a school by professor for a specific program, and whether or not that student would be criticized as disloyal for transferring if that professor was fired. Probably not. By and large, a basketball program is almost entirely designed by a coaching staff, even down to the design of the facilities sometimes, so to expect a player to stay through a coaching change is asking a lot.
 
There is a big difference in athletics. Athletics is entertainment. Fans invest money, time and emotional energy in teams and players. Grad assistants working in labs don't have thousands of fans following their every move and cheering them on. When players accept the role of student-athlete they are accepting the reality of being known and owned by the fan base. They are free to disregard that and reject the implications of it, but they do so at a price. Fans invest with the expectation that the players will be loyal to them, to their school. Perhaps that is too idealistic and unrealistic; but it is the expectation.
 
That’s from the perspective of the fan not the person.

Actually any form of entertainment is probably a job for someone else or at least a hobby or something they take seriously.
 
Honestly and not our (the fans) fault in my opinion, there hasn’t been much fan support for the players to be loyal to.
 
If there is a schism between coaches and schools, you can expect players to be loyal to the coaches who recruited them and for whom they played, not the schools. Period. That is the reality, for a lot of reasons including several mentioned above. Fans’ perspectives and players’ perspectives are very very different. Of course, there are always exceptions. However, we should not be surprised when it occurs.

Probably the best example at Wake is Timmy. He was not going to be involved with Wake as long as Ron Wellman was here, because Wellman was the guy who fired his coach. Timmy’s back now. He’s a Wake guy and cares about our program. But his first loyalty was to GDO!
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
I have absolutely no problem with coach-first loyalty
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Anything else is a little silly. It is all about relationships, which almost never have anything to do with rational analysis. You don’t play for the school, but you play for your coach and teammates.
It’s that way in things far more important than sports, not sure why we would expect anything different in this instance.
 
BabyDeac75 said:
If there is a schism between coaches and schools, you can expect players to be loyal to the coaches who recruited them and for whom they played, not the schools. Period. That is the reality, for a lot of reasons including several mentioned above. Fans’ perspectives and players’ perspectives are very very different. Of course, there are always exceptions. However, we should not be surprised when it occurs.

Probably the best example at Wake is Timmy. He was not going to be involved with Wake as long as Ron Wellman was here, because Wellman was the guy who fired his coach. Timmy’s back now. He’s a Wake guy and cares about our program. But his first loyalty was to GDO!
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I recognize that, but the weird thing is that Odom was back before TD.
 
BabyDeac75 said:
If there is a schism between coaches and schools, you can expect players to be loyal to the coaches who recruited them and for whom they played, not the schools. Period. That is the reality, for a lot of reasons including several mentioned above. Fans’ perspectives and players’ perspectives are very very different. Of course, there are always exceptions. However, we should not be surprised when it occurs.

Probably the best example at Wake is Timmy. He was not going to be involved with Wake as long as Ron Wellman was here, because Wellman was the guy who fired his coach. Timmy’s back now. He’s a Wake guy and cares about our program. But his first loyalty was to GDO!
Click to expand...

This narrative keeps being brought up but didn't Timmy come back to campus to help Danny recruit Giles? Or did I just dream that up?
 
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