CLICK HERE for all of Hoops HD’s Continued and Extensive Preseason Content
We hope you are ready for a season unlike any other: testing, distancing, and bubbles, oh my! Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen, when it is going to happen, or whether anything actually will happen…but in the meantime we will try to restore some order with season previews featuring the best players/coaches in the country. We continue our coverage with Tulane coach Ron Hunter. After making multiple NCAA tourneys as a player at Miami (OH), he made 1 NCAA tourney as coach at IUPUI and 3 NCAA tourneys as coach at Georgia State before being hired by Tulane last year. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with Coach Hunter about playing with Ron Harper and against Len Bias.
You played basketball at Miami (OH) in the mid-1980s with your high school teammate Ron Harper: how close were you 2, and did you always know that he was going to end up in the NBA? I knew that he was a good player but never thought he could make the NBA. We have known each other since age 13 and decided to go to college together. He was a center in high school but ended up becoming a PG on 5 NBA championship teams! I tell my recruits all the time about how hard he worked on his game, even after practice when the rest of us were tired.
What are your memories of the 1984 NCAA tourney (Jon Koncak scored 32 PTS in a win by SMU)? That was my 1st NCAA tourney and I was just overwhelmed by the whole deal after watching it on TV in the past. SMU was a good team: we did not play well but we learned a lot.
In the 1985 NCAA tourney you scored 7 PTS in a 1-PT OT loss to Maryland: how close did you come to beating Len Bias (who scored 25 PTS)? Lefty Driesell was the Maryland coach: he and I are both former coaches at Georgia State. We turned the ball over at the end and Adrian Branch scored a basket, which was a tough pill to swallow. Bias was a terrific player. It was 1 of the hardest games that I have ever played in.
In the 1986 NCAA tourney you scored 12 PTS/6-6 FG but Jeff Hornacek made a 26-foot jumper at the buzzer in a 2-PT OT win by Iowa State: where does that rank among the most devastating losses of your career? That is my history of the NCAA tourney: losing on last-second shots in another game that we thought we should have won. It was the 1st tourney game held in a dome so I remember there being so many people at my last college game.
After becoming coach at IUPUI in 1994 your program made the jump to D-1 in the late 1990s: what have you seen as the biggest difference between D-2 and D-1? Support and resources, period, especially when it comes to scholarships.
What are your memories of the 2003 MCC title game (26-year-old Navy veteran Matt Crenshaw only scored 6 PTS but made an 18-foot jumper with 1 second left in a 2-PT win over Valparaiso)? Matt was on my staff at IUPUI. That was an accumulation of all the hard work of building a program from scratch with no scholarships. It was draining on me both physically/mentally so it was great to get it done.
In the 2003 NCAA tourney Gerald Fitch scored 25 PTS in a win by #1-seed Kentucky: how big a deal was it to lead your team to the 1st NCAA tourney in school history? It was similar to my 1st tourney as a player: I felt completely overwhelmed so it was like a dream. We had not been expected to get there so I was not prepared as a coach to deal with the media and everything else.
In 2008 you raised over 200,000 pairs of shoes for Samaritan’s Feet, a foundation that donates shoes to people who cannot afford them: how did you get involved with the foundation, and what impact did you make? It was the best thing to ever happen to me during any part of my career. I got a phone call from the people at Samaritan’s Feet: they wanted to bring awareness about children who did not have shoes, and the rest is history.