Brownell’s Life of Basketball Success Raises Wilmington
RICHMOND, Va. – Among mid-major programs, there are some that have been consistent contenders in their conferences and regular participants in the NCAA Tournament. We all know about Gonzaga, while Winthrop has been a regular out of the Big South (heading to their sixth NCAA Tournament in eight years) and teams like Southern Illinois and Butler are also well-known among casual fans. UNC-Wilmington also belongs in that discussion, and there’s one person who’s been a constant in that development.
Make no mistake about it: UNC-Wilmington is Brad Brownell’s program. That’s an obvious statement in one respect, as he is in his fourth season as their head coach and has put together an 83-39 record after Monday’s CAA championship win over Hofstra, but as you might imagine, there is more to the story than just the immediate facts.
Brownell is a Midwestern gentleman who has lived in basketball havens his whole life. He was born in Evansville, Ind., in the state known as “Basketball Country”, went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and spent time as an assistant at the University of Indianapolis before coming to North Carolina, another basketball haven. At DePauw, he played for Royce Waltman, a Bob Knight assistant who is now the head coach at Indiana State, then worked under another Knight protégé, Jim Crews (currently the head coach at Army) before coming to Wilmington. As if that’s not enough, his first game as head coach was at Texas Tech and – you guessed it – Bob Knight. Brownell thought it was “a pretty wild experience” the way it all worked out.
He came to Wilmington as an assistant to Jerry Wainwright, now the head coach at DePaul, with help from Will Ray, a mutual friend who recommended him to Wainwright. He has been with UNC-Wilmington for 12 seasons now, and has seen it through plenty of success as an assistant and now the head coach. One of the top young coaches in the country, the 37-year-old just earned his second CAA Coach of the Year award, having won it in his first season at the helm as well, and has had a major hand in helping the program become one of the consistently good mid-major programs in the country.
Just look at some of the impressive facts about the program of late:
- Four CAA titles since 2000
- Appeared in the CAA championship game in five of the past seven seasons
- Defeated USC in the first round of the 2002 NCAA Tournament
- At least 21 wins in three of the past five seasons
- At least ten CAA wins in each year of Brownell’s tenure as an assistant or head coach at the school
- The last four years are the best four years in the program’s Division I history with 83 wins
Basketball is the driving force at the school, a small campus in the state system located about two hours from the Raleigh/Durham area. The school doesn’t have a football team and no major pro sports teams play there, so Seahawk basketball is the big attraction. Trask Coliseum, which has been around for nearly 30 years, is filled to capacity on many nights and has a tremendous atmosphere that makes it difficult for visiting teams. The team’s support was visible at the CAA Tournament, as many teal shirts could be found in the crowd at their game and their support for the Seahawks was evident. Fans care about the game, one reason Brownell has enjoyed the school.
“It’s wonderful to be around people that are so passionate about the game, and I really enjoy that on a day-to-day basis,” he reflected.
Those are among the selling points to recruits, along with the Atlantic Ocean being nearby. But Brownell says that recruiting is still a challenge, even with all of that and the recent success. The team has just one player from the Tar Heel State – sophomore Todd Hendley, who went to Wake Forest before transferring east. But they’ve done well with the crop they have had, and if you watch the way they play the game, you have to enjoy it. They know how to play the game, play at multiple speeds, defend, make hustle plays, and even do little things like tipping loose balls to someone else.
“It took a lot of hard work to recruit kids and get them to believe in something that you could achieve,” says Brownell, remembering that Trask used to only have about 2,500 people per game once. “To build that, to get the right kind of kids that fit a system, to have some success, to get a little bit of notoriety, and the challenge of continuing to stay successful at this level is one that is unbelievably challenging because we don’t just walk in and get Parade All-Americans like the big schools do. You’ve really got to find the right kids, you’ve got to develop them, they’ve got to get better and you have to work at it.”
With the continued success, other programs are sure to come calling before long. Brownell has one year left on his original five-year contract, and the school is working on an extension. Athletic Director Mike Capaccio, who was head coach at junior college power Indian Hills Community College in Iowa during the late 1990s and met Brownell on a recruiting trip there, said they are hoping they can keep him around, but they know their resources are limited since they’re a smaller campus in the larger state system. They also have the lowest budget in the Colonial Athletic Association, in part because they have 11,000 students and don’t charge a student fee.
Capaccio, who has been at the school since 1999, saw Wainwright move on to Richmond in 2002 and double his salary, so in all likelihood the selling points for Brownell to stay at the school for a long time will have to be intangibles, and there are some of those. His wife’s parents live in the area, and his family is able to get there from time to time. Basketball is the flagship sport there, and they are hoping to get a renovation to Trask in the foreseeable future. Brownell speaks glowingly of the area in every respect, describing it as a “hidden gem” and saying he has been able to recruit the kind of kids he likes to coach. He and his boss are on the same page, as Capaccio said the school is “a place that has really only scratched the surface. It has unlimited potential down the road.”
So while there appear to be plenty of selling points for him to stay there for a while, there is also the matter of the situation at a school that might have interest in Brownell. All coaching jobs are not created equal, especially in the beginning. As a person with an excellent basketball pedigree and keen knowledge of the game, Brownell is surely aware of that and knows he can wait to find the right opportunity if the time comes to move on.
Right now, he prepares for a fourth NCAA Tournament appearance in seven years at UNC-Wilmington. The Seahawks have established themselves as a perennial favorite in the CAA, which has had arguably its best season ever this year, and as long as Brownell is there, that should continue.
