St. John's president Rev. Brian J. Shanley excited about where Rick Pitino is taking program
Rick Pitino of St. John's Red Storm reacts in the first half against the Seton Hall Pirates during the Quarterfinals of the Big East Basketball Tournament at Madison Square Garden on March 14, 2024. Credit: Getty Images/Sarah Stier
It is, he said, “one of my favorite places on the planet.” Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, a quick drive across the bridge and up I-95 from his office in Queens. But when the Rev. Brian J. Shanley, president of St. John’s University, made that trip to the course on a Sunday afternoon after church a year ago this week, it wasn’t with his clubs in the trunk or with hopes of pars and birdies in his heart.
He was looking for a coach. He was looking for the coach, the one who would be able to take the moribund program the Red Storm had become and turn it around with a swiftness and style that would personify New York City.
So he pulled up to Rick Pitino’s house, which is right on the third hole of the golf course, spent about three hours talking with the Hall of Famer and his wife, Joanne, then got back in his car and headed back to campus.
“And as I was driving home,” Shanley said in an exclusive telephone interview with Newsday this weekend, “I said to myself: ‘This is the guy.’ ”
Shanley was not permitted to speak in much more detail about the timeline and process of hiring Pitino; former head coach Mike Anderson filed a $45.6 million lawsuit against St. John’s after the school fired him with cause and the hiring of Pitino is part of that case. But Shanley said when he and former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, hired as a consultant, first started to come up with a list of options for the new face of the program, “it was pretty clear pretty early that Rick Pitino was obviously, by a lot, the most talented coach we could possibly hire . . . It didn’t take us long to figure out he was our number one person.”
Within 24 hours of the face-to-face, an offer was made and accepted and news began to spread that St. John’s had its new men’s basketball coach. The official announcement was made on March 20, 2023.
This first season with Pitino at the helm did not last long enough to meet that anniversary. The Red Storm were eliminated from the Big East Tournament on Friday night, failed to receive an at-large bid from the NCAA Tournament on Sunday night and preemptively rejected offers from other postseason events such as the NIT shortly afterward, effectively ending the inaugural campaign. But there is little doubt that Year One of the Pitino Era was, if not a resounding success for St. John’s, a huge step forward. At least through the eyes of the person who hired him.
“Rick has done everything that I hoped he would do when we hired him and that is put us in position to challenge for an NCAA Tournament bid, to win the Big East, to energize our fan base and get school spirit back to where it was,” Shanley said. “Rick has delivered on everything I hoped he would . . . I think this is like a dream scenario. Rick is back in New York, we’re having success, the Garden is rocking. I want this dream to last as long as it possibly can.”
Shanley said he learned a lot about Pitino in the past year, which has only reinforced what Shanley had thought to himself on that drive back from Westchester.
“Rick is always thinking about how to make his team better,” Shanley said. “He has turned a team of guys who had barely met each other, 11 of them at least I think, as of last summer, and if you watch them as I have, every game this year they have gotten better . . . It’s been really fun to watch.”
Pitino, needless to say, learned a few things about St. John’s, too.
“St. John’s is a very difficult job on so many fronts, much more difficult than I ever imagined,” Pitino said on Sunday night, citing the lack of on-campus facilities and not having a campus community to be “immersed” in the team. “But what makes St. John’s great is that it is New York, it is Madison Square Garden, it is the Big East. I’ve been through it all, the highs and the lows of life, and coaching at St. John’s is a very, very difficult place to coach, but also an extremely rewarding place in building something special.”
That work began right away with the transfer portal opening on Monday and almost an entirely new roster to assemble. Then there will be workouts over the summer and practices that begin in the fall and pretty soon the regular season games will return to The Garden. Next thing you know the 2025 NCAA Tournament bids will be announced.
Maybe, just maybe, St. John’s will hear its name called then.
Shanley is optimistic that will happen.
“We definitely are closer compared to where we were at this time last year, we’ve improved markedly,” Shanley said. “And with Coach Pitino we’re only going to get better . . . There is nobody who is better than Rick at getting guys to play basketball well together. I think the sky’s the limit for us. I really do.”
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
