St. John's Rick Pitino and Auburn's Bruce Pearl share AP coach of the year award
St. John's head coach Rick Pitino calls to his players during the first half in the first round of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Thursday, March 20, 2025, in Providence, R.I. Credit: AP/Steven Senne
The games have stopped for St. John’s, but the accolades keep coming.
Pitino and Auburn coach Bruce Pearl were voted National Coach of the Year by The Associated Press and received the award on Friday in a ceremony at the Alamodome in San Antonio, where the Final Four is being held.
Both Pitino and Pearl received 20 votes from the 61-member media panel. It’s the first time in the 58-year history of the award that there has been a tie.
Pitino is the first St. John’s coach to win the award. He already received the Henry Iba Award as the U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s choice as National Coach of the Year. He is a finalist for the Naismith National Coach of the Year, which will be announced on Sunday in San Antonio.
“I’m just deeply honored. I thank the AP and sharing it with someone like Bruce, it’s just a special treat,” Pitino said at the awards presentation. “I’m smart enough to know coaches never win awards — players win the awards for coaches along with their staffs. So I know why I’m up here today. It’s because of the hard work that my guys put in.”
After leading Providence to the 1987 Final Four, Pitino was named National Coach of the Year by the National Association of Basketball Coaches and also received the John Wooden Award.
“It’s funny, because I said to my wife, ‘This is the second time I’ve won this award’ and she said, ‘No, you won the Wooden Award,’ ” Pitino said. “I said, ‘Oh. I never won . . . That’s awesome.’ ”
Two years ago, Pitino inherited a team on a quarter-century slide from the upper echelon of college basketball toward irrelevance. In his second season, the Red Storm went 31-5, won the outright Big East regular-season championship for the first time in 40 years, and for the first time in 25 years captured the Big East Tournament title and won an NCAA Tournament game.
They climbed as high as No. 5 in the AP national rankings, their first time that high in 34 years.
“We know why we win these type of awards,” Pitino said. “It’s dedicated players having a great season, and dedicated staffs and everybody coming together.”
Pearl, whose Auburn team will meet Florida in a national semifinal on Saturday, recalled a time when he was a team manager for coach Tom Davis at Boston College and Pitino was head coach at Boston University.
“I’ve said this many times: the best coach I’ve ever gone up against was Rick Pitino,” he said.
“I remember . . . this young Italian kid would be sneaking into practice or coming to watch [BC] games even when they weren’t on the schedule, because he was a sponge.
“I didn’t know then that that young coach would become one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game at any level,” he added. “I tried to emulate so many things about the way Coach Pitino coached: the way he loved his players, the way he built the staff, the way he won everywhere he had been, always giving his opponents credit . . . [and] honoring the game.”
Louisville’s Pat Kelsey received eight votes and Duke’s Jon Scheyer got five. Dennis Gates of Missouri and Tom Izzo of Michigan State each received three and Drake’s Ben McCollum and UC San Diego’s Eric Olen each got one.
In the Cards? After the awards ceremony, Pitino told reporters that St. John’s is working on a home-and-home with Louisville, with the first meeting next season at the Garden. He also said there are talks about scheduling exhibition games against Kentucky and Michigan.
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
