From the recruiting trail to the practice court, Chris Holtmann says he's “stolen so much” from Villanova head coach Jay Wright, who he has “tremendous respect” for.
Many of the philosophies he’s employed in building his Ohio State program, whether on the practice court or the recruiting trail, have come straight from his old Big East rival at Villanova. An open admirer of Jay Wright as a coach and a person, Holtmann will go head-to-head with the Wildcat head coach for the eighth time Sunday as the seventh-seeded Buckeyes try to spoil the postseason plans of No. 2 seed Villanova and earn a berth in the Sweet 16 for the first time in nine years.
Wright put Holtmann through the wringer during his first two seasons at Butler. Villanova won the Big East Tournament and regular season championship in 2014-15 and won the Big East regular season and NCAA championships the following year. In four matchups with Wright during that period, Holtmann’s Bulldogs went 0-4.
But with just one career Sweet 16 berth in 11 years as a Division I college basketball head coach, Holtmann is still trying to catch up to Wright’s laundry list of accomplishments at Villanova. Wright has been to three Final Fours in the past 13 years and won a pair of national titles in the past six seasons.
“I'm aware of how he builds his roster, and he plays a smaller rotation. I think there's some appeal to that. I haven't been able to kind of adopt that maybe as much as I thought I might initially. But yeah, there's certainly some things there that I've thought about and kind of studied with the way he builds his roster.”
“I've got an assistant who is all about two-foot plays and jump stop and 2-point percentage and really a lot of that is from Jay,” Holtmann said. “The fundamentals of footwork; the fundamentals of playing on balance on drives and on the interior; the idea of an offensive rebound being an immediate kick-out for a three is something that I think a lot of teams have stolen.
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