The buzz this week around Georgia Tech’s new basketball coach inevitably focused on whether Brian Gregory can get the Yellow Jackets back to the NCAA tournament and win a big share of games in the tough Atlantic Coast Conference.
I’ve known Gregory since 2003, when he took the coaching job at Dayton, the Catholic university I attended in the town where until recently I’d spent my newspaper career.
I watched him coach more than 260 games — most in person — and I’m a fan. But for Tech boosters, there’s only one prediction I’m willing to make: he won’t win enough to keep everyone happy because no coach does.
But there are a couple of things that are worth knowing about Gregory.
Watch him during the national anthem before games. He always stands straight as an arrow, at military-style attention, completely focused during that brief moment before a game.
If you study his resume, you’ll find he attended the U.S. Naval Academy for a year, which likely explains that pre-game posture.
But if you have any questions about his intensity, the look in his eyes during “The Star-Spangled Banner” will answer them.
And then there’s a short story involving a group of 14-year-old boys, one of whom was my son.
After an early summer baseball game a couple of years ago, that group of boys — still in the dirty uniforms — stopped with their fathers (including me) at a burrito shop near the University of Dayton campus.
As they sat eating, players from the Dayton team — hanging around campus for the summer to work out and play in traditional “open gym” games — stopped in.
The younger kids reacted immediately, talking to the college players who were celebrities to the basketball-obsessed kids.
The Dayton players spoke patiently with the kids and answered their questions about the injured point guard. It provided an impressive candid moment for the watching fathers with our time-worn cynicism about the behavior of college athletes.
At a later meeting with Gregory, I told him that story, expecting him to say how proud he was of how his players conducted themselves.
Instead, he said, “That’s what I expect of them.”
With Gregory, Tech’s getting a little more than some guy in a nice suit and tie on the sidelines.
Kevin Riley is the editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a position he was named to in January. He has followed the University of Dayton Flyers since his time as a student there in the 1980s.
