LSU wades into youth movement

Published 7:31 am Wednesday, March 22, 2017

LSU didn’t exactly rob the cradle to find its 22nd head basketball coach.

But Will Wade had better keep his proper ID handy should he give he and the Tigers a reason to celebrate with anything much stiffer than popcorn and soda pop.

It’s not unusual to dip into the playgrounds for a head coach, but usually, at this level, they don’t still have merry-go-rounds and swing sets.

Evidently, there was no readily available Cajun accent out there for LSU hoops.

Wade — more formally, Frank Williams Wade (but he looks way more like a Will than a Frank Williams) — is a mere 34 years old, and doesn’t look a day older.

LSU confirmed the hiring late Monday night the usual way, via Twitter, and then celebrated it with the now traditional billboards on Tuesday.

Side note here, but does it seem that suddenly Flagship U. is keeping the state’s billboard industry in deep coins?

Large chunks of Texas, too.

But every time somebody on campus burps, LSU takes a selfie of it and plasters it on billboards all over Baton Rouge and the immediate environs.

Anyway, Wade is certainly an interesting story.

Never mind that he could pass for a ball boy.

That’s kind of how he got his start … and not that long ago.

He brings four years of head coaching experience to the Tigers, two at Chattanooga, the last two at Virginia Commonwealth.

He will be the rare college coach who did not play his sport — not in college, not even in high school in Nashville where he grew up.

He wasn’t quite a ball boy in college at Clemson, but close to it on the food chain. He was a student manager who showed enough of something beyond sorting jocks to later land a job as a graduate assistant and, later, director of basketball operations.

From there it was on to Harvard — perhaps adopting the Frank Williams Wade name again — to be an assistant coach for two years, before four more years as an assistant at VCU.

He got his first head coaching job at Chattanooga for two years and then to VCU for the last two.

After an 18-15 start at Chattanooga, he’s gone 22-10, 25-11 and 26-9 the last three years.

That’s an impressive r?sum?, just not a very long one.

So, yes, LSU Athletic Director Joe Alleva has gone with the young up-and-coming coach over a veteran retread — some other names being mentioned were usual suspects like recently fired Indiana coach Tom Crean (50 years old), Middle Tennessee coach Kermit Davis (57), and Nevada coach Eric Mussleman (52).

Any of those three would have been safer, hires in that, if nothing else, they looked promising on paper, made sense, and the latter two had past LSU ties.

Given the ill-fated era under former player Johnny Jones that recently ended (in flames), an LSU past isn’t the selling point that maybe it once was.

The LSU glory days are more and more in the past these days, with only occasional flickers since Dale Brown, who was seven years older but a lot more of a total unknown than Wade is now when he was hired.

Some will grumble and scream “Get off my lawn” at such a hire, but at this stage, a youth infusion could be just what LSU needs.

The LSU basketball program is a tough nut to crack right now.

It needs some energy, it needs some excitement, mainly it really needs some relevance.

If nothing else, LSU fans need something to tide them over between the bowl game and the start of baseball season.

He’ll have to win, of course.

But just as important, some of that youthful exuberance needs to carry over to the program, to a fan base that doesn’t really seem to care these days whether LSU fields an on-court varsity team.

Youth could be a selling point.

It can work.

Billy Donovan was only 30 years old when he was hired by Florida and he had two years fewer head coaching experience than Wade has today.

By the time Donovan was Wade’s current age, he had the Gators in the national championship game, and five years later he won the first of back-to-back NCAA titles.

Right now, LSU would settle for simply making the tournament.

Wade has been to the last three Big Dances, the last two with VCU, following a trip with Chattanooga the previous season.

To find three trips for LSU, you have to go back 11 years, with a lot a mediocrity sprinkled in before this year’s collapse.

Maybe worse, none of it seemed to bother the fan base much.

Wade needs to change that as much as the win-loss column.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com