Will Wade was never really ours.

He was a rental, a fixer-upper at best. 

We knew that; we just didn’t want to admit it.

From the moment he signed on the dotted line to become the McNeese head basketball coach, the clock was ticking to the day he would leave for greener pastures.

It finally struck midnight for us Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island.

Moments after Wade and his Cowboys lost to Purdue in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, the coach confirmed what we all feared: On Tuesday, he was introduced as the head coach at North Carolina State.

While that may make us feel sad, remember, there are no losers in this story.

Wade, especially, is a big winner. He rehabilitated his career after an embarrassing fall at LSU. Now, he’s been fully vindicated, and he’s proven his worth to the college basketball world.

McNeese is also a winner. The future of the men’s basketball program has changed. The arena is filled with paying customers, and the school has gotten a boost with all the national attention Wade and his winning brought.

Local businesses saw a boost in revenue, and the Southland Conference discovered for the first time that we could also play this game.

We’re winners, too. We got to watch two seasons of historic basketball as a strong group of athletes came to play for an incredibly gifted staff. So, none of this is bad. It’s all been good.

We signed up for the game, pushed all our chips in, and hit the royal flush.

Nobody in these parts has seen two great, wild basketball seasons like this. That’s what we got on paper from Wade’s teams. 

The 58 wins in 69 games weren’t bad, either. Nor were the two years of kicking the stuffing out of the rest of the Southland Conference that used to wipe their feet on our logo. 

“We have a lot of payback to do,” Christian Shumate once said.

With Wade, McNeese did just that, winning 40 of 42 games against SLC competition, including never losing at home.

The program went from hosting the Southland postseason tournament almost out of pity to seeing opposing coaches whine about what a great injustice it is for the league’s best team, with the best coach and fans, to have the home-court advantage for the biggest games.

Wait, what, McNeese…a basketball bully?

That’s what we got when we made the deal with the devil and landed Wade. 

But that’s not all we have. A guy also picked us up when we were at our lowest.

Football was down, and our facilities were just beginning to be rebuilt after Hurricane Laura. Nobody wanted to come here. 

Yet Wade, needing his own rebuilding, chose us over the other schools that wanted him. Yep, he chose us.

More importantly, he didn’t big-name us either. He bought in. Completely.

He doubled down with us when he saw our chips in the middle of the table. He became the face of the area’s sports world, and his picture was everywhere.

He was on T-shirts as a cartoon character and soda cups sold in the arena. He was on billboards, and podcasts, sat for every interview, answered every dumb question, and took part in every silly promotional event.

We saw him in pictures on a horse, fishing, and even going through military training. The shots of him in hunting gear or on the water in waiters were a little hard to swallow once you really got to know him.

He was all in if it promoted McNeese, a school he had no previous ties with. It didn’t even have to be basketball. 

And we all ate it up.

All along, though, we knew this day would come. We knew he was going to outgrow McNeese. 

For all of the clowning and fun, Wade is one tough competitor. He wants to win and beat the best. 

After his troubles at LSU, which saw him fired, he also had a burning desire to show the world that he was not wrong, just a coach ahead of his time.

Another important thing: I believe Wade when he says he loves Lake Charles. It’s genuine when he says he appreciates how this community embraced him and his family when he struggled. That is the truth. 

That’s why we shouldn’t fret about his departure. He’ll never really leave us while Dr. Wade Rousse and athletic director Heath Schroyer are still around. The trio is connected. 

Wade will have a hand in the future of McNeese basketball, if not a loud voice at halftime. 

With Bill Armstorng, Wade’s former top assistant, as the next head coach, the path to continued winning is already paved. Wade won’t let us struggle again, and we can count on that—at least not in the near future. 

He meant a lot to us, but we may have meant more to him.

So maybe we didn’t rent him after all. Maybe we joined him in a sort of mutual aid package. 

It turned out to be an excellent deal for all of us. 

Jim Gazzolo is a freelance writer who covers McNeese State athletics for the American Press. Email him at jimgazzolo@yahoo.com