Why Calipari should have stayed

Over the last nine years, Calipari has taken the Memphis program from a decent mid-major and developed it into one of the best collegiate programs in the country. This season, the Memphis Tigers put together their fourth straight season with 30 wins or more — something no other college team has ever accomplished.

Memphis now even has a place among other historically prominent programs in men’s basketball. Calipari has been able to recruit talent from all areas of the country and has made Memphis an ideal location for top high school basketball players. Now, Memphis is in a position to compete for the NCAA Championship every year.

Still, despite all of his success in the state of Tennessee, Calipari has taken a job with the University of Kentucky. The Wildcats have struggled to reach the NCAA Final Four since they won the NCAA Championship back in 1998, former head coach Tubby Smith’s first year with the program. Billy Gillispie has led the Kentucky program for the last two seasons, and for the first time in 17 years, it failed to get a spot in the NCAA Tournament. Instead, Kentucky finished its season by losing in the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) quarterfinals.

Gillispie was fired a few days ago, and now the winningest men’s basketball program in the history of the NCAA has selected Calipari as its new coach.

While Kentucky offers Calipari the chance to be a heroic figure if he turns around the school’s struggling program, should he have taken the job?

I don’t doubt that Calipari’s coaching ability, combined with the resources that Kentucky offers him, will bring the program immediate prominence again and maybe an NCAA Championship in the near future.

The Kentucky job also gives him a chance to coach in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) — a conference that is far more respected than Conference USA — and it will pay him more money. Taking the job in Kentcuky will most likely improve his career and maybe even propel him into a position to transition from being simply a good coach to a Hall of Famer. But when did college basketball become about coaches’ careers?

College basketball receives national attention and, to many people, is more appealing than the NBA. (It is very easy to forget that it is college, and not professional, basketball.) These kids are not professionals, though some of them will be in a few months. There is a multi-million dollar industry surrounding college athletics, and it has prohibited people from realizing what else these athletes are dealing with — balancing athletics with academics and college life. Still, the athletes, not the careers of their coaches, the focus of college sports.

Too often college coaches in basketball and football are more concerned with their next job opportunity than creating a long-lasting program where they started out.

I realize that the coaching industry is like any other industry and that coaches always look to reach the next level, and it is a fact that might not be able to be controlled.

A perfect example of that in college basketball is Roy Williams’ decision to move from the University of Kansas to the University of North Carolina in 2003. Williams had been an assistant at North Carolina prior to taking the head coaching job at Kansas. Still, he left one prominent collegiate basketball program for another that was barely a step above it. The problem I have with moves like this is that the student athletes are too often forgotten when a coach moves from one school to another.

As an NCAA athlete myself, I would find it rather shocking if my water polo coach were to leave Princeton for a better job opportunity at his alma mater, the United States Naval Academy, or across the country to an even more historic program.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

While I play a sport that is not particularly marketable or covered by the media, coaches play a major role in deciding what college an athlete will attend.

I chose Princeton because the coaches were tremendous and personable. If after my freshman year, they up and left to work somewhere else, I would have felt cheated. Now I did choose to attend Princeton, where the academic rewards would have paid off, but what if I had chosen to play water polo at a school that was not as strong academically because of the coach and then he left?

I’m not trying to say that coaches need to sacrifice their careers to accommodate athletes’ careers — I just think it needs to be considered more and factored into their decisions.

The way certain coaches appear to be handling the coaching switches can even be insulting to the athletes.

Tyrkee Evans made a crucial life decision to attend Memphis under Calipari. The coach’s departure has already had drastic effects on Evans’ future. Evans, after hearing Calipari’s decision and most likley considering what three more years at Memphis would hold for him, chose to forgo the remainder of his college career and plans to enter the NBA. He might not make it in the professional league because he never had the chance to fully develop in college, and as a result, his future might be jeopardized.

Obviously, that last statement is pure conjecture on my part. But what if it were to happen?

Coaches have an important — maybe even the most significant — role in helping high school athletes choose what schools they will attend in the fall. The coaches, the universities and the NCAA need to develop a policy to prevent coaches from jumping ship as soon as better jobs open up — the athletes’ futures are thrown by the wayside for these coaches sometimes.

Calipari, congrats on becoming an eventual Hall of Famer, but just keep in the back of your mind how you ignored the futures of Evans, Wesley Witherspoon and Roburt Sallie on your way to the top.

Remember that college athletics is about the student-athletes, and they need to be considered in coaches’ job decisions.