Like father, like son: Villanova’s run to the NCAA Tournament has Ralph Willard’s hands on it

The morning after Kevin Willard called Rick Pitino a “cranky old b—” following the worst Villanova loss in nearly 30 years, his phone pinged. It was his father, Ralph.

It is not unusual for Ralph to contact his son after games. Often, the longtime basketball coach, who was Kevin’s college coach, will share an observation or insight about the game. This time, however, was different. Kevin did not need anyone to tell him what went wrong in Villanova’s 89-57 loss to St. John’s at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 28.

But maybe he needed some fatherly scolding.

“I know that Kevin was being facetious, and unfortunately, he doesn’t come across that way sometimes,” Ralph Willard said. “But I know that’s what he was doing.”

So did anyone in the room that night, or anyone who knows the Willards and their past. Ralph spent years by Pitino’s side as an assistant. Kevin’s first job in basketball was doing all the grunt work for Pitino when he coached the Boston Celtics. Ralph is Kevin’s biological father, but Pitino might be his basketball dad.

The question that night was about how Pitino handled the days after losses, and there weren’t many people more qualified to answer the question than Kevin.

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“I just lost by 30, I tried to make a joke,” he said. “Bad timing.”

That was part of Ralph’s morning-after message. Ralph might be turning 80 later this month, but he knows the way modern media works. The clip was all that mattered, never mind the context or the question.

“All I said was you needed to call Rick and explain to him what you meant,” Ralph said.

It was an old-school suggestion from an old-school basketball man. Kevin’s charge at Villanova is to rebuild a storied basketball program and bring it into the modern world, but his roots are with Ralph. The Wildcats are back in the NCAA Tournament, in Willard’s first season, for the first time since 2022.

They’ll play Friday afternoon in San Diego as the No. 8 seed in the West Regional vs. No. 9 Utah State. Villanova was picked eighth in the Big East’s preseason poll but defied expectations. Ralph lives full-time in Florida and hasn’t been to a game in person yet this season, but his hands are all over the turnaround.

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Kevin likes to make jokes about the reason for his bald head and even made one that aforementioned night, blaming Pitino’s fury after losses with the Celtics or later at Louisville, where Kevin followed him. But he offered another explanation recently.

Ralph was the head basketball coach at St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay on Long Island for 12 seasons, and for a while, the gym at St. Dom’s was “the babysitter” for Kevin and his older brother, Keith, Kevin said.

One of his first memories as a kid was helping Ralph revarnish the basketball floor.

“Those were old-school chemicals back then,” Willard said. “It was real varnish. They weren’t worried about the environment back then.”

Hair-loss jokes aside, the summers at St. Dom’s were the start of a life in basketball. The Willards were a middle-class family on the Island. Ralph and his wife, Dorothy, were teachers. The kids never wanted for anything, and Kevin praises his parents and his upbringing, but he learned how to work hard by watching his father coach.

Kevin was always around. On bus rides back to St. Dom’s from road games, star players Tim Kempton, who later went to Notre Dame and then a professional career, and Jim Christian, who later became a coach who worked under Ralph and is now the head coach at Canisius, would coax a young Kevin to go to the front of the bus to egg his father on to make the bus driver pull into McDonald’s.

“I was the youngest, so if I said we wanted McDonald’s, we got it,” Kevin said.

Kevin was 9 when Ralph took his first job in college as an assistant at Hofstra. Life changed a little bit. The demands of being on a college staff meant less time at home, but Kevin still saw his father plenty. The next season, when Ralph was on Jim Boeheim’s Syracuse staff during a 1986-87 season that ended with a loss in the national championship, Dorothy would put her three kids in the family’s station wagon and make the 4½-hour drive to home games.

Ralph had that job for less than a year before taking a job as Pitino’s assistant with the New York Knicks, which meant regular trips to the Garden for Ralph’s kids.

Until it was time to follow Pitino to Kentucky.

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Kevin was going into high school when the Willards moved to Lexington so Ralph could be Pitino’s associate head coach, a job he had for one year before getting his first college head coaching job at Western Kentucky.

It was the perfect time for Kevin to continue developing as a basketball player. Ralph knew when Kevin was in the fifth grade, when he coached Kevin’s CYO team, that his son would go far in the game.

“You would tell him to do something and most players would say, ‘What do you want me to do?’” Ralph said. “He would say, ‘Why do you want me to do it?’ I think that started a mentality in him where he tried to understand everything about the game. As a consequence, I think he developed a love for the game, not just in the obvious things but in the subtle things that make a difference.”

He also developed a tireless work ethic. Kevin would be in the gym almost every day with Ralph’s Hilltoppers, but he wasn’t getting most of his instructions from his father. It was assistants like Tom Crean and Christian, the one who used to make Kevin ask his dad to stop at McDonald’s. By Kevin’s junior year in high school, he was practicing with the team.

“Always had a wit, always had a confidence,” Crean said of Kevin. “You could tell he was older than his years. He was very, very comfortable around coaches and older people and older players. He was a part of all of us. You really didn’t look at him like he was in high school and noton the team because he was around so much.”

The coaching staff would occasionally go to Kevin’s games at Bowling Green High School. Kevin’s coach there, Ernie Simpson, was a no-nonsense farmer who didn’t allow water at practice and made the team run around the school’s track with weights around their ankles at 6 a.m. in the summer. Simpson taught Willard about work ethic, and Ralph’s staff taught him more about basketball.

“I don’t want to say he was like a younger brother, but it was really close,” said Crean, who would go on to join Tom Izzo’s staff at Michigan State before becoming a head coach himself. “You could always tell he was going to be successful. He was so driven to be a really good player and a winner and a leader.

“You wanted to be around him. If it meant working an extra hour, or an hour earlier, you wanted to do that because you knew it meant something to him and meant something to his family.”

Despite the advanced tutoring, Kevin didn’t make the Kentucky all-star senior team. It lit a fire in him. He wrote “NOT GOOD ENOUGH” on a piece of tape and stuck it to a mirror.

The goal was for Kevin to redshirt as a freshman at WKU. But that all-star snub and the extra work with his father’s staff made that path useless. Kevin played, and then followed his father and some of the staff to the University of Pittsburgh the next year.

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After Villanova wrapped up its 79-61 win over Pitt on Dec. 13, Kevin was asked to reflect on his time playing for the Panthers in the mid-’90s. He was an average backup point guard, but Pitt — and Western Kentucky — provided a crash course in how to run a college program.

He watched the way his father interacted with his players and staff, the way they looked up to him, the way he coached. It was a graduate-level course in coaching, and Ralph’s assistants thought so, too.

Crean spent four years working under Ralph at Western Kentucky and then one season at Pitt before joining Izzo at Michigan State. He learned from Ralph how to motivate. “He could make you believe that you were better than you were,” Crean said. He brought with him to Michigan State and beyond Ralph’s ability to game plan, to make adjustments, to attack the glass with four rebounders.

“I’d like to think that being with Ralph Willard helped bring that to that program,” Crean said.

Years later, after nine seasons as the head coach at Marquette, Crean was navigating a rocky road at Indiana. He went 6-25 in his first season, 10-21 in his second, and 12-20 in his third. Upward trajectory, sure, but it was hard to see the positives. He relied on what he learned from Ralph.

“I would’ve never gotten through the train wreck that we had at Indiana early on if I hadn’t been with Coach Willard,” Crean said. “He understood how to deal with chaos.”

One day, when Ralph was back with Pitino at Louisville, Crean called his old boss and left a message to tell him how thankful he was.

“It’s hard to explain, but the more things are going wrong, the more Coach Willard stayed poised and found answers,” Crean said. “Those guys have a lot of answers, but they always had way better questions, and when you’ve got way better questions on how to do things, you find better answers. Too many people know all the answers and really don’t know what the questions are.

“The Willard family always knew what the right questions were.”

Crean said he sees some of Ralph in Kevin in the way Kevin’s teams make adjustments and the way his teams have historically found ways to win with different styles.

Kevin, too, had plenty to ask of his father not long after Crean’s struggles. He’d gotten Seton Hall to the NIT in his second season, but the next three weren’t great, and he thought he might get fired after the Pirates went 16-15 in the 2014-15 season.

Ralph’s messages weren’t out of the ordinary. He reminded his son how hard he had worked to get to where he’d gotten. He told him he needed to stay the course, to believe in what he’s doing, to not flip-flop how he wanted to run his program every year.

Seton Hall went to the NCAA Tournament the next four seasons, and would have had a fifth straight if not for the pandemic.

If you’ve ever wondered why Holy Cross and Iona didn’t play each other during the two seasons of overlap when Kevin was the Iona coach and Ralph was the Holy Cross coach, don’t ask Kevin. He doesn’t have a good answer, and said looking back he would have welcomed it.

Ralph’s actions might explain it. Ralph, for the record, would have never wanted to play the game. It was a “no-win” situation. “If I lost, I would be ticked off, and if I won I would be disappointed for him,” he said. “So what’s the value of playing that game?”

Plus, he can barely watch Kevin’s games as it is. The open heart surgery he had in 2008 makes it risky to let the roller coaster of emotions reign over him. When Kevin was coaching at Seton Hall and Ralph would come up from Florida for games, he’d roam the empty upper levels of the arena to avoid being too close to the action.

“It’s a personal weakness of mine,” he said. “I’m working on it. I’m only turning 80, so I should have no problems conquering this.”

Ralph would have had little interest in being a coach these days. The modern game is too transactional and not about building relationships and developing players who will stick around. But he watches his son’s team with admiration and pride. He is, of course, prouder of the father and husband he has become, but the coach, too.

He saw the roster Kevin and his staff put together before the season and thought 17 wins was a good target and would be a good first step.

“To me it’s a real tribute to how hard he and his staff, and the players, have worked to represent Villanova in a positive way,” Ralph said.

The father and son never got to settle who the better coach was in an Iona-Holy Cross game, not that a one-game sample would have proved anything. The friendly competition is on the golf courses in Florida in the offseason.

Stats provide an answer to a question no one asked, though. Kevin’s winning percentage to date is .583. Ralph’s was .582.

Kevin by a hair?

That maybe would sit fine with Ralph. Fathers, they say, always want their kids to do better than they did, to be their own person. To be sure, Kevin Willard is certainly his own person. But asked about the idea of living under his father’s shadow in some ways to some people, he didn’t mind. Villanova’s program, for example, is Jay Wright’s, Kevin has said. Not his.

“I’ve always hoped to be Ralph Willard’s son,” Kevin said. “I’ve always embraced that, just like I love the fact that I’m one of Coach Pitino’s former assistants.”

If he ever strays from the course, if he ever forgets where he came from, he can count on his phone lighting up. Ralph might want to get on his son for his team’s rebounding issues. Or, in some cases, another life lesson.

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