Team in good hands with Giannini

By Ray Porreca
Collegian Staff
April 26, 2006

The La Salle Explorers basketball team was once a proud program. There were national championships, NCAA Player of the Year award winners and expected trips to the postseason. Then, the program fell on hard times. There were losing seasons and off-the-court distractions that damaged the program.

Dr. John Giannini was brought in after successful head coaching stints at Rowan and Maine to try and right the program. This past season, the Explorers took a big step in the right direction under both Giannini’s direction and the leadership of seniors Steven Smith, Jermaine Thomas and Lewis Fadipe.

Giannini looked back on the 2005-2006 campaign as a successful one. Though the team did not make it to a postseason tournament, there were a lot of bright spots. Giannini had nothing but praise to heap onto his players.

“I’ve been a head coach for 17 years,” Giannini said. “I’ve been pretty much the same coach in all of those years. What is different is the players.”

In a truly humble fashion, he added that the players are the ones who get the results; he and his staff just try to push them in the right direction. That is a process that begins well before the season starts as the coaches try and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the team for the upcoming year.

“We want to use defensive and offensive strategies that allow us to have our players be versatile,” the coach said.

Reflecting on this past season, Giannini said, “I knew our challenge would be defense. We started working on defense in September. Next year, it’s going to be very much the opposite.”

During the past campaign, the team had great role definition; that is, the players all knew where they fit into the system. They had their outside shooters in Thomas and sophomore Darnell Harris. Sophomore guard Sherman Diaz was able to come off the bench and provide tight defense in important moments, and senior Steve Smith was able to do a lot of things that could help the team win.

With the three seniors departing, there will be a changing of the guard. The team is going to feature six new recruits. Whereas last year the team played with just 10 players, they will play with 13 next year, and with that comes a new challenge for the coaching staff.

“Role definition was very, very easy for this team. Now our challenges are different,” Giannini said. “Now we’ll be more talented, we’ll be deeper, but we’ll be younger, less experienced, and understanding those roles will be much harder when you have 13 people as opposed to seven or 10.”

Now, two years ago it would have been out of the question for this team to have brought in six highly regarded recruits. Giannini credits this to his belief that in order to recruit a player a coach must be able to sell a vision to a potential recruit.

“Sometimes I think that’s the best way to recruit because kids can really see how they can make a difference and what the program can become.”

There were two times throughout the season where the team was dealt what could have been crushing blows. There was the 40-point loss to Villanova, and there was a five game losing streak. For a lot of schools this might have spelled the end to any hope of a successful season, but it did not for the Explorers. Giannini was hesitant to take credit for the fact that the team was able to brush these setbacks off.

“This is a team that had lost before and never quit,” the coach said. “They were just able to revert back to those experiences and remember that the most important thing is to win the next game.”

Character was a word which came out of the coach’s mouth a lot. He is clearly very happy to have a team with such great character. Over the past four years, the word “character” has become synonymous with the team’s star, forward Steven Smith.

“He didn’t have to come to La Salle in the first place,” Giannini said. “He didn’t have to stay at La Salle, he wasn’t supposed to be a strong student, he wasn’t supposed to be a great player, and he did all of the above. And it’s simply a reflection of his character.”

Smith’s character and leadership gave the team and the coaching staff something to build on for next year.

The coach has brought his experience to a program in need of guidance, and if this past year was any indication of what is to come, then the program should be in good shape.

porrecr1@lasalle.edu