Is this March as good as last March?
Key Dates:
- March 22, 2025 – The golden era of modern college basketball begins – Coach Will Wade signs his contract at NC State
- March 24, 2025 – Transfer portal opens. Likely to be the largest list of players ever. Over 1500 D1 players listed in the first week.
- May 14, 2025 – First Day of classes Summer Session I – Players begin summer S&C and skills workouts
- June 21, 2025 – Coach Wade’s two year show-cause penalty will expire
- June 23, 2025 – First Day of classes Summer Session II
- August 18, 2025 – First Day of classes Fall Semester
- November 3, 2025 – First game, FULL HOUSE AT LENOVO!!
Coaching Hires:
- Brandon Chambers – Coach Chambers follows Coach Wade from McNeese and also worked one season with him at LSU
“I’m excited to add Brandon to my first staff at NC State,” Wade said. “I’ve known Brandon for 15 years and he is one of the brightest young coaches in the game. He has the ability to recruit high level talent and also possesses a great ability at teaching the game, especially defensively, which he will specialize here at NC State.”
- Adam Howard – Coach Howard comes to NC State after 3 seasons at Nebraska.
“Adam is a great coach with a proven record of building programs, Wade said. “He’s everything you want in an assistant coach with his ability to recruit, game plan and develop players. He has an excellent tactical offensive mind and will do a great job on that side of the court for our team. I’m excited to have him in Raleigh and welcome him, his wife Renee and their three children to the Wolfpack family.”
Will Wade Fanzone
Excerpts from an article from 2017, as Coach Wade began his first season at LSU.
Roots
Interestingly enough, Wade never really dreamed of being a big-time college basketball coach and certainly had other ideas when he graduated from Clemson in 2005.
“Reality is, I don’t come from some great basketball family or great basketball tree,” Wade said. “We’re kind of self-made people.”
Still, Sissy Wade isn’t surprised the oldest of her two boys — younger son Jay has a doctorate degree and teaches at Loyola University of Chicago — gravitated to coaching.
“Will always had a lot of drive. … He was always analytical, too,” she said. “When he was younger, he didn’t just watch a basketball game. He watched the Xs and Os and where people were moving and analyzing them.”
UT-Chattanooga (2013-2015)
When Coach Wade got his first coaching job, he was “the third-youngest head coach in the nation at 30 years, 168 days.”
The Chattanooga men’s team was coming off a fourth consecutive non-winning season, and the program needed a swift kick in the backside to become relevant again in the Southern Conference.
New Athletic Director David Blackburn said, “At the time, we needed discipline, we needed new hope, we needed somebody who would be aggressive in recruiting and bring in some players,” he said. “We had to jumpstart it like a dead car battery.”
Upon accepting an offer from Blackburn, Wade immediately energized the program on campus and in the community. On the court, he went 18-15 in his first season with a 12-4 mark in conference play and was named the SoCon coach of the year.
“Will was the right medicine at the right time for us,” Blackburn said.
VCU (2015-2017)
After going 25-11 and 26-9 with a pair of NCAA tournament bids, Wade was one of the hottest coaching names [in the country]
LSU (2017 – 2022)
LSU athletic director Joe Alleva offered him a six-year, $15 million contract to revive an LSU program that hit bottom last season.
Displaying the unbridled energy and passion Blackburn and Alleva saw, Wade hit the ground running and started making recruiting inroads to remodel a roster that has just five returning scholarship players.
Coach Wade on Wade
“I worry that somebody else is outworking us, outmaneuvering us, out-thinking us,” he said. “I worry about that constantly, because I feel like we need to have the best of the best to position ourselves to win at a really, really high level.
“I don’t know if ‘paranoid’ is the right word,” he said before pausing. “But I worry about everything that’s going on and just try to make sure we have the best systems in place to have success.”
Wade didn’t blink when asked if he’s obsessed. “I would say that’s probably a fair word,” he said.
Mrs. Coach Wade on Wade
Wade’s wife of three years [at the time], the former Lauren Deason, has seen it from the time they met in December 2011.
“He likes to relax and have fun, too, but even on our first date we ended up watching game film,” said Lauren, a University of North Carolina graduate. “It was great, because I was a huge basketball fan before we ever met.”
In their time together, she has watched him become even more of a student of the game.
“He’ll do anything he can to find a way to win a game,” she said. “They won two games at VCU with four-tenths of a second on the clock because he knew exactly what to do in those situations. He studies and reads, and he isn’t afraid to try something unconventional.
“If there’s a coach trying something new — it doesn’t even have to be about basketball — he’ll contact him and go talk to him. Or he’ll spend an hour on the phone trying to figure out what they’re doing that makes them successful.”
Attribution