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THE BELIEVER BY TIM CIGELSKE, COMM ’04, GRAD ’18, ’20
IN HIS TIRELESS FAITH IN THE POTENTIAL OF THOSE HE COACHES, SHAKA SMART DRAWS ON HIS OWN BASKETBALL JOURNEY. As a young assistant coach, Shaka Smart helped the University of Dayton Flyers face a Marquette University basketball team led by a dynamic guard named Dwyane Wade. Although the Golden Eagles were ranked No. 13 at the time, Smart’s unranked squad pulled out a gritty victory in overtime. Victory didn’t cloud Smart’s view of something special in Wade, who started with some misses but regrouped to finish with a double-double. “He got going in the last six or eight minutes of the game,” Smart remembers. “If that game had been two minutes longer, there’s no way we would have won.” Wade went on to lead Marquette to a Final Four appearance that year before becoming an NBA superstar, confirming the potential Smart saw from the sidelines. Eight years later, Smart, then a 33-year-old head coach of Virginia Commonwealth University, had his own Final Four appearance as a coach, a textbook Cinderella story in which his unheralded team knocked off Georgetown, Purdue and Kansas. And now, another decade later, Smart has taken over as the 18th men’s basketball head coach at Marquette. Each day, Smart walks to his office in the Al McGuire Center and passes a mural of a triumphant Wade celebrating in the arms of a jubilant Bradley Center crowd. When he looks at that scene, Smart ponders a question about the emerging star he coached against 18 years ago: Did Wade even know his full potential? “I walk around here seeing pictures of him, and I think, what was he like when he first got here?” Smart says. “He doesn’t even know what he could become as a player and a person.”
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