On the eve of Saturday night's Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the Nova Notebook shares some anecdotes from four key figures in Jay Wright's coaching career.
 
During Wright's first stint at Villanova, when he served as an aide to Head Coach Rollie Massimino from 1987-92, one of his duties was to oversee a sprawling summer basketball camp that attracted hundreds of youngsters to courts inside the Pavilion and across campus, some from as far away as Long Island.
 
In 1988 an aspiring coach – then splitting his time between learning the craft and working as a guidance counselor in the Comsewogue school district – first met Nova's basketball camp director. Joe Jones, who would later serve on Wright's staff at Hofstra and Villanova, has reflected on that interaction often since the news came in May that Wright will be enshrined this weekend in ceremonies at the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield, Mass.
 
"There were probably 400 kids in that camp," says Jones by phone from Boston, where he serves as Boston University's head basketball coach. "Jay was awesome. The kids were engaged, everything was organized. Any time he spoke to the campers at assembly you could see how he held the kids' attention.
 
"At that time in my life I'd been around enough guys to know that this guy's ability to communicate was at another level."
 
Finally, Jones recalls a small act of kindness on Wright's part that meant something to a coach beginning his own journey in the profession.
 
"When the week was over, he gave me a pair of sneakers," Jones states with a chuckle. "I just thought that was a really cool thing to do and it just kind of reinforced the idea that this is a dude who thinks of other people."
 
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In 2001 Randy Foye was one of the most coveted guard prospects in the northeast. Not long after Wright assumed the head coaching position at Villanova on March 27, 2001, the Wildcats' staff had quickly prioritized Foye of Newark East Side High School in New Jersey. It didn't hurt that Foye already enjoyed a friendly relationship with one of the new Villanova assistants, Fred Hill, who had previously served on the staff at Seton Hall.
 
When the Wildcats came calling, Foye had done his homework on the new coach. He had familiarized himself with Wright's seven-year stint at Hofstra, specifically homing in on the way the Pride's lead guard, Craig "Speedy" Claxton, had developed into one of the top players in America East and later, a first round draft choice of the Philadelphia 76ers.

"As players, our goal, was to go to college, be successful and put smiles on fans' faces there, and then, ultimately, to become an NBA player," says the former Villanova All-American. "Seeing how Speedy had developed as a smaller guard into a guy who was out-rebounding power forwards and centers and controlling games, was an important thing for me."
 
That was one factor. Another was Wright's vision and passion for Villanova Basketball.
 
"When I think back to those early meetings with Coach in my recruiting process," Foye says now, "I keep coming back to the words humble and hungry. In our conversations his humility always came through. And he was hungry to take Villanova back to the top of the Big East."
 
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Although the perspective looks much different now, the truth is that during Ryan Arcidiacono's senior year at Neshaminy High School, Villanova finished 13-19, one of only two sub .500 seasons in Wright's 20 seasons as head coach. A coveted prospect himself, Arcidiacono could relate to the hard slog of a season as he recovered from back surgery in 2011-12.
 
It was the kind of circumstance where some prospects have elected to reassess their intentions. Arcidiacono, the son of a pair of Villanova graduates, did not.
 
"I think the biggest things for me in choosing Villanova were the location and the person Coach Wright is," the 2015 BIG EAST Player and the Year who has spent the last three seasons with the Chicago Bulls. "You can't judge every single team he has coached because not every team is the same. College sports in general is ever-changing and I didn't really point to one season when looking at it.
 
"I picked it because I felt it gave me the best opportunity to become a professional basketball player while getting a great education and learning the game from an awesome coach who had been to the Final Four (2009) before."
 
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Between his five-year run as an assistant to Massimino at Villanova and his seven-year stint as head coach at Hofstra (1994-2001), Wright spent two pivotal seasons as Massimino's top aide at UNLV.
 
Tom Pecora was on the staff with Wright at UNLV and joined him as an assistant coach for the entirety of his run at Hofstra before succeeding him as the Pride's head coach. (He later was head coach at Fordham and now serves as Associate Head Coach to former Wildcat Baker Dunleavy at Quinnipiac.)
 
"For our entire staff it was the greatest learning experience a young coach could have," Pecora states. "We took over a legendary program but the difference between the way Jerry Tarkanian went about business compared to Coach Mass, was huge."
 
As they settled into their new office space at the Thomas & Mack Center in the summer of 1992, the staff reported to work each day wearing shirts and ties per Massimino's wishes. They stood out in an environment where more casual attire was the norm.
 
"They used to call us the FBI," recalls Pecora. "We were so East Coast in our mindset, and it was enlightening to see that there were a lot of different ways to do things."
 
Pecora observed that those two seasons expanded Wright's outlook in another way.
 
"Jay was on the road recruiting high level players, some of whom were junior college players, whom we had never dealt with at Villanova," notes Pecora. "I think it expanded his horizons as a recruiter."
 
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During the period when Wright was at UNLV, in an age before cell phones and texting, Jones' contact with Wright was infrequent. It wasn't until Wright accepted the head coaching post at Hofstra that the pair re-connected. Jones believes it was a mutual friend, Long Island high school coaching legend and Massimino friend Frank Romeo, who dropped his name to Wright.
 
"I think Jay wanted an assistant from Long Island to be on the staff," he says.
 
Jones is the first to concede that there must have been more seasoned options for the position.
 
"I knew absolutely nothing about college basketball," he says now. "I was in my second year as a varsity high school head coach. But the thing that I understood right away is that Jay was just so different because of his ability to communicate and his work ethic. Those were things I was blown away by. He just had this unbelievable drive."
 
Sixteen-hour workdays were the norm in those early days. Jones would receive a to-do list from either Wright or Pecora in that first year, everything from pointers on recruiting to alumni functions.
 
"I was a sponge," he says, "and that's how I learned."
 
Those early days remain a bond between the trio of Wright, Pecora and Jones along with another assistant from that time, Brett Gunning, who accompanied Wright back to Villanova in 2001 and helped lay the foundation of the Nova program until his departure to the NBA in 2008.
 
"It was such a fun time," says Jones. "There was constant trial and error. We were all very young."
 
Jones still marvels at Wright's energy.
 
"The man was everywhere on campus," he says. "If there was any kind of meeting or function, he was there. As a staff, we watched and followed suit. It got so that we knew everyone on campus, and everyone knew us. We were entrenched in that community."
 
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If you ever wondered about the origins of Hoops Mania, Nova Nation, you should know some of that trial and error in Hempstead, N.Y., helped create the model for the annual kickoff to the basketball season (paused due to COVID-19 in 2020) we know today.
 
As the staff looked for ways to spark interest among the student population at Hofstra upon its arrival in 1994, an obvious choice was to create an October "Midnight Madness" event modeled after ones that had taken off in the 1990s at places like Kansas and Kentucky. It was just the kind of enthusiasm jolt the new coaches were looking for but there were several significant roadblocks.
 
"Jay," Pecora recalls saying to the head coach, "we have one kid on the team who can dunk a basketball, so we can't even have a dunking contest unless we rent a trampoline."
 
Undeterred, the staff pressed on with another concept. Instead of using an outdated home court – a new arena was still several years from completion – Hofstra would move the party to a campus venue known as "Hofstra USA."
 
"We made it into a kind of New Year's Eve party at a nightclub to celebrate the start of a new season," Pecora says.
 
Over the course of Wright's time at Hofstra as the team's fortunes improved, so too did the scope of the event.
 
"It became a big deal," states Pecora.
 
When Wright and Gunning returned to Villanova, more than a few of the staples of those shows were added to the Villanova version, which had also launched its "Hoops Mania" in the '90s. The first new edition, held in the Jake Nevin Field House ahead of the 2001-02 season, was a three hour plus affair with celebrity guests still being introduced to the crowd at 11:15 p.m. after an 8 p.m. start. By 2005, a tighter, streamlined affair debuted before a packed crowd at the Pavilion. A year later, 50 Cent brought the house down as a surprise musical guest, a tradition that has remained intact ever since.
 
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The life of a coaching wife at the highest levels of college basketball brings its share of challenges. Precisely calculating the impact of Patty Wright's contributions over the coaching career of her husband is an impossibility. But make no mistake, it's a role that hasn't been overlooked by those whom Wright has coached.
 
By the time he became a high school star, Foye's parents were deceased. He was nurtured by grandparents and family friends. When he enrolled at Villanova in 2002, he concedes that, at times, he felt the urge to hop in a car and make his way 90 miles up the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Turnpikes back to Newark.
 
"In some situations, Patty was more vital to me than Coach Wright off the court," Foye says now from his home in New Jersey. "She understood my situation, with my parents being deceased and me being a little homesick at times."
 
Foye recalls noticing when Patty Wright would arrive towards the end of Pavilion practices with her three young children in tow.
 
"When I would walk off the court after practice ended, she would ask me, 'is there anything you need?'", states Foye. "She'd also ask me if I needed to talk.
 
"I used to wonder to myself, why is she asking me all these questions? But now I know that's just a mom understanding that a younger person might be going through some things. To this day, I just appreciate how concerned she was about me."
 
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Pecora and Wright are among the many members of the Rollie Massimino coaching tree and Wright has often spoken of the outsize impact his mentor has had on his career.
 
"Coach Mass was a teacher, that was how he started, and I think that was huge for all of us," states Pecora. "He was a relentless worker who exposed his staff to every aspect of the business -recruiting, contracts, working with an administration."
 
Another key to Wright's rise, in the view of his longtime friend, was that at Hofstra he wasn't under an intense spotlight immediately.
 
"I feel bad in some ways for young coaches whose first job is at the highest level," he says from Connecticut. "The mistakes they make are in front of packed arenas and television audiences. We got to make mistakes as young coaches playing in front of a handful of fans. That allows you to become a good coach because you aren't afraid to take chances. You aren't coaching scared.
 
"The truth for Jay is the same as it is for all of us: he became a better coach when we started getting better players. There's a reason they call the arena we moved into during Jay's last few seasons as the 'House that Speedy Built"."
 
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When Arcidiacono allows his mind to drift back to the team he along with Daniel Ochefu, Josh Hart, Kris Jenkins, Jalen Brunson, Phil Booth, Darryl Reynolds and Mikal Bridges helped lead to the 2016 NCAA national championship, he cannot escape the enormity of his coach's impact on that group.
 
"Coach was able to take our 'redemption' class and mold us into exactly the class of players he wanted from a Villanova team," Arcidiacono states. "We epitomized what it meant to be, not only a Villanova player, but a Jay Wright player. We were a good group of guys off the floor that was hardworking and nasty when we stepped over the lines on to the 94 by 50 feet.
 
"Being a point guard for Coach Wright takes a lot. It can be demanding on the court and off it. You've got to be the connection point between Coach and the rest of the players. If he's getting on one of the players, he's doing it for a certain reason, an end goal that is bigger than any individual."
 
And like many of the generations of players who have played for Wright at Hofstra and Villanova, the festivities in Springfield on Saturday night are a source of pride.
 
"He's been an instrumental part of my career," Arcidiacono says. "I always look back with great memories, not just because of the national championship in '16, but because of the values Coach Wright instilled in all the players."
 
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The enshrinement ceremony for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2021 airs Saturday on NBA TV at 7 p.m.