Will Conroy Remains the Husky Coach in Waiting
A strange thing happened in Corvallis, Oregon. The University of Washington men's basketball team hours before tipoff found itself without its veteran coach after Mike Hopkins was whisked away and put in COVID protocols. Yet that was only inconvenient.
No, what proved so unusual during Thursday night's game against Oregon State was how instantly harmonious everything seemed for the Huskies once assistant coach Will Conroy took over.
Rather than chaos and confusion emanating from the sudden change in leadership — remember how the UW football team dropped all three games after Jimmy Lake was removed — unerring calm seemed to hover over this basketball team.
Not to shove Hopkins out the door, at least just yet, but Conroy looked and acted like a head coach. There was a noticeable vibe about him and the team interacting together that worked and was hard to ignore as the Husky basketball team won 82-72.
Conroy will be asked to coach again on Sunday night in Eugene against a tougher team in Oregon (11-6 overall, 4-2 Pac-12), and there's no reason to think he won't have the Huskies (9-7, 4-2) ready for this challenge, as well. The Ducks enter having won nine of the previous 10 meetings.
Now in his seventh season as a UW assistant for two different coaches, Conroy steadily has been groomed to take over this program some day. It started with Lorenzo Romar. It continues with Hopkins.
The players like and respect Conroy, as seen in video footage of the team posted on the road of him getting drenched in a postgame celebration at OSU and given a signed game ball a day later.
While Hopkins appears to have righted the Husky ship in terms of wins and losses — after an extended and overly uncomfortable stretch of 41 defeats in 56 games — he still has plenty of work to do in terms of restoring the overall basketball experience.
UW fans haven't come back to the stands in significant numbers, still wary of the pandemic and also skeptical of the basketball product being put forth. Alaska Airlines Arena hasn't been half full of people for any one game yet this season.
In a support role, Conroy largely has been credited with restoring sanity to a basketball program that last season veered wildly of course by convincing Seattle-Tacoma players Terrell Brown Jr., Emmitt Matthews Jr., Daejon Davis and PJ Fuller to come home and play for the Huskies. And be together.
While Hopkins is extremely likable, not every player gets him. The departed Erik Stevenson looked highly uncomfortable after the coach pulled him seconds into a game last season and then grabbed the player's head with both hands while he made his point. Stevenson and Hopkins reportedly did not end well in a one-on-one when the player announced he was leaving.
Conroy relates to the Huskies because he was once a record-setting player, the tireless playmaker, for one of the UW's greatest teams. He played alongside Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson as they put together a dazzling 29-6 record in 2005. He later got a taste of the NBA and played overseas.
Well before Hopkins came on board, Conroy was offering his basketball expertise to the Huskies. Once Romar was fired, he was the only coaching carryover when the team was put in Hopkins' hands.
While he's been a loyal solider for Hopkins, the players clearly gravitate to the one-time Husky point guard, sharing in his intensity and wanting to respond to him.
The fans like him, too. Conroy has been known to stand on the court and pass a ball back and forth with a lucky member of the Dawg Pack standing in the middle of the seats, with opening tipoff fast approaching, to get the student body involved.
People have said Hopkins someday would take over the Syracuse program, where he played and coached for Jim Boeheim for parts of three decades, once the successful coach retires.
Whether or not that ever happens, the Huskies have their own man in waiting. Conroy will be a college head coach at some point. He's doing a pretty good imitation of one right now.
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