From the sidelines
By Marty Gordon
NRVsports@ourvalley.org
Both Radford University and Virginia Tech have not had the men’s basketball season they had hoped for.
2023-2024 came to a screeching halt for Radford this past week. Tech still has an outside shot at running the gauntlet during this week’s ACC tournament, but this season has been rocky.
Tech Coach Mike Young did manage to win the tourney three years ago, but the wins and success has hit a speed bump.
Meanwhile Radford University’s Darris Nichols has reached for the gold ring but keeps missing in the Big South Conference.
Nichols just finished his third season. The native son of Radford is the eighth head coach in program history at RU.
Nichols’ plan to return the Highlanders to their winning ways came to fruition in just his second season at the helm, leading the program to a 21-15 overall record, including a 12-6 mark in Big South play, during the 2022-23 campaign. Radford came one point away from playing in the conference championship, but still earned a bid to the College Basketball Invitational.
This included a 11-18 record in his debut season.
Before returning to the New River Valley, Nichols spent six seasons as an assistant coach at the University of Florida. While at Florida he helped coach the Gators to a 123-75 record that included four straight 20-win seasons. Nichols and the Gators also tallied four straight NCAA Tournament bids.
The 2016-17 season was one of the best, while Nichols was at UF. Florida earned a 27-9 record and reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. The Gators finished second in the SEC with a 14-4 record, matching the second-most conference wins in team history. Florida climbed as high as 12th nationally in both the AP and coaches polls and hit No. 3 in RPI and KenPom rankings.
Nichols, a member of Coaches 4 Change, garnered a spot in ESPN.com’s 40 Under 40 in the summer of 2020, rated #17 on the national list that included both head coaches and assistant coaches. He was also rated the #2 assistant coach in the SEC in a Stadium poll of coaches around the league.
Young also came to the New River Valley with lots of optimism. He is also a native of Radford.
Initially, he was hired in 2019 and steered the Hokies to their first-ever ACC men’s basketball championship by winning four games in four days in Brooklyn, New York in March 2022.
His resume includes some very successful times at Wolford.
He has made the NCAA Tournament in seven of the last 13 seasons, including being the fastest Virginia Tech coach to make The Dance.
Under his watch in 2020-21, he led Tech to being 4-0 versus the AP’s Top 25, with the four wins being tied for the most ranked wins in a season in school history.
This all includes being very successful in beating some big time programs and their legendary coaches like Mike Krzyzewski, Jay Wright, Tom Izzo, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams and Tony Bennett.
He joined the Hokies after a record-setting 17-year tenure as the head coach at Wofford. The Terriers posted a 30-5 overall record in 2018-19, including a perfect 18-0 mark in Southern Conference play, and registered a convincing 84-68 win over Seton Hall in the first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament.
The 2019 Sporting News Coach of the Year, Young built the Terriers into one of the Southern Conference’s preeminent programs and a perennial NCAA Tournament participant. He guided Wofford to five NCAA Tournament berths over the past 10 seasons and five Southern Conference championships. In addition to the on-court success of his teams, 100 percent of Young’s student-athletes at Wofford who completed their eligibility graduated.
This year, Tech has only managed to stag 18 wins and fell to near the basement of the ACC conference. A late season surge of winning did push them back to the middle of the pack. But that’s where they remained.
Already fans are asking if changes need to be made to one or both programs. Both Young and Nichols deserve another year to right the ship.
The future has not been written, and with the idea of the transfer portal, things could change on its own. But with this, both programs are hungry – hungry for winning ways.
