The Wright State coach wasn’t referring to the flu-like symptoms he’d felt earlier in the week after contracting COVID, he was talking about adhering to virus protocols and being forced to miss the Raiders’ conference game Thursday night with Milwaukee at the Nutter Center.
That meant WSU’s associate head coach Clint Sargent would be on the bench and Nagy would be watching the game on TV at home.
College basketball – like the rest of society – is enduring yet another surge of the ever-morphing virus since the pandemic began 22 months ago. By mid-week, the NCAA had tracked over 120 men’s and women’s games that had been cancelled this season and, likely, just as many have been moved to other dates to deal with the growing number of positive tests.
Thursday night both teams were affected.
Milwaukee was without its star player, Patrick Baldwin Jr, the 6-foot-9 freshman son of the Panthers’ head coach. The highest-ranked recruit ever signed by a Horizon League team, he had been averaging 15 points per game this season.
The Panthers were also missing 7-foot backup center Samba Kane.
Along with Nagy, WSU had four players sidelined by COVID precautions: A.J. Braun, the 6-foot-9 freshman who had started the past five games and was averaging 7.6 p.p.g., Cornell transfer Riley Voss, sophomore Alex Huibregtse and walk-on Andy Neff.
People who know Nagy best would not have been surprised to hear of his TV time misery.
Sargent has been around when the coach was watching his beloved Dallas Cowboys and noted with a grin: “Things he’s passionate about and cares deeply about, it gets pretty intense for him.”
“Yeah, nobody wants to watch with me,” Nagy admitted.
That was the case Thursday.
“I’m 100 percent that Mrs. Nagy was NOT watching with him,” offered Raiders’ 6-foot-9 forward Grant Basile.
He was right. Jamie Nagy, Scott’s wife, watched from the couple’s bedroom.
“Her feed must have been two seconds ahead of mine,” Nagy laughed. “Even though she had the door shut, I could tell if we did something good or not.”
Through the early portion of both the first half and the second, the Raiders seemed out of sync and were outplayed by a Panthers team that was more aggressive and was shooting and rebounding better.
WSU trailed throughout much of the first half and was down by 11 four minutes into the second half.
In Sargent’s words “it looked bleak.”
“It was terrible watching that” Nagy said. “I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to turn it off and just have somebody tell me the score at the end.”
He said he began to feel like his late father, Dick Nagy, who had been a well-respected college coach for 33 years and spent his last years driving from his home 40 miles north of Chicago to WSU to sit behind the Raiders’ bench and agonize, sometimes quite vocally, as his son’s team played its games.
Often he couldn’t bear to watch anymore and would walk around the arena, sometimes mumbling his displeasure.
“I felt like my dad tonight,” Nagy said. “I wanted to do exactly how he did when he’d get up and walk around. And when he wasn’t there, sometimes he just couldn’t watch and he’d call someone and ask what the score was.
“But I’m the head coach, I knew I better watch the game.”
And in the end, he was glad he did,
The Raiders began to play defense. They made their free throws and didn’t turn the ball over. They were led by Tanner Holden, who finished with 22 points, and with 8:50 left in the game, they took the lead for good.
The 80-75 triumph was the 5-7 Raiders third victory in a row.
Third straight season disrupted
This is now the third straight WSU season that’s been altered by COVID.
“Mostly I hate it for the kids and how it impacts their college basketball experience,” Nagy said. “Two seasons ago they didn’t get to play in the NIT because of it. Last year we didn’t play all our games because of it.”
He didn’t mention that fans weren’t allowed to attend Nutter Center games last season either.
“And this year,” he added, “there’s a good chance before all is said and done that…”
He caught himself and didn’t finish the thought.
Sargent said the ever-shifting landscape of college basketball this season – with positive tests, quarantines, postponements and forfeits – is difficult because “you just don’t know what’s coming.
“So much of when you try to compete and perform is about mindset. But when COVID starts to sprinkle into the picture, it’s so disruptive to your focus:
“It’s ‘Are we going to play today? Who are we gonna have? Are they going to be able to play?”
Basile, who added 12 points, seven rebounds and three blocked shots Thursday, admitted: “You can’t really control it at this point. Look at how many guys are out in the NBA now.
“But our training staff does a great job keeping us safe so we can go out on the floor and compete.”
Thursday night the PA announcer repeatedly reminded fans that masks were required to be worn by all fans – unless eating or drinking – during the game.
Even though the Omicron variant of the virus is highly transmissible and accounting for a record numbers of cases, the majority of the fans paid no attention to the request and remained mask-less throughout the game.
When the game ended, the WSU players were feeling so good about their comeback that they made a circuit around the edge of the court so they could slap hands with those fans, bathe in their cheers and sometime stop and pose for group pictures or sign autographs.
Although Nagy is allowed to return to some coaching duties from afar today, protocol requirements will keep him from coaching Saturday’s game against Green Bay at the Nutter Center.
The team first learned it would be without him six days ago when it resumed practice after Christmas.
“For a little bit it was like ‘What are we going to do?’” Holden said. “But we have a great coaching staff and Coach Sargent definitely is cut from the same cloth as Coach Nagy. He was made for the moment and I felt we didn’t miss a beat.”
Sargent said the team has faced challenges all season:
“The public doesn’t know all of it, how our guys have faced a lot of adversity this season. We told (the players) : ‘How you handled that, you’re ready for this. You’re equipped.’”
And no one has faced more adversity than Nagy himself.
“It’s been a brutal Fall,” he admitted quietly.
His dad had been diagnosed with leukemia in July of 2020 and died this past October 6. He was 78.
“Then a couple weeks after that the family I lived with in high school, their son who was a year younger than me passed away from brain cancer,” Nagy said.
“It’s been a couple of gut punches for me.
“But I give our players and coaches a lot of ownership of the program – I’m not a micromanager – and that was necessary this Fall. I just wasn’t around as much because my dad was sick.
“I’ve felt I haven’t done a good job with this team. Early on, I think emotionally I was a little absent. It took me this long to get pulled back around, but I felt I was close to being back.
“And then this.”
‘Tribute to him’
One plus came the night before the game.
“Coach Nagy called me up and was so supportive, so genuine,” Sargent said. “He asked how I was feeling and then he giggled and said: ‘This is the first time in 27 years (as a head coach) that the night before a game, I feel pretty good.’”
Although that feeling soon evaporated, he felt better again after the victory.
In the postgame dressing room, he and the players connected via a FaceTime call, He told his players he was proud of them.
“He was pretty happy for us,” Basile said. “But it’s a tribute to him and the culture he’s built here. It was next man up.”
“I hope he was so prideful of what he saw on the floor because it all was a reflection of (him),” Sargent said. “The kids showed their character when they had to.”
With a smile, Sargent said the night ended up “just a unique, lifelong memory for a lot of reasons.”
For Nagy, it was a moment he was left to experience on his own.
While his wife watched the game from behind the closed door of the bedroom, the family’s English bulldog smartly sought refuge as well guessed a laughing Holden:
“I’d say Diesel went outside…and went to sleep.”
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