Whit Babcock swung for the fences, again. And he hit a home run (on paper), again. Kenny Brooks was his #1 target to coach the women's basketball team the entire time. While there is no proof that Buzz Williams and Justin Fuente were his #1 targets during those coaching searches, they likely were.
Will and I heard from a source a few weeks before the women's basketball season ended that Kenny Brooks was being pursued by Virginia Tech. Earlier this week, an industry source told us that Babcock pretty much had Brooks locked up a few weeks before the season ended, and that Babcock also had Buzz Williams locked up before the 2013-14 season ended.
If all of that is true (and from what I can tell, it's all at least partially true), that means Babcock is out there looking for coaches before he even fires the current coach. In the James Johnson and Dennis Wolff situations, towards the end it was pretty obvious that they were going to get fired.
With Johnson, the Hokies won just six ACC games in his two years as a head coach. He was handicapped by the completely overrated 2011 recruiting class, but he also had two NBA players in his first season as head coach (Erick Green and Jarrell Eddie) and yet only won four conference games that year. I liked Johnson personally, and in fact he stopped by our Spring Game tailgate one year. However, it was pretty clear that he wasn't going to work out.
Dennis Wolff had a horrible record until this past season, when his team made the WNIT. However, Wolff only had one year remaining on his contract, and a coach can't recruit in that situation. He either has to be fired or extended, and Wolff's record of 62-93 did not warrant an extension. That was a very easy business decision for Whit Babcock, and you could see it coming from a mile away. Even if Wolff had somehow made the NCAA Tournament this season, I still think he would have been gone.
Now that Wolff has been released and Kenny Brooks has been hired to replace him, Tech fans have turned their attention to baseball coach Pat Mason. Mason was promoted from pitching coach to head coach when Pete Hughes took the Oklahoma job after the 2013 season. He inherited a team that lost a ton of talent (including future major leaguer Chad Pinder).
Mason's first season was poor, his second season was average, and so far his third season is teetering on the brink of disaster. The Hokies have lost their last 11 games, including losses to VMI (15-14 record), Radford (6-19 record) and Liberty (16-11 record).
Here's how Mason's first 2+ seasons look so far…
2014: 21-31-1, 9-21 ACC
2015: 27-27, 13-16 ACC
2016: 10-16, 1-8 ACC
Total: 58-74, 23-45 ACC
I think Mason took over a tough job. The team was gutted following Tech's 2013 NCAA Tournament bid, and it's not easy to recruit to Blacksburg with the current facilities in place. That said, I sort of doubt that those results will be acceptable to Whit Babcock.
Babcock played baseball for James Madison. His father, Brad, was JMU's long-time head coach. In fact, the elder Babcock was JMU's first baseball coach, and he went 555-251-4 from 1971 through 1989. He took the Dukes to four NCAA Tournaments, and JMU became the first Virginia school to ever make the College World Series, accomplishing it in 1983. He also coached the Harrisonburg Turks, a college summer team in the Valley League.
Whit Babcock grew up in the household of a guy who really knows a lot about baseball. Therefore, I believe it would be accurate to say that Whit himself knows a lot about baseball. He also knows that Union Bank & Trust is about to invest a lot of money in the program. I would not be shocked at all if he made a coaching move after this season is over. Knowing how he worked with Buzz and Kenny Brooks, he might already be looking.
I don't know much about college baseball, but I did hear that Coastal Carolina coach Gary Gilmore was very interested in the Virginia Tech job at one point, probably when Pete Hughes left for Oklahoma, and perhaps when Chuck Hartman retired as well. Gilmore has a 1,045-522-2 record during his coaching career. He's taken Coastal Carolina to 12 NCAA Tournaments, and he's a native of Franklin County, VA (that's about an hour from the Tech campus, FWIW). He's been a scout for the Mariners and Indians.
Coastal Carolina is one of the best small-conference jobs in the country. Gilmore can recruit very good talent to Myrtle Beach, and then they face a Big South schedule. They have great facilities and terrific weather. Still, you've got to figure that a guy who has had that much success might want to test himself against the very best. If he can do it an hour away from the town where he was born, even better.
I don't know if Whit Babcock will make a change, and even if he does, I don't know whether he will consider Gilmore or not. However, Gilmore is the first name that popped into my head. Thus far, Babcock has gone after proven winners in his three major hires. I expect he would do the same in baseball.
Justin Fuente is Raising his Twitter Game
If you want to recruit successfully these days, a program must be social media savvy. Social media is a free way to market the program. Tech's football recruiting staff (Chuck Cantor, Thomas Guerry, and company) taught themselves Photoshop skills when they were first hired, and they immediately went to Twitter with graphical presentations to gain exposure for the program.
Ever since he took the Virginia Tech job, Justin Fuente has embraced this type of recruiting. Fuente has been on Twitter since February of 2012, and he has a total of 261 tweets during that time period. That doesn't seem like a lot, and it isn't a lot. However, 141 of those 261 tweets have come since November 28, 2015…the day he was hired to be Virginia Tech's head football coach.
Some (myself included) wondered how Fuente would adapt to recruiting against Power 5 conference coaches. He had no experience doing that in the past, so naturally it was going to be a little bit different. His recent use of social media shows that he's very aware of the types of things a head coach needs to do to recruit successfully these days.
If you don't have Twitter, and you're wondering what I'm talking about, I'll embed a few of his Tweets to show you.
When 4-star Virginia Beach wide receiver Tahj Capehart visited Virginia Tech on Tuesday, Fuente tweeted this…
Excited to host a difference maker from the 757 today!! pic.twitter.com/whSrB4ILTw
— Justin Fuente (@CoachFuente) March 29, 2016
When Virginia Tech receives a verbal commitment from a prospect, Fuente generally posts something like this…