Butler basketball: Thad Matta holds first press conference as coach

Thad Matta, who last coached at Butler 21 years ago, is returning to take over the men's basketball program which has been down in recent years.

Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS One of the first things Thad Matta looked into when he was hired last spring as Indiana's associate athletic director for men's basketball was whether he could get newly-hired head coach and basically NBA-lifer Mike Woodson a head start.

After 17 years as a head coach at Ohio State, Xavier and Butler and 11 more as a college assistant coach, Matta knows the NCAA rulebook, including the rule that allows Division I programs the opportunity to take an international tripin the summer once every four years. It's supposed to be an educational opportunity, but teams are allowed to practice 10 times on campus before they go on tour and can play up to 10 games against non-NCAA teamson tour long before the official start of practice.It can be particularly valuable for a new coach trying to get to know his team and for players trying to get to know their new coach.

Matta learned IU hadn't been on a foreign tour since Tom Crean took the Hoosiers to Montreal in 2014, so he started looking into options and presented them to Woodson.

"I remember telling him, 'Hey, we're up for a foreign trip,'" Matta said Wednesday in a news conference after the introduction for his return to coaching at Butler. "I said, 'I'lltry to get something in The Bahamas. We'll fly in a pro team and we'll play them.'"

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Woodson, who spent most of the previous 25 years coaching in the NBA and hadn't been part of college basketball since he graduated from IU in 1980, didn't even know a foreign tour was an option.

"He said, 'Wait a minute, I can coach my team this summer?'" Matta said. "He just got as excited as he could be."

The Hoosiers ended up playing two games at The Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, winning two exhibition games against the Serbian professional club BC Mega, giving Woodson a head start going into the fall. It helped IU get started on the road to its first trip to the NCAA tournament since 2016.

That was effectively Matta's job at IU for the past year. He was paid $400,000 to help guide Woodson along as he learned about the college part of coaching college basketball. Matta purposefully stayed out of the public eye during the past year while he was in the position, but said taking the job and being part of a college program again inspired him to get back into coaching after five years away.

"This year, being around it but not in it, was really good for me," Matta said. "Sitting in meetings and watching practice and learning an inordinate amount of basketball from Woody, that kind of got me going again."

The job was the creation of IU athletic director Scott Dolson, who said he came up with it after his discussion with Woodson in New York when he approached Woodson about the job. Woodson called himself a collaborator and indicated he wanted to have a relationship with Dolson similar to the one he had with Glenn Grunwald who was his teammate at IU and then the general manager when Woodson was head coach of the New York Knicks. Dolson realized he couldn't work with Woodson on that constant of a basis because of his responsibilities to the rest of the department, but decided Matta would be the perfect fit for the role.

Matta said he sat in on staff meetings and attended practice every day. In the meetings, the staff frequently watched film together sometimes for scouting purposes but other times because Woodson was looking for innovative plays and concepts and would debate with the staff whether concepts he saw other teams try would work for IU. Matta was part of those debates. He was an obvious presence at the scorer's table at every game. However, he said he mostlyleft the on-court part of the job to Woodson and his assistants.

"I didn't have a ton of input to what was going on, only the nights they won," the typically-wry Matta said, pausing to see if anyone picked up on what he just said. "That was a joke. I know how Indiana fans are. I wasn't trying to get credit there."

Matta's contribution was to help Woodson learn the parts of the job he couldn't have learned from all of those years in the NBA. Woodson might have had to game plan to stop LeBron James, but he'd never before had to thumb through the NCAA rulebook to learn about the arcane rules about what he was allowed to do in recruiting. His NBA connections were endless, but he didn't have the same number of contacts for coaches who were looking to stay in the college game and he hadn't been to the summer travel events where he could see those coaches work.

But Matta had done all of those things for decades, so he provided those insights.

"Woody was gonna do what Woody was gonna do, but just in terms of (teaching him) the college game," Matta said. "Helping him put together a staff. Helping him with job responsibilities, those kinds of things... He didn't know a lot of the recruiting, the rules, the regulations."

Woodson has admitted to being a novice in that regard. He said in a news conference before IU's First Four NCAA tournament game against Wyoming in March that he found the NCAA compliance test "tricky," and he frequently had to be told things he was suggesting like picking up recruits for visits with a private jet were not legal under NCAA rules.

"A lot of it was just the recruiting, what he could do and what he couldn't do," Matta said. "Just like, on an unofficial visit we can't leave campus. He'd say, 'Let's take him to eat.' We'd have to say, 'No, no, we can't leave campus.'"

But annoyed as Woodson might have been by the rules, Matta said he was receptive to having them explained so he didn't run afoul of them.

"He was great because he wanted to learn," Matta said. "Some of those guys don't want to learn. Mike wants to know everything that's going on in the program."

While Matta was in the job, he decided to minimize his public profile. The announcement of his hire in conjunction with Woodson's added to the buzz around the program and drew dozens of interview requests, including from the IndyStar, but those were never fulfilled and Matta gave no interviews while in Indiana's employ.That was Matta's decision.

"I don't ever like being in the spotlight," Matta said. "But I know in the position I'm in, it comes with the territory. When I went to Bloomington, I didn't want that. I just wanted to be behind the scenes and doing whatever Indiana needed me to do. I didn't want the notoriety of any of that. That's kind of who I am. That is Mike's program and I hopefully did something to help him be successful this year, and most importantly because I fell in love with Indiana, did something to help the future of the program."

Matta said he believes IU remains in good hands. He said Dolson has become one of his best friends, and that he developed an immense respect for Woodson as a coach, a man and a leader.

"Mike is such a special guy," Matta said. "He's got one of the biggest hearts I've ever seen in terms of just his compassion. What I walked away with is his commitment to the game of basketball. Mike Woodsonlovesbasketball. Loves ball. I'd sit in those meetings and we'd be watching, God knows who we were watching play, just because he wanted to learn. He wanted new ideas and wanted to be innovative. That's what I took away was that burning passion for the game of basketball."

Follow Indiana insider Dustin Dopirak on Twitter @DustinDopirak or e-mail him at ddopirak@gannett.com.

Read more:

How Thad Matta helped Mike Woodson behind the scenes adjust to college basketball - IndyStar