Minding his business

Dave Odom blames (affectionately) Jeff Jones for his son, Ryan, becoming a college basketball coach.

When Odom the Elder and Jones were assistant coaches at the University of Virginia in the 1980s, Ryan used to ride his bike to old University Hall after school and hang out at practice, chatting hoops with Jones, now Old Dominion’s head coach.

“They would sit there and talk about what we were doing practicewise,” says Dave, who later became the head coach at Wake Forest, where he coached future NBA great Tim Duncan. “He was soaking in Jeff ’s knowledge. I think that really was the beginning of his interest in not only playing, but eventually coaching, basketball.”

Ryan Odom now has been a professional coach for 26 years. This past spring, he took over at VCU, replacing Mike Rhoades (M.S.’02), who decamped to Penn State after six seasons and three NCAA Tournament appearances.

VCU is Odom’s fifth head coaching gig after UNC Charlotte (as the interim coach), Lenoir-Rhyne (a North Carolina Division II school), the University of Maryland- Baltimore County and Utah State, where he took the Aggies to the NCAA Tournament this past season. Seeded 10th, they lost to No. 7 Missouri in the round of 64. Entering the 2023-24 season, Odom has a career record of 170-106.

“I didn’t come here, and our staff didn’t come here, for comfort. We came here to compete for a national championship,” says Odom, who has coached and lived all around Richmond, growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Winston- Salem, North Carolina, playing at D-III Hampden-Sydney, and then serving as an assistant at American University and Virginia Tech. “That’s why we came here, because we believe it can happen. Will it ever happen? I have no idea. I can’t predict the future. But that’s the ultimate goal: to aspire to do things that others would say ‘There’s no chance you’re doing that.’”

An old boss liked that about him.

Freeman Hrabowski, Ph.D., hired Odom at UMBC when Hrabowski was the school’s president. A mathematician and now president emeritus, Hrabowski remembers being wooed by Odom’s amiability, determination and mind.

“I’m always looking at people and their ability to think well,” says Hrabowski, whom President Barack Obama appointed in 2012 to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. “[Odom is] an educator, he’s an excellent thinker, and excellent thinkers know how to be flexible. They know how to look at the strengths of the situation and the people, to look at their weaknesses and their challenges, to look at the gaps and to figure out where there are holes and what are the highlights that they need to focus on in order to reach the goal.”

“I didn’t come here, and our staff didn’t come here, for comfort. We came here to compete for a national championship.”

For Odom, thinking is contingent on listening.

“I can’t say I’m never impulsive, but generally, I try to think through things to figure out, ‘All right, is this the best course of action for this player, this team?’” he says. “I think the biggest thing for me is continuing to evolve and improve as a coach, and the only way you do that is to evaluate and learn from others, right? Whether it’s my assistant coaches or your players, they teach you things a lot of times with the things that they’re going through, and you’re trying to work through helping them be more confident or not give in, in this situation. You’re trying to help them see things that they didn’t even know were possible for themselves.

“That’s in a lot of ways what coaching is all about. It’s to try to help you achieve something that — maybe it’s individually, maybe it’s as a team — that you never dreamt was possible.”

Odom did that at UMBC in 2018. He led the 16th-seeded Retrievers to a round of 64 NCAA Tournament win over top- seeded Virginia, becoming the first 16 to beat a 1. In 2023, Fairleigh Dickinson beat Purdue to become the second. All time, 1 seeds are 150-2 against 16 seeds.

“Just imagine what a leader does for a group of young people when that leader can help those young people [not listen to] what everybody else in the world is saying,” Hrabowski says. “Because the world was telling them, ‘No, you can’t do it. No, you’re David, and you’re going up against Goliath, and no, David, you cannot do that.’ But imagine if David had had a coach, quite frankly, who says, ‘You will not give up. I don’t care how big Goliath is, how talented, how wealthy, whatever. You will not give up. You will continue to fight.’ And somehow, Ryan was that coach. I mean, you see Ryan’s face when he tells you something, and you believe it. You do. You just believe it.”

Odom says cultivating passion is essential to his teaching philosophy, and that passion is, in part, defined by suffering. The connection?

“Because you love it, right?” he says. “You’re willing to suffer to get what you want and try to experience the success that you desire relative to whatever you’re trying to get done. Success is never final. If you’re not evolving as a coach, as an administrator or whatever profession you choose, then eventually it’s going to catch up with you.”

Jones says he doesn’t remember exactly what he and the young Odom talked about at those UVA practices in the 1980s, and neither does Odom. But both men are coaches’ sons (Jones’ father, Bob, led Kentucky Wesleyan to the D-III national title in 1973), and, Jones remembers, they bonded over that.

“Having been a coach’s son myself, it was just normal,” Jones says. “I had a habit of, when I would sit around, I’d al- ways have a basketball in my hand, and I’d kind of be dribbling beneath my legs, and I guess Ryan started doing that, too. I think as sons of coaches, as much as you’re around the game, playing it, observing it, you’re picking up on things, and you form your own philosophy on basketball. A lot of that, maybe most of that, will come from your dad.”

Still, Dave Odom had other ideas about his son’s future, especially when Ryan majored in business.

“I thought,” Dave says, jokingly, “he was going to go to Wall Street and make millions of dollars.”