(Ep057) Joe Mantegna: Putting Cause Above Self on the Court, Mentoring Young Players Through Personal Tragedy, and Continuing his Father's High School Coaching Legacy
As a player, Joe Mantegna says he was the college basketball equivalent of Rudy. But even before his playing days at Ithaca College were over, the coaching seeds sown by his father, who’s in the Massachusetts Basketball Hall of Fame, had begun to germinate, and he soon found himself on the sidelines at Boston University and Lehigh University. But when he came to a fork in the road, he decided that he wanted to have the same kind of impact on teenagers’ lives as his dad had, and so took the head coaching job at Blair Academy.
It’s rare for a rookie high school coach to win immediately, and more unusual still to be blessed with pro-level talent, but Joe had both when future All-Star Luol Deng and longtime NBA vet Charlie Villanueva showed up in his first recruiting class. Since then, Mantegna has built Blair into a national powerhouse, winning four national titles and, more importantly, developing many more high quality young men.
In this can’t miss episode, Joe gets raw about:
What moves him when he thinks about the players whose lives he has touched
How rooming with future NBA coach Steve Clifford gave him a coaching masterclass
Why he teamed up with Royal Ivey and Luol Deng to coach the South Sudan national team
What role the principles of grit, gratitude, joyfulness + selflessness play in Blair’s culture
How mudita - finding joy in other people’s success - is his team’s equivalent of Doc Rivers’s Ubuntu
Keep learning from Joe on his Twitter feed and at his basketball camps.
