SnapJolt

WASHINGTON – Chris Caputo got an early glimpse, way earlier than most. It was the spring of 1996. The Final Four was being staged at the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, N.J.; this was still the era of Final Fours in basketball gyms, before hosting the thing formally required a football stadium-sized stage, when the event was big but not so big an outsider couldn’t inject himself into it. Caputo was a sophomore in high school, and an aspiring basketball player at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens. Now Western Connecticut State coach, Guy Rancourt, who grew up on the same block as Caputo and treated him like a little brother, had a fascinating proposition for any basketball-obsessed high school kid: For various coaching ambition reasons of his own, Rancourt was going to go troll around the coaches’ hotel, a Hilton in Manhattan. Did Caputo want to tag along?

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Why, yes. Yes he did. Caputo still remembers walking into that lobby, old enough to know faces and names, still young enough to be starstruck. There, in a big chair over to the side, was Jerry Tarkanian, not far off the height of his pomp, still the most entertaining man in the business, holding court with a group of recognizable coaches, belly laughs bellowing. Whoa, wait, turn around, over there — that guy getting on the elevator. That was Mike Krzyzewski, wasn’t it? Coach K!

Caputo bumped into Norm Roberts, a former Molloy freshman coach under the legendary Jack Curran, now on his way to Tulsa with a promising up-and-coming head coach named Bill Self. Roberts showed the young guys around. He introduced them to other coaches. Caputo was 15 years old, but he already felt that most intoxicating of college basketball-adjacent socio-psychological rushes, one it takes most coaches well into full adulthood to experience: the joy of being new and fresh and overwhelmed at the Final Four while also instantly feeling like you’re already inside of it. Like this is where you really belong.

“It was the first exposure to it,” Caputo said. “It was like, OK, wow, this is it.” Just like that, he knew: When his playing days were over, whenever that was — and however long it took him to get into the profession, whatever he had to do to make it — he would become a coach. He could wait. He was patient.

Exactly 10 years later, at the ripe old age of 25, Caputo was an assistant on the 2006 George Mason team that captured America’s imagination — his return, via very different means, to another Final Four. Ten years after that, he finished his first season as the associate head coach for the Miami Hurricanes. Now, in April of 2022, he has taken up residence in the Charles E. Smith Center in Foggy Bottom, the latest man in charge of reviving a George Washington men’s basketball program that everyone involved believes should be much better than it has been.

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As he does so, Caputo also will be taking his first major step outside the purview of the man who helped him launch, and then for two decades patiently fostered, a young coaching career. The highly-rated assistant’s first foray from the Jim Larrañaga nest, where he has spent all of his time coaching in the past 20 years, wasn’t remotely a rush. The opposite, actually. Caputo waited for this, and thinks he has landed the ideal first head coaching gig, found a place that can grow. He’s convinced he’s being rewarded for his patience. Is he right?

For as steadfast as he has been at Larrañaga’s side for the past 20 years, Caputo was not remotely patient about becoming a coach in the first place. It didn’t take him long to realize the whole “when my playing days were over” thing was going to be shorter for him than for many of his high school teammates. He was a good but generally unremarkable high school basketball player at an iconic city high school program, meaning by 15 he had reliable first-hand evidence that he was absolutely not going to play in the NBA. “You learn pretty quickly you’re not at this level,” Caputo said. (The realization eventually comes for us all.) Still, he did sign on to play some college ball, at Westfield State in Massachusetts, where he was the team captain and spent a significant chunk of his time plotting how to get a coaching gig after he graduated.

He did a couple of summer internships in those years, for Marsh, an insurance company in New York, which only reinforced his desire to remain utterly fixated on basketball. “I was definitely the worst intern they ever had,” Caputo said. “This is like, early days of the Internet, and I’m spending so much more time following what’s going on at ABCD camp than I was working. I was trying to get out of there as fast as I could to go watch high school games or AAU games, playing in my own summer league games. I didn’t do a great job.” That was the message Caputo received from himself early — that the coaching ambition wasn’t like the playing ambition. This one could not only be followed through on, but also it sort of had to be. “It was like, hey, if your life is going to work every day, then this thing seems like where you really want to be.”

Not long after that, the fateful meeting came. Caputo was working the northeast camp circuit when he met Larrañaga, himself a former player for Jack Curran at Archbishop Molloy, then just a few years into his tenure at George Mason. Caputo walked right up to Larrañaga, said they had gone to the same school, and said he wanted to get into coaching. Larrañaga gave him his business card and told him to stay in touch. It was the type of interaction college coaches have constantly — yeah, sure, good luck, keep in touch — but Caputo wouldn’t let it rest.

Recounting this story, Larrañaga says, “Well, he started emailing me,” and he almost sighs after the “well,” as though he can still feel the exhaustion of the constant emailing. “He emailed me all the time. Like almost every day.” But Larrañaga immediately liked the kid, in that way that people with similar backgrounds, from very specific neighborhoods or schools, can immediately understand each other. So when Caputo emailed, the emails got responses — or most of them did, anyway. Larrañaga was impressed with Caputo’s willingness to grind for it, even this young, and so when he had an assistant position open on his staff he encouraged the wildly underqualified Caputo to interview.

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That interview went nowhere. Larrañaga hired Eric Konkol instead. “I was like, great, I’m going to get this third assistant’s job!” Caputo remembers. “How old am I? This is incredible! And he was like, um, yeah, you’re not getting this job. You’re not qualified. You have no ability to do this job. But if you apply, I can talk to you.” It was a backdoor way for Larrañaga to get Caputo any sort of interview, and after the young coach had impressed George Mason’s hierarchy during that process, the door was open for the head coach to create an unpaid volunteer position on his staff — video coordinator, he called it — that would help get Caputo in the game right away, if he could afford it financially.

His parents had just paid for his college for four years. He was, he’s happy to admit, fortunate that they agreed to keep supporting him, to “keep me afloat,” as he puts it. “We didn’t pay Chris anything,” Larrañaga said. “He worked for free for three years. And he went so far above what I expected in that volunteer position — far more than I could have possibly hoped for.”

In a very short period of time, Caputo’s hiring looked like a no-brainer, the beginning of a hugely productive 20-year relationship.

As soon as a full-time staff position opened up, Caputo was hired for it. And so he was off and running, an assistant coach on the rise. Larrañaga’s experience taking a fated team to the Final Four in 2006 wasn’t just a super fun career highlight, it also established Larrañaga as a top mid-major coach and his incredibly young assistant as an intriguing name in the profession to watch. How old was this kid? Really? What’s his deal? He seems sharp. We should take a look at him.

This is de rigueur for interesting coaches on the ascent. Which, not coincidentally, is about the point that most coaches decide to find their next job. Working for free (or grinding it out as a graduate assistant) will have you eager to secure the bag as soon as it’s available to you, and becoming the cool young third assistant with the local D.C. recruiting ties leftover from your George Mason days is the type of thing that could, even in the late aughts, net you a healthy payday. Beyond the check, though, is the climbing of the ladder, the desire, expressed in deed if not always in word by so many in the coaching profession, to never stagnate in any one position, to always move up.

Except Caputo never really did any of that. He took people’s calls, sure, and in fact Larrañaga describes Caputo as one of the great networkers in college hoops — not just among college hoops coaches but of people from all walks of life. (He counts Miami heat coach Erik Spoelstra as a close friend and professional mentor, and is the type to seek out business people and CEOs and authors and the like.) But Caputo, interestingly, used his appetite to hoover things up and bring them back to Larrañaga. New systems of play. New offensive looks. Ball screen defensive trends. Sports psychology ideas. Weird stuff overseas coaches were doing. He stayed on at George Mason, helped build another tournament team two years after the Final Four run, and then another, the 27-7 2010-11 team featuring Cam Long, Ryan Pearson and Luke Hancock that seemed to establish Mason as a genuine mid-major power in the mold of Butler and Xavier. That performance got Larrañaga the Miami job, and Caputo didn’t really consider the idea of not going to Miami with his head coach. He was as happy as ever being one of the fulcrums in his own development under Larrañaga, and in Larrañaga and Miami’s holistic development, too.

“He’s an insatiable reader,” Larrañaga said. “He listens to a ton of podcasts. So, in staff meetings, when we are talking about using terminology, or team defense, Chris is the guy who knows all the terms of what all the NBA coaches are doing and what they’re calling it. This is what the NBA does, this is how these guys are teaching it. This is what Erik Spoelstra does, but this is what Brad Stevens does. Is this something we want to incorporate into our team? There are so many things we’ve adopted from the NBA stylistically, and those are almost always things where Chris initiated that conversation.”

The Hurricanes’ tenure under Larrañaga, with Caputo as a progressively more crucial coaching piece, has been a regularly successful one, at a program not historically renowned for such. Miami stopped playing men’s basketball altogether in 1971. It resumed in 1985, as an independent, and joined the Big East in 1991. When Larrañaga arrived, Miami had made six NCAA Tournament appearances ever; he has five of his own in 11 seasons, including in 2021-22, when Miami went to the Elite Eight and was 20 minutes away from knocking off the eventual national champions, Kansas, en route to the Jayhawks’ eventually triumphant trip to the Final Four. The team won the ACC regular season and league title in 2013, its first-ever sweep and just the second season title in its history. Larrañaga swept the national coach of the year awards that season. His reputation — as a freewheeling, confidence-building grandpa doing goofy dances in the locker room to get his kids to play loose en route to another tourney win — hasn’t diminished since.

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Thus, Larrañaga’s assistant coaches have taken other jobs. Konkol left in 2015, named the head coach at Louisiana Tech. (This spring, after a successful tenure there, he was hired to replace former Miami coach Frank Haith at Tulsa. The circle of life.) Michael Huger, another of Larrañaga’s original Miami assistants, left the same year, and has been the head coach at his alma mater Bowling Green since 2015-16.

Caputo stayed. He has had plenty of chances to leave along the way, and even some open head coaching jobs that he’s been vaguely interested in, but he also, first and foremost, has always been happy under Larrañaga. Caputo was living in Miami. His young family was happy. He did two things: hang out with them and coach basketball. “He’s never been obsessed with becoming a head coach,” his wife, Julie Caputo, said. “He’s obsessed with coaching, no doubt about that. Chris has no hobbies. He loves coaching. But he’s just always been about the process.” Why mess with what works?

“Most of the people in our business, they can’t wait to get out of the job they’re in,” Caputo said. “As soon as they get to the spring they’re asking, OK, who’s going where? Who’s getting fired, who’s getting hired? And I’d just be like, I don’t know? Because I was happy with where we were, the work we were doing. The grass isn’t always greener.”

This is true, and which works out quite nicely for someone who always at least kept the idea of heading his own program in the back of his mind as he worked under Larrañaga the past 20 years — he didn’t have to rush it, could stay doing what he’d known, and could wait for what he viewed as the best possible opportunity to come along before he staked himself and struck out on his own.

So: What makes George Washington that? After all, the program has not exactly been tearing it up of late. Since the end of Mike Lonergan’s tenure in 2015-16 — Lonergan had turned GW into a top-50-ish team with reliable tournament aspirations before he was fired following an investigation into alleged verbal and emotional abuse, a story which had more than its fair share of strange twists and turns — the Colonials have won more than 20 games just once, in 2016-17, Maurice Joseph’s first year replacing the outgoing Lonergan. The program declined precipitously from there, ranking 192nd in adjusted efficiency in 2017-18 and 293rd in 2018-19.

Joseph was let go; Jamion Christian, formerly of Siena and Mount St. Mary’s, and then an ascendant young coach in his own right with his own big designs on GW, was hired. Christian never remotely got it going. COVID-19 and a challenging 2020-21 season that featured just 17 games played (and five wins) didn’t help, but it wasn’t a total surprise athletic director Tanya Vogel decided to make a change after a 12-18 2021-22 season. The Colonials ended up 29-50 in Christian’s three years. Their highest adjusted efficiency ranking was 226th. Christian was a positive figure, but the program hadn’t improved much, if at all, from the dark days of what was supposed to be a temporary post-Lonergan mess.

Yet there is something interesting about George Washington as a place. How many campuses like this one — wedged beautifully into a vibrant urban rowhouse neighborhood, pocked with world-class restaurants, steps from the White House — are there in the country? How many of those places have gyms like the Charles E. Smith Center, nestled right there on campus, with the right number of seats, great sightlines, a red chair honoring alumnus Red Auerbach, and no onerous off-campus arena to commute to? How many of the nation’s best players come from the surrounding DMV, and how many of their larger contemporaries could someone connected in the area — like, say, someone who used to recruit at George Mason — peel off? How many of those players, plus transfers (from which Miami never shied), plus international guys, need to commit before you’re competing at the top of the A10? And oh, by the way, how many George Washington alums have deep pockets, and might also be willing to inject some resources into a winning program? (There are already plans to upgrade the Smith Center with additional basketball courts, replacing the pool, in what will be a functional practice facility within the gym, too.)

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Despite six ugly seasons in a row now, and just six NCAA Tournament appearances since 1997, there is something appealing about George Washington, something that feels like it’s just been sitting here, hiding in plain sight, ready to be awoken. This could be a really good basketball program, right? The pieces are there, aren’t they?

Caputo is convinced, anyway. Thus far, and it’s ridiculously early, the sale seems to be taking. Three of Christian’s former players (most notably Joe Basimile and Brayon Freeman, to Oklahoma and Rhode Island, respectively) have left through the portal, but Caputo has retained the rest of the eligible roster, including starter Ricky Lindo, the former Maryland forward, who entered the portal and had high-major and fellow Atlantic 10 interest, as well as an offer from Murray State, before Caputo reeled him back in.

Lindo was impressed with the intensity of the workouts Caputo has been putting him through, the same stuff the coach has picked up from his voracious NBA-habit consumption, the same stuff he was running with draft hopefuls in Miami. At one recent workout, the team tested their 3-minute run capacity, how many times they could get up and down the court, with the same benchmarks NBA teams use during the pre-draft workout process. The message was simple, if implicit: You want to get to the league? Here’s one of many targets to hit.

“I believe he’s serious about making GW a really good program, like it once was, and building it from the ground up,” Lindo said. “I want to be one of the players that can say I helped him bring GW back to fame.”

If it happens, it probably won’t happen overnight. Then again, neither did Caputo’s career. He got a jump start into the business, to be sure, and a lucky one, his initial ambition to be a coach suddenly matched by his happiness at having found a great boss on the first go. He spent the next 20 years cheerfully working for the same man, secure in the knowledge that he didn’t have to leave his job if he didn’t really want to, eschewing momentary status upgrades and pay raises along the way. He was dug in with Larrañaga. That he emerged for George Washington, and now, must say something about what the program can be. “It’s a great recruiting base, a brand name school, and a leadership that is very inspired to get back to winning,” Caputo said. It’s a sample size of one, but still: No one who has ever hired him has regretted it.

(Top photo: Courtesy George Washington Athletics)

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