Herb Sendek Continues to Be in Awe of Rick Pitino

Herb Sendek (Santa Clara Athletics Photo)

Herb Sendek not only worked for Rick Pitino at Kentucky, but he was also on his staff at Providence before that.

Sendek left UK to start his head coaching career at Miami (Ohio) and is now the head coach at Santa Clara where he will send his team against UK today at 12:15 p.m. in the NCAA Tournament in St. Louis.

“We do have different personalities. Everybody is unique but I can’t even begin to tell you the impact that Coach (Pitino) has had on me,” Sendek said Thursday in St. Louis. “I was fortunate to work with him both at Providence and the University of Kentucky, and both of those were just incredible experiences.

“And to this day I continue to stand in awe. What he is doing at St. John’s, what he started to do at Boston University and moving forward is legendary. Obviously, as a young coach I was all eyes wide open, ears, trying to learn as much as I could. But obviously had to integrate it into my personality, right? And some say I don’t even have a personality. So that was an important step, because you got to be yourself at the end of the day.”

Sendek said working for Pitino was an “all-consuming endeavor” just like it was to play for him.

“You couldn’t just stick your big toe in the water. You had to be all in. For a guy who played Division III basketball at Carnegie Mellon, here I was as a young coach afforded a mind-boggling opportunity at Providence in the Big East and then at the University of Kentucky,” Sendek said.

“So although we worked hard and we all had moments where we could have used a little bit more sleep, I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. I mean, I had to pinch myself. Are you kidding me? I had to pinch myself every day with the gift that I had been presented.

“I think across the board, when coaches and student athletes gather to reminisce, invariably we talk about what was most difficult, what was most challenging, what we had to overcome. I have never had a former player come back or gone to a gathering where anybody reminisces about a shortcut they took or where they got over or what was easy. That is not what people hold on to. We hold on to something that was hard, that required us to give all of ourselves, and then the stories go, and the legends grow.”

Sendek recruited Mark Pope when he was in high school and originally stayed home to play at Washington before later transferring to Kentucky. He said even today he was not surprised when Pope opted to leave medical school to start a college coaching career.

“There are so many stories like that in coaching where this thing just kind of gets in your system and you follow your heart. Obviously Mark would have been a tremendous doctor. He is so bright. He is so caring, but he has also turned out to be a great basketball coach,” Sendek said. “But my first recollection of Mark as a young man was that he was a young gentleman, he was very bright, very engaging, but more than anything just a really nice person.”

Sendek emphasized his fondest memory of his time in Lexington was getting his wife, Melanie, a 1980 Boyle County High School graduate.

“Coach Pitino actually played cupid and set my wife and I up, and sure enough, 30-some years later, we are here. So that would be memory number one (memory of Lexington),” he said.  “And then the second thing is, once again, just some great relationships, with the players, people in the community, even this week, had a chance to reconnect with a couple friends from the Lexington area.

“But that four years was just, I mean, it was magic. Coach Pitino often refers to Kentucky as Camelot. And there’s a lot of truth to that. It is not like that everywhere else. If any of you are native Kentuckians and that is your sole experience, I assure you Big Blue Nation is one of a kind.”