There may come a day in the autumn when the basketballs start bouncing off the hardwood and echoing off the walls of Villanova’s Davis Center that Baker Dunleavy feels that little twinge, the one insisting he should be in his sweats and on the floor shouting instructions to the players about how to run properly through the assigned drill.
Dunleavy had worked for years to become an NCAA Division I head coach, through four seasons as a player for the Wildcats and then seven as a member of Jay Wright’s staff, from director of basketball operations all the way up to associate head coach. Then he worked through five years as head coach at Quinnipiac to build a truly successful team.
And then, after his Bobcats posted a 20-12 record this past season, he resigned to accept a position in the Villanova athletic department as General Manager of Basketball.
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“There’s no doubt in my mind it’ll be a difficult adjustment,” Dunleavy told the Sporting News. “Coaching … is a passion and borderline addiction for everybody who’s in this business. So that’s something I accepted when I changed roles, and you just embrace the fact that’s going to be there.
“But I also think if I was in the gym with my own team at Quinnipiac, there would have been a big part of me looking at it like: Did I just pass up on a life-changing, amazing opportunity?”
Dunleavy is part of a family that has basketball in its bones. His father, Mike, was a star player at South Carolina, played 11 seasons in the NBA and was a head coach for 17 more. His brother, Mike Jr., won an NCAA championship as a hot-shooting forward at Duke and played 15 years in the league.
Neither of them, however, ever has been the GM of a college basketball program.
Because almost no one has been.
Duke hired Rachel Baker last June to be general manager of its men’s program, and her duties were described as overseeing Name/Image/Likeness opportunities for players and working with them to “enhance their personal and professional skill sets.” Reigning NCAA champion UConn has been advertising for a general manager position in its men’s basketball program. Some college football programs have had “director of player personnel” positions for years, but that’s not exactly what this is.
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Villanova athletic director Mark Jackson chose to hire Dunleavy to oversee both the men’s and women’s basketball programs and assisting head coaches Kyle Neptune and Denise Dillon with NIL issues, the transfer portal, enhancing and marketing individual athletes’ brands and fundraising.
Dunleavy is well qualified to handle the business side of his job, in addition to his wealth of basketball experience. He earned a degree from Villanova’s school of business and spent four years working on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch before accepting an offer from Wright to return to basketball.
“I was really proud of the year we just had at Quinnipiac and certainly was enjoying the coaching side of the job,” Dunleavy told TSN. “Just in taking a big step back in terms of my family and myself, certainly the job has changed a lot in the past few years, and the scope of it has become bigger, and the opportunity to do things outside of coaching that didn’t exist maybe even three or four years ago and kind of engage in a part of the business that really is growing from nothing. For me, that opportunity seemed really exciting.”
One of the underrated and most challenging aspects of a college head coach’s job is being not only in charge of practice planning and game strategy but also management of the roster. The shift to immediate eligibility for transfer players has made that infinitely more challenging; even players who regularly start or even star – such as Michigan center Hunter Dickinson, or point guards Kerr Kriisa of Arizona and Ryan Nembhard of Creighton – might be interested in searching for other opportunities. And the importance of NIL in the recruiting and retention process adds another level of complication.
“Branding has become such a huge piece of where the game is now. The connections for after basketball have become such a big thing. The draft process … there’s just maybe three, four or five things you have to worry about now that you never had to worry about before,” Neptune told TSN. “I think we found ourselves stretched a little thin with all those things.
“We decided to go with Baker based off a real need, but also someone who is uniquely qualified just based off him understanding the program, him having been a head coach, and just who he is as a person: from a longstanding basketball family and one of the most intelligent people I know. It was a perfect marriage.”
Pro Football Hall of Famer Bill Parcells once explained the division of duties for GMs and coaches at the pro level as one gathering the groceries and the other preparing the meal. We are accustomed to general managers at the professional level putting teams together and the coaches in charge of player usage and tactics. That’s not what’s going on here, with the introduction of the GM concept to colleges.
As Neptune reminded the Sporting News, NCAA rules do not permit Dunleavy to do on-the-road scouting of prospective players. That is reserved for designated coaches. So it wouldn’t make sense for the Dunleavy role to be totally in charge of player personnel for either basketball program.
He does bring a valuable set of eyes and an exceptional basketball brain, though, to help in evaluating prospects, particularly those available through the transfer portal. There’s no rule against him watching video and offering advice.
“It’s a role in which you are a touch point to every part of the organization,” Dunleavy said. “The fact I do have a background in coaching, recruiting and evaluating – I think I’ll be an extra set of eyes and ears when it comes to what players we do target. I think there’ll be, from a basketball end, those type of roles that are more advisory.
“But when it comes to the growing business side of, especially, men’s basketball, it’s being able to navigate the things that are just now in place and things that are not in place yet and to identify those things we do need to add to what we’re doing, to be early movers in the space while still making sure that everything we do still fits Villanova’s established culture.”
Culture is an important part of why Villanova basketball matters as much as it does in 2023. It was following a disastrous 13-19 season in 2011-12 that Wright resolved to recruit players he believed would fit the campus and basketball program and not necessarily those who received the highest grades from analysts.
That led to Villanova winning seven Big East regular seasons, five Big East tournaments, three NCAA regionals and two NCAA championships in a period of nine years, which led Wright’s induction to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021. He retired a year later, following his fourth Final Four appearance.
This past season was not the success many hoped it would become. Cam Whitmore, the most highly regarded prospect in recent Villanova history, missed the start of the season and sat out eight games with a thumb injury. Veteran guard Justin Moore was able to play only 13 games because of the achilles injury that ended his 2021-22 season in the closing seconds of the Elite Eight win over Houston. The Wildcats wound up 17-17, although Neptune thought they had improved by the end of the season.
The hiring of Dunleavy is just one of many steps toward returning the program to its customary prominence.
“If I’m working hard and collaborating in that space, it can allow guys like Mark Jackson, like Kyle Neptune, our assistant coaches to really become more specialists in their role and concentrate on what they should be spending time on,” Dunleavy said.
“I watched Jay do the job as a player, as an assistant, as associate head coach; he did it in an all-encompassing way every day: managing and having his fingerprints on every part of the program and leading every aspect of the program. There was nobody better in the way that he did it. But I don’t know if it’s necessarily possible to do it that way now. The scale is just becoming huge in terms of responsibility. You have to have people that you trust to manage part of the program.”
Dunleavy did not view leaving Quinnipiac as “necessary”, but he has four daughters and does not mind the idea of having slightly more regular hours and probably a good bit less travel.
Dunleavy is looking forward to his return to Villanova. He spent a significant portion of his of his life there and met his wife, Chrissi, at the university.
“If I was going to leave,” he said, “it was going to be for something that allows me to do something like this: something new, something different while also keeping a foot in the basketball world.”
Ultimately, though he no longer will have the wins and losses on his personal record, Dunleavy’s success in this position will be defined by whether or not the Wildcats succeed on the floor. Can his work make Neptune’s job less difficult? (Notice, we did not say “easier”.)
“I don’t know,” Neptune admitted, with the understanding all of this is entirely new. “I think that we’re all competitors in this business, in this craft. When I was the video coordinator, the four or five things I had to do daily, I was really into that. In my mind, those four or five things were the most important things. You couldn’t have told me a job would be more stressful or more challenging than that. I could say that for every spot I was at. I think that’s something competitors share. They’re going to put the onus on themselves.
“I do think Baker will help. He’s been a head coach for a good amount of time. He knows our program, which is extremely important. You could be a head coach and not know how we want to do things at Villanova and not be a fit. There’s a lot of different ways to do things; I think we’re unique. He knows exactly what we’re looking to do. He’s a high-level business mind, a high-level leader, is great at galvanizing people. I don’t think we could have gotten a better fit for this role.”