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Savannah State Head Coach Horace Broadnax (center), a key member of the Hoyas’ 1984 national championship team, returned for last season’s 25th Anniversary ceremony.
Horace Broadnax is no stranger to joining a great basketball team. As a freshman at Georgetown in 1982, he played on the Patrick Ewing-led Hoyas that were coming off a title game appearance.
Yet after winning a national championship and compiling a 115-24 career record with the Hoyas, Broadnax began coaching. He landed his first few jobs with losing programs but did well to rebuild each of them. In his three coaching stints, Broadnax’s teams have improved by 10 or more wins from his first season at the helm to his second.
“I think that the longer that I stay in the profession, the more experience I get,” Broadnax said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “You can start to identify problems, and strengths and weaknesses of people, and try to put them in the best position to win.”
At Valencia Community College, Broadnax won under nine games his first year and then cracked 20 wins in his second. At Bethune-Cookman, he was named conference coach of the year in his second season after turning a 1-26 team into a 12-16 squad.
Now at Savannah State, Broadnax has been tasked with building a winning team out of a former Division II program that went 0-28 the year prior to his arrival. The Tigers’ record has improved in each of Broadnax’s four seasons, and last year they had their first winning record as a Division I-AA school.
“We’ve been very fortunate here at Savannah. You just try to get talent in,” Broadnax said. “A lot of times in the first year you have a tendency to try to put your system in, and the second year you will be able to recruit some of the players that are capable of playing that system.”
An independent, Savannah State bounces around the country playing a wide selection of schools. The Tigers started 2-0 before losing to North Florida University on Wednesday evening.
Broadnax’s experiences of starting with losing programs as a coach starkly contrast his playing days on the Hilltop. A former Florida high school player of the year, the point guard came to Georgetown ready to contribute to one of the top teams in the nation. Broadnax averaged at least 4.8 points per game all four years with the Hoyas and started in his final two seasons. He went 2-of-3 for four points when the Hoyas beat the Phi Slamma Jamma Houston Cougars for the 1984 national title.
“That was Coach [John] Thompson [II’s] expectation, and that’s what we expected each and every year – to go out and compete for a national championship,” Broadnax said.
The former Hoya said that a loss to a hot-shooting Villanova team in the 1985 title game and his experiences as a coach have put the title in greater perspective.
“[You see] how much energy and how much talent and how much attention to detail needs to be placed on something,” Broadnax said. “The older I get, I look at it and feel very humble and proud.”
Still, Broadnax’s fondest memory of Georgetown was his role as a student. Even though the Hoyas were going through the team’s most successful period in history and Georgetown was synonymous with basketball around the nation in the mid-1980s, the players were normal kids on campus.
“Being under Coach Thompson [II], it allowed us to play at a high level, on a national stage, but at the same time be a student on campus and have the environment on campus to relax and intermingle with the students,” he said. “Over the four years, having a high-profile player like Patrick Ewing (COL’ 08) and playing on the national stage, we didn’t feel that our lives were being intruded on by the media or different people.”
After earning a finance degree from the business school, Broadnax – like many Georgetown students – went to law school and practiced law for several firms in Florida before going back to college basketball.
Now married with two children, the coach still tries to keep in touch with his former teammates. In February he returned to Georgetown to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the national championship.
Broadnax has seen current Head Coach John Thompson III grow from a teenager in the early 1980s to a nationally recognized coach.
“I’m pretty sure he and his father have the same competitive spirit and drive,” Broadnax said. “Obviously they’re a little different in their approach to the game, which I think credits [Thompson] III’s success because he’s doing it according to who he is and what his personality is.”
The coaches will have a chance to reunite Saturday when Thompson’s Hoyas travel to Tiger Arena. Last season Georgetown trounced Savannah State 100-38, and Broadnax knows he is facing an uphill battle even on his home court.
“Georgetown is a good program – a top-25 program,” he said. “There’s the saying `bringing a knife to a gunfight,’ but I feel like we’re bringing a plastic knife to a gunfight. . We definitely have to bring a lot of energy and definitely have to bring some intelligence to this game to have an opportunity to win.”
Broadnax said he hopes that regardless of the score, the exposure of playing a program like Georgetown will elevate his current team.
“It looks like it’s going to be a sold-out crowd,” Broadnax said, adding that Tiger Arena holds about 5,000 fans. “From a Savannah State perspective that’s good, seeing the program expand and getting fans and the citizens of Savannah to come out to the game and see that we can play a good brand of basketball. [It could] possibly jumpstart this program.”
It is fitting that Georgetown may be able help Broadnax, a former player who contributed to the Hoyas’ rise to national prominence.
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