Valvano’s impression continues on campus

To say that Jim Valvano left his mark on the traditions of N.C . State basketball is an understatement. Valvano  changed not only the culture of the Wolfpack basketball scene, but the national basketball scene.

On Wednesday night, the Student Wolfpack Club met just outside of Technician office at Witherspoon for the first meeting of the year. After passing out ice cream and popcorn and collecting fees for joining the club, they showed game footage from the 1983 National Championship game against Houston.

The errant shot, now called a pass, by Dereck Whittenburg , which led to a dunk by Lorenzo Charles that won the game for the Pack, sent Valvano into a tizzy which would forever embed him into Pack fans’ hearts.

So when student government athletics chair Alex Williamson and traditions chair Andy Walsh began to think about which coaches should be added to the Coaches’ Corner outside of Reynolds Coliseum, Valvano had to be one of the names added to the garden that already features former women’s basketball coach Kay Yow .

Williamson said that they are working to make the bust exude some of the same energy that fans saw on the court from Valvano .

“One of the biggest things about Valvano was his energy and the way he could motivate people with his enthusiasm for basketball,” Williamson said. “That’s one of the biggest things that we want to portray in his piece – how lively and active he was as a coach.”

Much like the coaches who came before him, Valvano made his presence known on and off the court. Though he was a great basketball coach who won two regular season conference championships and two conference tournament championships in only ten seasons with the University, Valvano left behind a foundation that is still being ran today to fund cancer research.

The Jimmy V. Foundation was started in honor of Valvano in 1993 after he began to assemble the group that he hoped would be able to end the disease that would eventually take his life – cancer.

Williamson said that they plan for Valvano’s  statue to honor his legacy with the foundation as well as his contributions on the court.

“Beyond all of Valvano’s great coaching abilities on the court, he left a legacy through his work with the Jimmy V. Foundation,” Williamson said. “We want to make sure that is included in his bust. That’s more important than anything he could have ever done on the court as a basketball coach.

“We want to use the corner as an opportunity to teach and inform others of not just what they did on the court, but also the legacy that they left behind and to spread the word about that work,” Williamson said.

The project, which should conclude around Dec. 2012, will feature three new coaches – Everett Case, Norm Sloan and Valvano . Each have ties to one another and led State basketball to a place where it had never been before each of them arrived.

Before Valvano was hired for the position, Sloan had already brought the Pack its first national championship. But what Valvano did in 1983 had never been done at the University. He took a team that finished third in its own conference and led it to the promised land of NCAA basketball – the national championship game.

The 1974 team was expected to win the national championship. The 1983 team wasn’t expected to win the ACC championship.

Chandler Thompson, student body president, has helped Williamson and Walsh throughout this project, and said that she hopes the project will help to endorse the story of what Valvano brought to the school.

“Our generation is probably more closely connected to Valvano’s story because of ESPN and how historic the 1983 run was,” Thompson said. “Hopefully, through the project, students will be able to learn more and get to know how great Valvano was.”

Thompson also went on to say that this project might not be finalized after this point.

“The original project for Yow came to [former Student Body President ] Jim Ceresnak from a student,” Thompson said. “If any student at the University were to propose a new idea to make it better, that’s how Student Government gets the best ideas. So we would definitely be open to looking into other ideas for the Coaches’ Corner.”