Former Wichita State assistant Greg Heiar hopes to win NJCAA title with ‘Play Angry’
Returning to a place that you called home where some of the best memories in your life were earned can be quite the surreal experience, as Greg Heiar and Carl Hall discovered this past weekend.
Each man have made an indelible mark on Wichita State basketball: Hall was the goggle-wearing, floor-burning, rebound-grabbing, bucket-getting big man on the 2013 Final Four team, while Heiar’s time in Wichita as an assistant coach correlated with the best six-season run in program history.
And for one weekend, they were both back inside the Koch Arena practice gym: Heiar is now the head coach of Northwest Florida State with Hall as an assistant and the team was practicing for their 4:30 p.m. game Monday against Trinidad State in the first round of the 2022 NJCAA national tournament at Hutchinson Sports Arena.
“This brings back a lot of memories,” Hall said, taking in his surroundings one more time. “We spent a lot of hours in here.
“The practices. The grind. Man, those preseason days, those 90 days before the season were such a grind, but I miss it. That’s when you really bonded with your team.”
Just outside the doors of the practice gymnasium, the Kansas high school Class 6A basketball state championship games were being played. In between the whistles and balls bouncing, the faint roar of the crowd could sometimes be heard — nothing like the Roundhouse circa 2014, of course — but loud enough to make Heiar smile.
Since leaving his office at 21st and Hillside in 2017, Heiar has always felt a strong attachment to Wichita State.
“Man, I loved Shocker nation. Those fans were so good to us,” Heiar said. “Basketball really is a way of life around here. It makes it that much more exciting to come back here with my new team as head coach and hopefully Shocker nation can adopt our team and come out and watch us play. If they do, they’re going to see some really exciting, Play Angry-type basketball like we played at Wichita State.”
Although Heiar has spent time as an assistant coach at four Division I programs, his time at Wichita State under Gregg Marshall and coaching alongside the likes of Chris Jans and Steve Forbes impacted him more than any other experience.
Jans has become a successful head coach at New Mexico State and is playing in another NCAA tournament, while Forbes is excelling in his turnaround at Wake Forest and was named the ACC Coach of the Year for his work this season.
Heiar credits Marshall, Jans and Forbes for his success as a first-year head coach at Northwest Florida State, a program that won just six games last season but is now 26-5, Panhandle conference champions and headed back to Hutchinson with a No. 10 national seed.
“Gregg Marshall, Chris Jans and Steve Forbes, those are my three biggest mentors and their fingerprints are all over how we play because of my time with them,” Heiar said. “And honestly, because that’s all I really know. And I’m proud to say they have their fingerprints on this program.”
Sure enough, Northwest Florida State runs an almost identical offense to the 2011-17 Shockers. Many of the same halfcourt sets, many of the same secondary breaks and a lot of the same intensity.
Five years later, Heiar’s raspy voice barked out instructions inside the practice gym once again. He has of course changed some of the drills and some of the plays to his own liking, but he takes a great deal of pride in demanding excellence in the details — much like his former boss.
“He’s so good with the details,” Hall said of Heiar. “He’s good at getting guys to play hard. And when we play like our hair is on fire, we’re a different team.”
After spending the previous 12 seasons as a Division I assistant, going back to become a juco head coach has reinvigorated Heiar, who was the Chipola Junior College head coach from 2004-09.
He feels like he is back to his roots, just two years removed from working in some of the best facilities in college basketball at LSU. Heiar is likely to someday return to the Division I ranks, but for now he says he is having the time of his life working in the tiny town of Niceville, Fla.
“We have a gym. We have three rims in there. We’ve got a weight room,” Heiar began rattling off. “We’ve got basketballs. We’ve got a training room and a trainer. We’ve got a place for them to eat and a place for them to lay their head down and sleep.
“We have everything that you need to be successful. I just try to worry about the controllables and those are how hard we work, how well we listen and how hard we compete every single day. This place is beautiful to me.”
The fact that he was able to bring Hall, who arrived at WSU at the same time as Heiar, on board was a happy coincidence. Hall was a first team juco All-American at Northwest Florida State in 2010-11 before committing to WSU and after a professional playing career, the 32-year-old wanted to start his coaching career at his alma mater.
It just so happened to work out that the school hired his former coach in Wichita.
“It was like it was made to happen,” Hall said. “This is my dream job. I want to keep going in coaching and I’m so grateful to be learning under GH. I’m trying to learn as much as I can. You look at the game in a totally different way when you’re on the other side.”
Due to limited numbers, the staff sometimes have to hop in during 5-on-5 portions of practice and Hall was more than happy to score a few more baskets inside Koch Arena on Saturday. The players on the team swarmed him after he hit a turnaround fadeaway jumper to end one drill.
In just one season, Heiar has restored the culture at Northwest Florida State, which was coming off two straight losing seasons. He did it by completely overhauling the roster and stocking it full of Division I prospects, some of which the current WSU coaching staff are monitoring for this 2022 recruiting class.
But the Shockers are far from the only Division I program doing that — Northwest Florida State figures to be one of the most popular teams for the dozens of D1 head coaches who descend annually upon Hutchinson to evaluate the best junior college talent in the country.
“People don’t realize that winning is not easy,” Heiar said. “If it was, everybody would be doing it. There’s a lot that goes into winning. One of the biggest things is that everybody has got to be on the same page and trust the process and believe in themselves and believe in what they can do. It’s easy to say, hard to do. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at.”
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