In 2002, Loyola men’s basketball coach Michael Giorlando helped bring guard Darrel Mitchell – who went on to amass 86 wins, three trips to the NCAA tournament and three SEC West crowns in four years – to LSU.
In his senior season, Mitchell connected on four of the most dramatic shots in the history of Tiger basketball before the UCLA Bruins ousted LSU in the Final Four.
Giorlando was once Coach John Brady’s assistant and LSU’s director of basketball operations – recruiting talent capable of producing credentials like those was part of his job.
Now he sits behind the athletic director’s desk on the sixth floor of Loyola’s Recreation and Sports Complex, feeling nothing but gratitude for the noble curtain call that standout Mitchell has enjoyed.
“I was thrilled he made it to the Final Four,” Giorlando said. “He is the ultimate student athlete.”
Giorlando pointed out a framed Times-Picayune page in his office from the 2002-03 season – made the day after the Tigers, with standouts Ronald Dupree and Collis Temple III, downed No. 1 Arizona, which was led by future-NBA players Channing Frye and Salim Stoudemire.
The Tigers also upset No. 5 Florida and No. 11 Mississippi State that season.
“That was Darrel (Mitchell’s) freshman year, and one of the highlights of my coaching career. Unfortunately, you just can’t stop after you beat the number one team in the country,” he mused, going on to recall how one of his obligations as an assistant at LSU was to monitor the athletes’ academic status.
“(Mitchell) enrolled in six hours for summer school the summer before that season,” Giorlando said. “He was so quiet and low maintenance, you didn’t even know he was in class – he went about his business and never was a problem. His professors recorded perfect attendance on his part, and he earned a 3.5 GPA,” he added.
“It gave me an idea as to who we were dealing with for the next four years.”
But Giorlando could only watch Mitchell mature from afar as he accepted the director of athletics and head coaching positions at Loyola before Mitchell’s junior season in 2004.
Of the last duties Giorlando had at LSU were running summer recruiting camps and coordinating official visits to LSU’s campus.
He both evaluated and courted the acrobatic Tyrus Thomas, low-post phenomenon Glen Davis and resilient defender Garret Temple – all starters on this year’s storied squad that knocked off a No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament for the first time in its history and made the Final Four for the first time in 20 years.
“It was all coach Brady and (associate head coach) Butch Pierre that signed those guys. I was just part of the team,” he said.
“There’s a lot of gratification for me as a coach in seeing these guys continue to grow and seeing them reach the heights we knew they could,” Giorlando added.
Brady constructed a blueprint around that core of talent that Giorlando hopes to duplicate in his tenure at Loyola.
“It’s simply to get better every year,” he said. “The way teams like that get better is individually – everyone’s accountable for personally getting better and committing themselves to unselfishness.”
None of the recruits Giorlando played a part in placing within the LSU program “cared about who got the credit.”
Giorlando’s run from 2001-04 saw the Tigers win 58 times and reach both the NCAA tournament once and the NIT twice.
He coached the ‘Pack as far as the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference semifinals this year, falling two games short of a trip to the NAIA national tournament.
Ramon Vargas can be reached at [email protected].
