Rob Summers was hired in the spring as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Missouri. He has been tasked as the team’s offensive coordinator and will work with frontcourt players.
When cooking for a college basketball team, the same one you coach, you develop a few culinary staples. They’re the sort of things that appeal to most palates and can be prepared in large quantities.
Rob Summers and Joe Mazzulla leaned on spaghetti, tacos, hamburgers and hot dogs.
“Sometimes it was OK,” Mazzulla said, laughing.
“W fed those guys,” Summers added.
Cooking was part of the job for them at NCAA Division II Glenville State, where they were both assistant coaches from 2011-2013. So was stocking the arena concession stand with Skittles and popcorn and driving the team to road games.
Talking in Mazzulla’s New England home a few weeks ago, the coaches got around to reminiscing about that fledging stage of their careers, which was barely more than a decade ago but so vastly different from their current statures.
Summers, 40, joined the Missouri coaching staff in the spring, reuniting with head coach Dennis Gates after they’d teamed up for a time at Cleveland State. Summers is the Tigers’ new offensive coordinator and works closely with frontcourt players.
Mazzulla, 36, won an NBA title this summer with the Boston Celtics, the youngest coach since 1970 to do so.
They’re friends — close friends — who share values and basketball philosophies that date back to their playing days at West Virginia. With Summers’ input, Mizzou’s style of play is likely to look a little more like the Celtics’. And Mazzulla is all ears for MU-inspired ideas.
But back to the memories.
“W always venture off to the things like, man, it’s just crazy how far we’ve come,” Summers said.
“Man, you’re an NBA champion,” he told Mazzulla recently. “Me being at Mizzou, being at the SEC, close to the NBA — dude, we started at Glenville.”
“I tell everybody, to this day, that’s the best decision we ever made,” Mazzulla responded.
Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla, center, speaks to his players during a timeout during Game 5 of the NBA Finals against the Dallas Mavericks on Monday in Boston.
‘The grassroots of just coaching basketball’
Glenville is a small town tucked into the hills of West Virginia. The wooded banks of the Little Kanawha River, which extend into the Ohio River, hug its southern edge. Main Street is a combination of crisscrossing power lines and mismatched brick buildings. Barely more than 1,000 people live there, though another 1,500 are students at Glenville State University.
“It was a close-knit community,” Summers said. “They love their Glenville State athletics.”
“It’s a small-town place,” Mazzulla told the Post-Dispatch. “Being in West Virginia for as long as we were, we kind of were comfortable with it. We had groups of people there. It’s small, it’s unique, but there’s people that are passionate about their sports, they’re passionate about their community, so it was good to be a part of.”
Glenville lies an hour and a half southwest of West Virginia University, where Summers and Mazzulla played together during the 2006-2007 season.
A freshman point guard from Rhode Island, Mazzulla played just under nine minutes per game that season. Summers, in his fifth year of college basketball after sitting out a season following a transfer from Penn State, was West Virginia’s starting center. The Mountaineers won the NIT that year, which was coach John Beilein’s last at the helm of the program.
Despite nearly a foot of difference in their heights and a few years of separation, Summers and Mazzulla hit it off at the start of that season.
“I don’t know (why),” Mazzulla said, “but what I respected about him was that he held us accountable as underclassmen and freshmen but he never treated us any different. That says a lot about him: He didn’t care about age or grade or anything like that. He just had a respect for people and wanted to build great relationships.”
Both were adamant that they wanted to chase playing careers in the sport.
“I never thought I’d be a coach,” Summers said. “I know that (Mazzulla) comes from a family of coaches. … I think he always knew he wanted to coach.”
Mmmm — maybe not.
“No, not really,” Mazzulla said. “Never really thought about it at all.”
Summers joined the Glenville State staff just before Mazzulla did, putting in the call to get his friend a spot as an assistant coach, too.
Working with the Pioneers was an adjustment on multiple fronts. They had to plan the practices, not participate in them. They didn’t have the resources they’d grown used to during their own college careers.
“It humbled us enough,” Summers said, “coming from a high-major program like West Virginia that’s such a big program in the state to being (the) low man on the totem pole and somebody who had to really grind their way up the coaching ladder.”
“That was the good development for us, coming out of playing into coaching, just figuring out how to meet the guys where they’re at,” Mazzulla said. “Going from playing to coaching, your communication styles are different when you play as when you coach, so that process of learning how to build relationships with the guys and communicate with them was a fun thing to go through them together.”
There wasn’t always much to do away from the court. At one point, Mazzulla and Summers bought baseball gloves to play catch, “trying to figure out something to do outside of watching film,” the latter said
Mazzulla took a liking to Glenville and remembers the restaurant scene fondly. He met his wife at the school — she was a volleyball coach.
The Pioneers improved from 5-21 before Summers and Mazzulla joined the program to 8-19 and 13-16 with both on the staff.
Each coach stuck around the DII Mountain East Conference after they moved on from Glenville State. Summers’ first head coaching gig was at Urbana University, which closed in 2020; Mazzulla’s head coaching shot came at Fairmont State.
Summers jumped up to James Madison, then joined Gates’ staff at Cleveland State. When MU hired Gates, Summers migrated to Miami (Ohio) before his recent move to Missouri.
March 21, 2010 -- West Virginia guard Joe Mazzulla (right) pressures Missouri guard J.T. Tiller in first half action during an NCAA Tournament second round game between Missouri and West Virginia at the HSBC Arena in Buffalo, NY. Chris Lee clee@post-dispatch.com
Mazzulla was hired by Boston as an assistant in 2019. When the Celtics suspended their coach days before the start of training camp in 2022, they named Mazzulla the interim and eventually removed that tag from him.
Summers regularly flies east to stay with Mazzulla, often observing parts of the Celtics’ training camp “just to learn what stuff they’re doing new, but also just to show them what we’ve been doing new and talk,” the Mizzou assistant said.
The duo has gone on coaching retreats together and corresponded through texted pictures of sets drawn on napkins. There’s a definite synergy to what they design.
“W play similar styles, everywhere he’s been and everywhere I’ve been, being from the same tree, having the same kind of mindset when it comes to offense,” Summers said. “W don’t have such different viewpoints from how to run stuff offensively.”
Sharing ideas with Mazzulla has given Summers some immediate credibility in Columbia. A testimonial from the Celtics coach appeared in Missouri’s news release announcing Summers’ hire, and Boston’s NBA Finals victory sure didn’t do anything to undermine the addition’s credibility within the MU locker room.
“What they’ve done with the Celtics, it makes the value I bring even better because I’m already doing it,” Summers joked. “Now they win the championship, so I’m like ‘Oh, we’re gonna play like the Celtics.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna play like them? They won a championship, let’s do that.’ ”
Though their players might not be aware of it, the principles both coaches preach on the court and in the locker room date back to a Division II school in West Virginia.
“Those two years at Glenville really prepared us for where we’re at now,” Summers said. “W were able to not focus as much on the resources and the nice things you have — it was the grassroots of just coaching basketball.”
The roots of the friendship between Summers and Mazzulla lie in those Appalachian hills, too.
“You just share a lot together,” Mazzulla said. “Our faith is important, our marriage is important, our kids are important, basketball is important. The top priorities in our life are aligned, and it’s easy for us to grow in that together.”
Now finding success in the game, they have cooking experience and a small-town gig to thank.
“It’s something that no one can ever take away from us,” Summers said.
A photo of the 2006-2007 West Virginia men's basketball team shows Missouri assistant coach Rob Summers (center, No. 33) and Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla (middle row, third from left) together.
Jayson Tatum speaks with Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024, at the Mathews-Dickey Boys & Girls Clubs in north Ƶ before his new 2K Foundations basketball court is unveiled. (Video by Ethan Erickson, Post-Dispatch)
