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The Basketball Podcast: EP392 with Matt Wise on First Year Head Coaching
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Samford head coach Matt Wise joins the Basketball Podcast to share insights on taking over as a first year head coach.
Matt Wise enters the 2025–26 season as the head women’s basketball coach at Samford University, continuing to build on a coaching career defined by player development, tactical innovation, and program elevation. After being officially introduced as head coach in April 2025, Wise took the reins following two seasons as an assistant coach with the Bulldogs, where he was deeply involved in all aspects of the program.
Prior to his time at Samford, Wise served as the director of video and creative content for Alabama’s women’s basketball team during the 2021–22 season. His coaching journey also includes extensive experience on the men’s side, with assistant coaching roles at East Tennessee State, Little Rock, and two separate stints at the University of Wyoming. At Wyoming, he helped guide the Cowboys to a Mountain West Tournament title and an NCAA Tournament berth in 2015, contributing to the development of NBA forward Larry Nance Jr.
Wise began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at the University of Florida, where he supported the Gators during back-to-back Elite Eight appearances.
A former four-year letter winner at Transylvania University, he led the Pioneers to a 2009 NCAA Division III Tournament appearance and earned his master’s degree in sport management from Florida in 2013.
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Matt Wise Quotes:
“This is the vision. This is how I see it going. This is the why, this is the how. This is what we do. This is what we’re about. These are the values, all of it. And I lay it out, and by the end of the conversation, the dad goes, ‘Matt, you need to have this conversation with every single family on the team.’”
“These parents and these players, they wanted to hear what will be the same, what will be different, what’s the vision? How is this going to work? How do you see me? . . They need to hear that I valued them as a person, but they knew that because we had a very strong relationship. But they needed to know I valued them as a basketball player. And how are we going to win games using them?”
“The biggest thing they [the players] wanted to hear, was that it wasn’t going to become transactional, which is never how I’ve operated, but they wanted to hear that that part was going to stay the same.”
“It was part of the vision I have had for years of developing and putting together a staff. I’m very impressed when young head coaches include an older, established, maybe former head coach on their staff. They are humble enough to bring wisdom to their staff and to say, I don’t have all the answers, I don’t know it all.”
“There’s this theory about the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is cunning, clever, knows everything, has a million different moves. It tries different tactics to attack. The hedgehog has one principle, one thing it does really well. It balls up. That’s it. That’s what it does. It doesn’t have a second move. As much as the fox tries its different maneuvers . . it can never defeat the hedgehog because the hedgehog stays true to its one principle.”
“I talked to the staff about that. ‘Okay, what’s going to be our hedgehog principle? We can’t be great at everything. We can’t even be good at a lot of things. What are we going to say? This is our stamp. This is who we are. We are going to own this space.’ . . So, for us, our hedgehog principle is ‘development.’”
“You’re talking about being excited about when you’re uncomfortable, scared, nervous, anxious, worried. That stuff freaks us out. But understanding that emotions and feelings aren’t facts, they’re signs, they’re signal posts.”
“If you want to know what makes a player tick, find out what makes them talk and listen. And I think I would go to question-asking of where are you trying to get to? What are you trying to do? You don’t think there’s going to be struggle on that path? You don’t think that this skill work that we’re working on, maybe it’s preparing you for better decision making on the court?”
“The way you handle these drills, the way that you handle this practice session or whatever it might be, you’re just building these strong habits. You are building the mental capacity and the emotional capacity to handle these moments. You might come up short, but every time you come up short, you’re building and strengthening those muscles.”
“What I love most about doing the true random motion offense is . . it makes you a significantly better set executor. Because if you can not call the slip and naturally do it based off the read, then you really have something special in your set execution. I’m hoping that as we continue the off-ball screening development, that that’s something that will make us also a better set execution team.”
“It starts with your language and your values . . We asked them . . What was something you learned or worked on? What was a way that you were a good listener or helper? What was the time you had fun with a friend specifically? So, it’s relationship and community building. And then what was a time that you experienced struggle or challenge or something difficult?”
“In that very first meeting, we passed out our culture document to set the tone. From the very beginning, this is what we’re about. This is what we value. These are the words and the language of our program. These are the standards. These are what are non-negotiable: we’re always putting the team first, no whining, no complaining, no excuses, and over-communicate . . And so, we left rules for the fall, but at that first meeting in June we wanted them to understand these standards are non-negotiable.”
Matt Wise Breakdown:
Matt Wise Selected Links from the Podcast:
Matt Wise
Billy Donovan
Cam Newbauer
Kristy Curry
Carley Kuhns
Larry Shyatt
Allen Edwards
Walker Martin
Charity Brown
Sally Higgins
Hannah Barber
Chandler Merkerson
Jim Collins
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company
Tiffany Jones
Doc Rivers
Mark Daigneault
John Pelphrey
Brian Lane
Sam Merrill
Tony Pujol
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
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