PHILADELPHIA — Jay Wright, who won two national championships at Villanova, guided the Wildcats to four Final Four appearances — including one earlier this month — and is arguably the greatest coach in Philadelphia college basketball history, is retiring from coaching, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
Wright, 60, held a team meeting at 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to one source, to inform his players of the decision. The source added that Wright’s decision had been several weeks in the making. The Athletic was the first to report that Wright was likely to retire.
Over his 21 seasons at Villanova, Wright compiled a 520-197 record, winning eight Big East regular-season championships and five conference tournament championships. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last September.
His decision shocked the college basketball community and came just 18 days after his team’s 81-65 loss to Kansas at the Superdome in New Orleans in the semifinals of this year’s NCAA Tournament. That Final Four berth was Villanova’s first since 2018, when the Wildcats won the second of their two national titles during Wright’s tenure. The first was in 2016.
The day before that Kansas loss, Wright had been asked, given that Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski already had announced that this season would be his last in coaching, whether he had given any thought to retiring.
“It’s got to be mind-blowing,” he said. “I would be lying if I tell you I don’t. You think about it after each year. You think about where your life is, what are you going to do. It’s difficult to think about. And honestly, if you’re [Krzyzewski] and you’ve done it for that long, and you’ve been that successful and it’s so much a part of your life, and you think about the longer you do it the more relationships you have, and those relationships are meaningful to you … that’s probably something that’s got to be really difficult to deal with.
“I think about it because there’s going to have to be a time when it’s time for the next coach of Villanova. There’s going to have to be that time. You have to pick that time.”
It turns out that he already had.
