Peeler: Former NC State PG Justin Gainey accomplished one challenge as a player. Up next: Coaching

Justin Gainey has never shied away from big challenges.

As an NC State freshman, the 6-foot tall point guard from High Point was playing for an ACC championship in his hometown arena, the Greensboro Coliseum, against third-seeded North Carolina, guarded by 7-foot-2 center Serge Zwikker.

He didn’t care that he was giving up 14 inches to the Tar Heel mountain, he was just basking in the glory of playing in the tournament he used to watch in his middle and high school classrooms as a kid. Playing for first-year head coach Herb Sendek, Gainey set a record by doing something that no one had ever done before or since: play every moment of all four games, 160 minutes in four days.

It was a glorious weekend for the steady floor leader, who was limited by injuries during the regular season. He worked his way into the starting lineup heading into the postseason and basically refused to come off the court during the tournament. The eighth-seeded Wolfpack rolled through the tournament by beating ninth-seeded Georgia Tech (60-46), top-seeded Duke (66-60) and fifth-seeded Maryland (65-58), before ultimately falling to the Tar Heels (64-54) in the title game.

“Just playing in the ACC tournament, which I had grown up watching when it was in Greensboro, was something that I had always dreamt of,” Gainey says now. “In the moment, to be able to play and not come out for a single moment, in my hometown, I was in Heaven.

“Coach tried to ask me if I was tired, and I always said, ‘No, I don’t want to come out.’”

Maybe he wanted to a couple of times, but there was no way he would let Sendek or his teammates know that.

“There were some moments during the tournament that I was fatigued and tired, but I did my best not to show it,” Gainey said in a 2021 interview. “That’s the way the whole season was for me: up and down and up and down and once I started playing, I wasn’t about to come out.

“It was so much fun.”

Two of Gainey’s teammates, C.C. Harrison (157) and Jeremy Hyatt (150), were close in that same tournament, as were Duke’s Luke Kennard (154 in 2017) and NC State’s Brandon Costner (151 in 2007), but Gainey is the only one to ever play every minute of every game through four rounds. Three Wolfpack players— Michael O’Connell (172), Casey Morsell (166) and Mo Diara (157) — exceeded Gainey’s total minutes played, but that was during the team’s run of five games in five days, not four.

Late North Carolina coach Dean Smith, whose team ultimately beat the Wolfpack in the title game, was one of many who gave Gainey props for the record-breaking performance.

“I admire that kind of courage,” Smith said.

Sendek, with the multiple stops in his coaching journey in his rearview mirror, said Gainey’s play that weekend was “astonishing,” as he joined Kenny Carr (1975) and Brandon Costner (2007) as the only two NC State freshmen to earn first-team All-ACC tournament honors.

“His performance … was quite remarkable,” says Sendek, now the head coach at Santa Clara. “He played in every minute of every game.

“Hell, I don’t know if he even had a turnover.”

To set the record straight, the routinely steady Gainey did have seven miscues in four games there in his backyard coliseum, but none in the championship game.

Now Gainey faces another challenge, returning to his alma mater as the Wolfpack’s head coach, joining just a handful of ex-NC State players who have led the Wolfpack. One of them, Norm Sloan, guided his alma mater to three ACC titles and the 1974 NCAA championship. Both Sidney Lowe and Bob Warren advanced teams to their respective conference tournament championships games. Gainey was approved by the school’s board of trustees on Tuesday evening and will be formally announced Wednesday afternoon at an April Fool’s Day press conference that is 100 % real.

He fits exactly the profile NC State athletics director Boo Corrigan said he wanted to replace one-year coach Will Wade, who left to return to LSU last week, a coach who connects with the fan base and “fits in with who we are.”

Following his playing career, which included a short stint overseas, Gainey reluctantly entered the world of coaching. He remembers the night his senior season on a bus heading back from the airport to Reynolds Coliseum when then-Wolfpack assistant John Groce asked him if he ever thought about a career in coaching.

“I’m not sure I could handle players like me,” Gainey said.

He had to be convinced to even return to his alma mater for the opportunity of a lifetime. In 2004, after earning an undergraduate degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing, Gainey was working at one of the Gold’s Gyms in Cary and volunteering as an assistant coach at Cary Academy when NC State’s Lee Fowler called and invited him to apply for a newly created administrative internship as assistant to the athletics director, working in the department’s business office.

It was an initiative to add diversity to Fowler’s staff and kicked off Gainey’s 20-year journey to return home.

Eventually, Gainey was hired to be part of the staff of another former Wolfpack point guard, Lowe, as the director of basketball operations and eventually assistant coach. It began a 20-year journey to return home. He spent time at Elon, Appalachian State, Arizona, Marquette (twice), Santa Clara and Tennessee, developing his on-court coaching skills and his off-court relationship-building.

“When I was a player, I didn’t really know what coaching was,” Gainey says. “It’s so much more than what I ever saw. You are, in a sense, an educator. You have to develop relationships. You have to learn to tell someone you care about the truth, and sometimes that’s hard to do so that it gets through to them without being demeaning.

“That’s what’s great about this job.”

Both Sendek and Tennessee coach Rick Barnes predicted that Gainey would be successful as a first-time head coach, even if they didn’t know it would be at NC State.

“He is the complete and total package as a coach,” Sendek said in 2021. “Everything he has done in his life has been enriched with his character and the person he is. He is the consummate gentleman and family man.

“Whatever Justin touches is going to be better for it.”

Barnes, who coached against Gainey as head coach at Clemson, added: “He was an incredibly tough competitor then, and he has that same tenacity now as a coach. Justin has a passion for on-court player development that has fit in well with our staff. Our players loved working with him to grow their game.”

The 49-year-old Gainey and his wife Courtney, who attended school at Winston-Salem State, have three sons, Jordan, Jayson and Jaxson. Jordan Gainey played two years at USC-Upstate and two years for Tennessee, earning Big South and Southeastern Conference honors along the way.

Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu