The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1285691
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 ■ 35 he applied to as a senior in high school in Hickory, N.C., and the one school above all others he wanted to coach. And true to Valvano's words of advice, Summey arrived at NC State after a journey that made him appreciate that dream coming true even more than he could have imagined. The path started in a statistics class at NC State. Summey was a freshman, and at that time Les Robinson was the basketball coach for the Wolfpack. Robinson had managers for different categories, including stats and used students from the class that Summey happened to be in for that role. Summey eventually became the head man- ager under Robinson's replacement, Herb Sendek, and then was a graduate assistant from 1997-99 for Sendek before embarking on his own coaching journey. He started as an assistant at Saint Fran- cis (Pa.) in 2000 and moved to The Citadel in 2004. Two years later, Summey went to North Florida, and in 2008 he was hired as head coach of Division III Bethany College in West Virginia, going 17-12 and finishing second in the Presidents' Athletic Confer- ence. After one year there, he returned to the Division I level, when he was hired as the director of basketball operations at Miami, a capacity he held for four years before re- turning to Saint Francis as an associate head coach in 2013. Then, finally, he was hired at Bowling Green as an assistant in 2015. In 2019, the Falcons made their first MAC Tournament title game appearance in 17 years, before the team earned the league's No. 2 seed with a 21-10 record going into this year's postsea- son before it was canceled. Summey said that if anyone told you they never had doubts about what they were doing in their career stops, they'd be lying. "There's always moments," Summey ad- mitted. "There's always, 'Am I doing the right thing?' Sometimes the dream out- weighed the journey, and I was not enjoy- ing the journey. The final five years I had at Bowling Green, I enjoyed the journey. "I didn't stop chasing the dream, but I stopped making it bigger than living in the moment. Like Coach Valvano said in that let- ter, enjoy the journey. Sometimes the journey is more important. I just I came to a point where I was like, 'I'm going to really enjoy it and throw myself into what I'm doing.'" The experience included some interesting times, although Summey has a strong appre- ciation for all his prior stops. That included recruiting at The Citadel, a military school, in the midst of two wars while at the same time a phenom named Steph Curry was about to enroll at conference rival Davidson. Summey was at North Florida when the team transitioned into Division I and the Atlantic Sun Conference — and during that period, it could not compete for anything other than regular-season victories. At Bethany, he replaced a coach who had won three league titles in six years. "The one thing I can say is every stop in every place that I've been, it has allowed me to become better at what I do," Summey explained. All those stops helped him reach the point where he was on Keatts' radar for a new assistant coach when Takayo Siddle left the staff to become the head coach at UNC Wilmington. The moment that call came from Keatts to tell Summey he had the job is one that still gives him chills when he thinks about it. "It's one of those situations where you work as hard as you can for as long as you can to try to surround yourself with good people," Summey said. "You always have a dream, but everybody in the world has a dream. My dream was to be back at NC State. "A lot of people's dreams never become reality. When Coach Keatts called me in May, to let me know that he was going to hire me for this position, that was a culmina- tion of 21 years of work." Indeed, it was a lifetime passion and dream come true after a long, fulfilling and worthwhile journey. ■ Summey was a former student manager and graduate assistant at NC State, and his final game on the bench for the Pack prior to returning was also the last contest that Reynolds Coliseum served as the regular home of the men's basketball team. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE MEDIA RELATIONS