newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MATT SUGAM

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

PISCATAWAY – Mike Rice insists it’s a business as usual like any other road game. That rhetoric comes as no surprise. Anyone who knows Rice is well aware he’s not the sentimental type.

But Rutgers road trip to Pittsburgh is a homecoming of sorts for the second year head coach.

Yes, the Scarlet Knights played in Pittsburgh last season, but it was at the Consol Energy Center against Auburn. Now Rice returns on Wednesday night to face Jamie Dixon and the program that gave him his first big break in coaching as an assistant coach on Pitt’s staff.

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A grandson of a man who helped build Three Rivers Stadium, Rice embodies the blue-collar mentality of the city he calls home.

Watch just a few minutes of one of his practices and you’ll see why. He demands hustle and hard work over anything. The execution of drills must be run to perfection. If not, players are chewed out while running a suicide or hitting the floor for push-ups.

A son of a coach, Rice spent most of his childhood in Pittsburgh as his father coached high school for 13 years before coaching at Duquesne.

Rice returns home to coach against one of his mentors in Dixon at the Peterson Events Center for the first time. So does this game mean more than most because of that?

“No,” Rice said after practice on Tuesday. “It means that I know their system a little better and it probably means that they know my system a little bit better because I do some things that I learned from Jamie [Dixon].”

One of the things Rice learned from Dixon was how to coach in the toughest conference in the country.

“Recruiting in the Big East, how to prepare, how to win in the Big East,” Rice said of what he learned in his one season at Pitt. “It allowed me to look at it from the perspective of how you’re successful in the Big East. How hard it is to win in the Big East.”

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In this road trip home, Rice will also be coaching at Robert Morris for the first time. After a year on Dixon’s bench, Rice parlayed that into a head coaching job at the Pittsburgh based NEC school.

With three years of success, including back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances, Rice will once again roll out the balls in the Charles L. Sewall Center as his team practices there before they head to Morgantown. That is an event that will that will be more special than playing Pitt.

“At the end of the day, when you’re at a place for so long — and in this business three years is a long time to be at one place, which is crazy to say — you forge a lot of relationships and a lot of friendships,” assistant coach Jimmy Martelli, who was with Rice at Robert Morris, said. “Too often I think people just leave that place or that program and never really look back.”

That’s something Rice and Martelli haven’t done. They constantly remind their young team how lucky they are for the facilities they have and an arena that has more than 50 people come to it for game.

And while Rice is excited to see familiar faces line the practice floor, he made sure to reiterate it was a business trip.

Still, Rice will always have fond memories of the Steel City. It’s the place where he grew up, and spent four pivotal years of his coaching career.

But for Rice, one thing will always be remembered. The thing that matters most.

“Averaging 25 wins a year for those four years you always think positively about those years because you won so damn much.”

For more Rutgers basketball coverage follow Matt Sugam on Twitter @MattSugam and on Facebook.