When Perry Clark arrived at Tulane, there was nothing.
No office, no equipment, no program.
Zilch.
The goals were modest. He was realistic. It would take time.
After a four-year hiatus, resurrecting Green Wave basketball wasn’t going to happen overnight, he thought.
That prediction was about the only thing Clark got wrong.
In his sixth season as coach of the Green Wave, Clark is riding a swell of success. Tulane is 10-2 this season and focusing on a return to the NCAA Tournament. Clark’s is a program on the move.
“We’ve far elapsed where I thought we would be to the point where I had to rethink it and now we’ve set other goals,” Clark said after Tulane outlasted UNC-Wilmington Friday night at Fogelman Arena.
Clark’s re-evaluation began after the fourth season, after the Wave had reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament for a second straight year.
“We had to look at this thing as a Top 20 program,” Clark said.
As such, he had to change his thinking on scheduling, recruiting, just the way he operated.
Clark then landed a superb class, now in its second season, that includes bookend forwards Rayshard Allen and Jerald Honeycutt. A new arena is planned for 1997 near the Superdome, with Tulane the primary tenant. The Green Wave is among the schools set for the mega-conference that will begin play next season and includes Louisville, Cincinnati, Marquette, DePaul and others.
Tulane’s success, Clark reminded, has come without landing some of New Orleans’ top players, such as Duane Spencer, Randy Livingston and Melvin Simon. It has come despite playing in a bandbox that seats 3,600. It has come despite a lack of tradition. Even before the program was shut down in the mid-1980s after allegations of point-shaving rocked Tulane, the Green Wave had never reached the NCAA Tournament.
So Clark wasn’t so much re-establishing as inventing.
And from nothing, Clark has created something.
Clark said Green Wave players have bought into his philosophy of hard work, defense and togetherness. He popularized mass substitutions several seasons ago by dubbing his reserves the Posse; some current players say the attention generated by the Posse was their first exposure to Tulane.
As for Fogelman Arena, where a loose ball Friday rolled off the court, into the lobby and was a closed door away from tumbling into the New Orleans night, Clark said it’s all how you look at the charming house.
“We sell that we’ve got something unique, like the Boston Garden,” he said. “This is a unique place, a unique situation.”
He tells recruits not to judge Tulane in conventional terms. Fogelman isn’t Rupp Arena or the Dean Dome. It’s more a miniature Allen Fieldhouse.
“They serve beer,” Clark said of the building where Florida Atlantic will play Saturday night. “Our fans are rabid. They enjoy.
“This is the bayou. We do things a little differently. If you judge it on what it is, instead of trying to compare it to your ideal, I think kids fall in love with it.”
Honeycutt, who visited UCLA, Arkansas and LSU before settling on Tulane, said, “It doesn’t matter where you play. It’s how you play.”
Like Honeycutt, Allen and Correy Childs said they knew about Tulane because of its appearances in the NCAA Tournament and televised games against Louisville. They also knew that the others, such as Honeycutt, had committed or were considering the Wave. All felt they could become part of a blossoming future.
Childs was runner-up for high school player of the year in Michigan and jolted family and friends by choosing to play out of state.
“I wanted to get away from home,” he said. “And I knew Tulane was on the rise.”
The success should continue this season. Tulane was the preseason pick to win the Metro, has beaten Indiana and Alabama and lost to Michigan by two points in its season opener in Hawaii.
