This is Northwestern University coach Gary Barnett’s new life: coach of the year awards clutter his office, fans stop him in shopping malls and porters at Chicago’s airports refuse to take tips from him.
“I can’t go into a recruit’s house now without signing an autograph and taking a picture,” he said. “Before, they had to look me up in the media guide just to know who I was.”
That’s the only way Barnett can categorize things now – before he took the Wildcats through their 1995 dream Rose Bowl season and after. On Thursday night, he explained the difference to about 85 members of NU’s South Florida alumni chapter at the Sheraton Design Center.
The trip was the first part of a Florida fundraising swing that also will include Naples.
“There are so many requests for your time and now the players can’t even go to a basketball game without being mobbed,” he said. “Our seniors are spending their weekends signing [commemorative books) for $250.”
But all the attention, Barnett said, hasn’t gone to the players’ heads. There haven’t been any problems with missed workouts, and most of the team is still focused on the unachieved goal of winning the Rose Bowl.
Barnett’s own distraction, negotiating a new contract, should be over soon as well. He said he expects to sign in the next week, although the length of the deal is still being discussed.
“It could be five years or 15 years,” he said. “Either way, I’m going to be there for a long time.”
In Barnett’s world of “after,” recruiting was also easier this winter, but coaches expect last season to really pay off a year from now, the end of the current recruiting cycle.
