Photo courtesy University of Richmond
Good guys don’t always finish last. Take Chris Mooney, who three years ago was coming off back-to-back 20-loss seasons as head coach of the University of Richmond’s men’s basketball team. He was fighting off critics — even a billboard that called for his firing — after an extended absence from the spectacle that is the NCAA tournament.
This year, the Spiders returned to the Big Dance and pulled off a first-round upset, defeating the favored University of Iowa. Mooney also guided the team to four wins in four days at the Atlantic 10 tournament in Washington, D.C., dismantling crosstown rival VCU in the process.
Six players on this year’s squad were “super seniors” who opted to remain for a fifth season after the NCAA granted an additional year of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the end, their perseverance paid off.
“It’s such a cliche in sports to prove people wrong,” Mooney says. “Everybody’s worried about the doubters and the haters. I just don’t care. I’d rather worry about the investors and the believers.”
Mooney, 49, has been at UR for 17 years, last guiding the program to the NCAA tournament in 2011, when the Spiders reached the Sweet 16. But VCU stole the spotlight that year, reaching the Final Four. In the hierarchy of Richmond basketball, the Spiders would spend the next decade in the Rams’ shadow.
This year, however, was different.
“I think it was kind of redeeming in a way,” says Dan Palazzolo, interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at UR. When the haters got loud in 2019, Palazzolo helped circulate a petition and penned a letter to the university’s athletic director defending the coach’s honor. Mooney is affable, pays close attention to academics and “looks at the whole person when he recruits,” Palazzolo says. “Not only is it a successful basketball program, but Mooney is an incredibly good fit.”
