Middle Tennessee State coach Rick Insell jokes he didn’t realize he had so many family and friends, at least not until he and his son got a second chance at women’s basketball history.
Thanks to the Women’s National Invitation Tournament, Rick’s Blue Raiders (23-9) will host his son Matt and the Ole Miss Rebels (19-13) on Thursday night in the third round in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
“We’re going to have anywhere from 150 to 200 people that are cousins and just close, close friends,” Rick Insell said. “This is the negative I got out of the whole thing. I’m having to buy Matt’s buddies and friends’ tickets. He should be doing that.”
It is believed that when the Insells met the first time, a Blue Raiders’ 71-65 victory against the Rebels in November, that it was the first father-son coaching matchup in Division I women’s basketball.
“The women’s game is not as old as the men’s game,” Rick Insell said. “I’d say it’s going to happen more and more before it’s all said and done.”
Fathers and sons coaching against each other is nothing new to men’s college basketball.
Louisville coach Rick Pitino got his second chance to beat his son Richard in November, and some of the earliest games even featured Middle Tennessee with Ed Diddle Jr. losing 11 of 12 games against Western Kentucky teams coached by his father, Ed, between 1957 and 1962.
Dads have dominated. According to research by the Louisville Cardinals, dads have won 16 of 18 matchups against their sons.
Matt Insell is trying to make it at least 1-1 on the women’s side.
Both father and son are seizing the family angle to promote a game that stands out even on the busy March tournament schedule with a big crowd expected tonight. Middle Tennessee even took out a full-page newspaper ad touting “Family Feud II” and “The Battle in the ‘Boro'” for a program in the WNIT only because the Blue Raiders snapped a six-year streak of NCAA tournament berths.
Matt Insell is in his second season coaching the Rebels after spending five seasons as an assistant coach at Kentucky. Facing his father in the postseason means much higher stakes.
“We’ve both attacked the NIT to win it, and this is the next game in the process of trying to do that,” he said.
Ole Miss might have the edge because Middle Tennessee will be without senior Cheyenne Parker, the second-leading scorer and rebounder in Conference USA, who was dismissed in late February for unspecified violations of athletic department policy.
Still, he knows the coach on the other bench very well, and the emotions in this game with these stakes will be different than their first game in November.
“But the biggest thing is he’s a great coach,” Matt Insell said of his father. “His teams are always prepared, they win a lot of games and beat a lot of top-tier schools every year. It’s like playing a team in (the SEC). For us, it’s a chance to redeem ourselves from a game earlier this year that we felt like we should have won.”
Even though dad is buying the tickets, family and friends will split their support. Rick Insell said they will mix Blue Raiders shirts and sweatshirts with Ole Miss hair ribbons and vice versa. There’s one exception: Rick’s wife, Deborah, apparently plans to be neutral.
“She’ll sit behind their bench and she’s closer to their players than my players,” Matt Insell said. “But she won’t be happy. She said she’ll wear black because somebody’s going to be mad.”
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