Caleb Daniels was out to dinner with his family on a Wednesday night last spring when he received a text message from Joey Flannery, the director of basketball operations for the Villanova men’s program.
It was sent to the entire team, instructing the players to come to a mandatory team meeting in the film room at 8 p.m. that April 20 night.
“We never have meetings that late so it was quite unusual,” Daniels recalled. “We all came there at 8, and that’s when we heard the news.”
The news — which had already leaked onto social media — was that the team’s longtime coach, Jay Wright, would be retiring at age 60, and Kyle Neptune, a former Villanova assistant who led Fordham in 2021-22, would succeed him. In an emotional meeting, Wright first addressed the team, and then Neptune followed suit.
“Definitely our head was spinning,” Daniels said. “I was just trying to figure out what was really going on, trying to fathom what was going on.”
With a new season underway, Neptune, 37, is one of two young men’s basketball coaches replacing legends of the game. He succeeds Wright, who won two national championships at Villanova and led the program to four Final Fours, including April’s in New Orleans. At Duke, Jon Scheyer, 35, takes over for Mike Krzyzewski, who retired at 75 after leading his team to five N.C.A.A. championships — second in the men’s game only to John Wooden’s 10 with U.C.L.A. — and 13 Final Fours, including last season’s.
“For me, I don’t think about it as much as people think,” Neptune said. “All I can do is try to be my own man and try to do the best I can do for Villanova.”
On the women’s side, Coquese Washington, 51, a W.N.B.A. champion as a player, is replacing one of the game’s most accomplished coaches, C. Vivian Stringer, at Rutgers. Stringer, 74, a Hall of Famer, ranks fifth in career victories and is the only coach in N.C.A.A. history to lead three different programs to the Final Four.
It’s Washington’s second head coaching job after having led Penn State to three regular-season conference championships from 2007-19.
“Following a legend, it’s hard,” said the West Virginia men’s coach, Bob Huggins, a fellow Hall of Famer. “I’m sure they’ll do a great job, but it’s hard.
“Those are huge shoes to fill. Huge.”
Expectations are high, too, especially at Duke, which is in a tie at No. 7 in The Associated Press preseason poll, and at Villanova, ranked No. 16.
“Every single thing they do is going to be under a microscope,” said Rick Pitino, the Iona men’s coach who is a Hall of Famer, adding he believed Scheyer and Neptune were “ready for the job.”
“As long as recruiting stays strong, those guys will do great,” Pitino added.
Scheyer was a captain on Duke’s 2009-10 championship team and then played professionally both overseas and in the U.S. before returning to Duke as a special assistant in 2013-14. He was elevated to associate head coach in 2018.
When Krzyzewski announced in June 2021 that he would retire after the season, it allowed him and Scheyer to divide responsibilities in an orderly fashion. Scheyer concentrated on recruiting that spring and summer, while Krzyzewski had more time to be on campus and work with his final team.
The plan seemed to work: Duke earned the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title and won 32 games before falling to rival North Carolina in an instant classic in the national semifinals.
And Scheyer landed not only the No. 1 class for 2022, according to 247sports.com’s rankings, but Duke also has the No. 1 class of 2023.
“That’s why I think there was a sense of urgency from the school to announce the next head coach and to announce the plans for Coach K where we could continue to recruit at the highest level and to bring in the big-big-time players,” Scheyer told The New York Times in 2021.
As Scheyer’s coaching tenure begins, junior guard Jeremy Roach, the team’s captain, says the vibe is “generally the same.”
He added: “They kind of embody the same culture and of coming in every practice giving 110 percent, bringing the energy, so it means kind of the same thing.”
At Villanova, the transition wasn’t planned in Duke’s military fashion, but there is still a lot of continuity.
Neptune was only away from the program for one year while coaching at Fordham, and he recruited or coached virtually all the Wildcats’ current players. He also kept intact Wright’s staff of assistant coaches and his three-man recruiting class, headlined by the five-star freshman forward Cam Whitmore.
“It’s comfortable because they kept it in the family and we know him personally and as a coach,” said Daniels, a graduate student guard. “So we’re willing to play even harder for him, the same way we would do coach Wright.”
Neptune went 16-16 in his lone season at Fordham, which plays in the Atlantic 10 Conference, a far cry from the bright lights of the Big East. In nonconference play, his slate includes games against Iowa State, Michigan State and possibly North Carolina, which is ranked No. 1.
Keith Urgo, who was an assistant under Neptune at Fordham before succeeding him, thinks Neptune is the perfect fit at Villanova.
“He had the learning curve last year,” he said. “I think there’s always a learning curve as a head coach or even as an assistant coach.”
Dr. John Giannini, a longtime head coach at La Salle who now works as TV analyst, said he was impressed that during Neptune’s lone season at Fordham he pioneered new coaching tactics and didn’t simply try to mimic Wright’s tendencies.
“Everything he did was very different from what Villanova did,” Giannini said. “Multiple defenses, more combination defense, it was just very different and it was very successful.”
At Rutgers, Washington is in her own unique situation. Though Stringer retired in the spring, she actually hadn’t coached since the end of the 2020-21 season. She took a leave of absence last year, although Rutgers did not address why when it made the announcement ahead of last season. Stringer, a cancer survivor, was reportedly worried about reductions in coronavirus testing.
Tim Eatman served as the program’s acting head coach last season, when the Scarlet Knights finished 11-20 overall and 3-14 in the Big Ten. Washington was hired as the new head coach in May.
“Our style of play may be a little different,” she said at Big Ten media day. “Coach Stringer was known for great defense and low-scoring games. I kind of would like to score a little few more points so the pace may be a little bit different.”
Playing an up-tempo pace may be challenging as the team only has eight scholarship players, including three transfers and two freshmen.
“It’s very fun with only eight,” the returning junior forward Erica Lafayette told NJ.com at the team’s media day. “It’s very fast, and I feel like we bond more. Our open conversations are better. We don’t have time to clique off and do anything because we are such a small group. You see one person and you want to see everybody.”
In the end, Scheyer, Neptune and Washington will be judged by their wins and losses. Duke is 2-0 under Scheyer heading into a Tuesday game against No. 5 Kansas in the Champions Classic in Indianapolis, while Washington improved to 2-1 with a win over the New Jersey Institute of Technology on Sunday. Neptune is 1-1, having lost to the in-state rival Temple on Friday. He and Villanova will host Delaware State on Monday.
The coaches can look to North Carolina’s Hubert Davis for some inspiration. Last season, he became the first new men’s coach to lead his team to the N.C.A.A. championship game in his first full season at the helm after replacing the Hall of Famer and three-time champion Roy Williams.
“They’re going to go through their bumps of running a blue-blood organization, you know?” Providence Coach Ed Cooley said.
He added: “Your biggest donors want to know that their hard-earned dollars are going towards winning so it’s a fine balance and you do the best that you can. You make sure you work hard every single day, you try to find the best fit for who you are as the person and coach and you gotta get a little lucky. It’s a hard balance, it’s fun.”