Inside Joe Mazzulla’s ‘awesome’ meeting with D-III football team

During their annual preseason training camp, Trinity College football players spend a great deal of time in a beige-walled classroom.

For 2 1/2 straight weeks, every day ends with a team meeting aimed at instilling longtime head coach Jeff Devanney’s desired team culture before the season kicks off.

“We basically have 18 straight nights where we have team meetings, and all of our team meetings all revolve around culture and expectations,” Devanney told the Herald. “It has very little to do with actual football. It’s just about trying to make sure everybody’s on the same page as to what our culture is.”

Devanney leads most of these meetings. But to break up the monotony of camp and provide different perspectives, he also brings in guest speakers.

The headliner of Training Camp 2024: Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla, who was two months removed from an NBA championship at the time.

The visit was facilitated by Celtics chief marketing officer Shawn Sullivan, whose son is a junior wide receiver at Trinity. Sullivan reached out, and Devanney, a Connecticut native and lifelong Celtics fan, jumped at the chance to have Mazzulla address the team.

But Devanney figured Mazzulla’s appearance on the Hartford, Conn., campus would be brief. Some prepared remarks about leadership and toughness, maybe a few questions, pose for a picture and then hop back on I-84 up to Boston.

He didn’t expect Mazzulla to spend an hour-and-a-half in that room, or for his visit to become much more of a conversation than a coach-to-team address.

“Joe was awesome,” Devanney said. “I didn’t know if he was going to spend five minutes with us or 20. He spent 90 minutes with the team. But he didn’t speak at the kids.

“He started out by basically saying, ‘You guys have won multiple championships. I’ve only won one. So I’m trying to figure out right now how to have sustained success, so I should be asking you guys questions instead of talking to you.’ And that’s kind of what he did. He spoke for five minutes … and basically for the next 85 minutes, our guys asked him questions, and he was very honest and open and really cool.”

Trinity is a New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) football powerhouse, winning or sharing nine conference championships since Devanney took over as head coach in 2005. The Bantams have lost more than one game just once in the last nine seasons, with five undefeated campaigns. They’re contending for another title this year, currently tied for first in the NESCAC with in-state rival Wesleyan, whom they’ll host in their Nov. 9 season finale.

Naturally, the main theme of Mazzulla’s visit was what’s required for championship teams to sustain success — a formula the Celtics are looking to perfect as they try to become the NBA’s first repeat champion since 2018.

“It was a lot about … once you get to the top, how you try to stay on the top,” Devanney explained. “It was a lot of those kind of themes. How you try not to be complacent.”

Mazzulla also spoke about the underappreciated links between sports — how he weaves highlights from soccer matches and UFC fights into his Celtics meetings — as well as some of their inherent differences.

In college football, he noted, one loss could torpedo a season. Especially in a league like the NESCAC, whose teams only play conference games and aren’t eligible for the Division III national tournament. Defeats are inevitable in the NBA, so the emphasis there is on ensuring one loss doesn’t snowball.

“He understood that we only play nine games, so we can’t afford to lose a game. If we lose a game, it could ruin our season,” Devanney said. “And in the NBA, you’re going to lose a game. Nobody’s going undefeated in the NBA.

“So he even shared a story about when they lost a game last year after winning 11 or 12 in a row. They lost, I think it was at Minnesota or something, and they broke open some bottles of wine and shared wine as a team.”

That anecdote might have been referring to Boston’s March loss in Cleveland, during which Cavaliers backup Dean Wade scored 20 fourth-quarter points to snap an 11-game Celtics win streak. The Celtics dropped their next game, too, but went 32-7 the rest of the way, including their dominant 16-3 playoff run.

Boston did not have a losing streak longer than two games all season.

“It’s almost like a reverse psychology,” Devanney said. “You don’t try to get on the players, because you’re just going to lose sometimes. The other team’s going to make their shots.”

Mazzulla, whose Celtics are off to a 4-1 start after losing in overtime to the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, also reflected on his own small-college experience.

The 36-year-old spent seven of the first eight years of his coaching career at Glenville State and Fairmont State, two Division II programs in West Virginia. Those included two seasons as Fairmont State’s head coach, a job he left in 2019 to join what was then Brad Stevens’ staff in Boston.

Among other lessons, Mazzulla’s time at the lower rungs of college hoops underscored the value of winning.

“He was talking about how he was at this small school, and there was another school in that league that won all the time,” Devanney said. “He’s like, ‘It’s a terrible school in a terrible location, but players wanted to go play there because they won all the time.’”

Roughly half of Trinity’s roster hails from New York, New Jersey or western Connecticut. But Devanney said Mazzulla was able to win over even some of the Knicks diehards in the audience.

“I was just very impressed with how humble he was, and I was really impressed with the fact that he spent 90 minutes with us,” the coach said. “Afterwards, we had some guys on our team who were like, ‘Coach, I’m a Knicks fan and I hate the Celtics, but that was really cool.'”