St. John's head coach Rick Pitino during the introduction of his players before an NCAA college ... [+] basketball game against UConn, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. As a teenager in the mid-1980s, Mike Repole took the subway from his two-bedroom home in Queens, N.Y., to Manhattan, where he attended St. John’s men’s basketball games. He sat in the upper deck at Madison Square Garden, far away from the floor. Still, he didn’t care. He had a chance to watch one of the nation’s best programs. On Thursday afternoon, Repole will be back at MSG to see No. 1 seed St. John’s compete in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament. This time, Repole will have much better seats, sitting courtside near the St. John’s bench and rooting for his alma mater. Repole, an entrepreneur who has an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion according to Forbes, has assisted St. John’s financially with generous donations to support Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) efforts. The money has helped attract recruits to a program that was off the national radar for a long time. But Repole deflects any praise, preferring to give credit for the turnaround to the University’s administration and especially the players and coach Rick Pitino, who has once again reinvigorated a team and fan base in his sixth decade as a head coach. St. John’s (27-4) is No. 6 in the Associated Press poll, its highest ranking since January 1991, and its four losses have come by a combined seven points. The Red Storm won their first outright Big East regular season title in 40 years and are favored to win their first conference tournament championship since 2000. And they are 18-0 at home, winning nine games apiece at their on-campus arena and at MSG, where they have drawn multiple sell-out crowds. “It’s been amazing,” said Repole, who co-founded and sold two beverage companies to Coca-Cola for more than $10 billion. “I couldn’t be happier for the University, the students, the alumni. It’s a beautiful story. Madison Square Garden feels like 1985 again.” MORE FOR YOU ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap And Review: You Killed My Father, Prepare To Die Russia Is Bombing Bridges To Cut Off 10,000 Ukrainian Troops In Kursk ‘Canada Will Never, Ever…Be Part Of America’: Trudeau’s Successor Carney Lays Into Trump After Winning Leadership Race The success has been a long time coming. St. John’s was one of the founding members of the Big East in 1979 and helped put the nascent league on the map in the 1980s. The Red Storm had All-Americans such as Chris Mullin, Mark Jackson and Walter Berry, each of whom grew up in New York, as well as legendary coach Lou Carnesecca, another New York native and St. John’s graduate. “St. John’s is really core to the DNA of the Big East,” conference commissioner Val Ackerman said. During Carnesecca’s final 17 seasons, the Red Storm made 15 NCAA tournament appearances, including advancing to the Final Four in 1985 and securing a No. 1 seed in 1983, 1985 and 1986. Since Carnesecca retired in 1992, St. John’s has never been the same. Yes, there were some good seasons along the way, including in 1999 and 2000 when the Red Storm finished the regular season ranked No. 9 in the AP poll both seasons. But since 2000, St. John’s has made only four NCAA tournament appearances (2002, 2011, 2015 and 2019) and hasn’t won any games in the event. The Red Storm’s situation became so untenable that even Repole, one of the school’s biggest boosters, had enough. During an interview with WFAN in April 2019, Repole said “the culture at St. John’s right now is toxic” and added that University president Bobby Gempesaw and vice president for administration Joe Oliva should step down. “This is not a New York laughingstock anymore,” Repole said at the time. “We are now a national embarrassment.” Repole’s comments came shortly after Mullin resigned as coach after four seasons and two days before the school hired Mike Anderson, who had been fired as Arkansas’s coach and was not St. John’s first choice. At the time, Pitino was in limbo and wasn’t considered for the position. Two years earlier, Louisville’s board of directors fired Pitino when the FBI opened an investigation into fraud and corruption in college basketball. Pitino, who had won national titles in 1996 at Kentucky and in 2013 at Louisville, was already enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. But college programs stayed away from him due to his association with the FBI scandal, so he headed to Greece, where he coached professionally for two seasons. Iona Provides Pitino Another College Opportunity In March 2020, Pitino finally got another shot at coaching in college when the Iona University job opened after coach Tim Cluess resigned for health reasons. Iona president Seamus Carey and athletics director Matt Glovaski flew to Madrid, Spain, to meet with Pitino at an Irish pub, where they discussed the opening and Pitino’s past. “I said, ‘Look, guys, I don’t break rules. You’ve got to trust me,’” Pitino recalled this month after St. John’s defeated Seton Hall. “(Carey) said, ‘Don't say another word. I went to your basketball camp. I know what you're all about. You don't have to explain anything. We want you to come to Iona.’ And that was it.” By any measure, Iona was a much more low-profile job than Pitino’s other stops over the previous 30 years with the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Louisville and Kentucky, four of the most glamorous positions in basketball. Still, Pitino had a house near Iona’s campus just outside of New York City, and he was eager to prove himself again even though he had plenty of money to retire and take it easy in his late 60s. “He’s a coach for life, and I mean literally life,” said West Coast Conference commissioner Stu Jackson, who was an assistant under Pitino with the Knicks and at Providence College. “Rick is not one to sit around, and the fact that he coached at Iona and (in Greece) just exemplifies his love for the profession and his love for the game. And it doesn’t matter where it is, who it is. He's always a coach.” Like he had at his other college jobs, Pitino didn’t need much time to make an impact at Iona. The Gaels won the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament title in 2021, Pitino’s first season, and qualified for the NCAA tournament. The next season, Iona went 25-8 but lost in the MAAC tournament’s first round. The Gaels then finished 27-8 in 2023, winning another MAAC regular season and tournament title and advancing to the NCAAs, where they lost in the first round to Connecticut, the eventual champion. One week before the UConn game, St. John’s had fired Anderson, who went 68-56 in four seasons, never made the NCAA tournament and never made it past the Big East tournament quarterfinals. This time, St. John’s targeted Pitino, with Rev. Brian Shanley, who became the University’s president in February 2021, leading the charge. Repole and the school’s other boosters were aboard, too. By then, Pitino had been exonerated by the Independent Accountability Resolution Process in the Louisville case. “I’m a serial entrepreneur, so when somebody tells me I have a 1% chance, I really like my odds,” Repole said. “I have a mantra out there. I say, ‘Think big, dream bigger.’…I always believed that with the right leadership, the right vision, things can happen.” Pitino Experiences Early Struggles At St. John’s During Pitino’s introductory press conference in March 2023, he vowed that “St. John’s is going to be back. I guarantee that.” Still, midway through last season, the Red Storm were struggling, having lost three in a row to fall to 14-12. After a home loss to Seton Hall in mid-February, Pitino went on a diatribe, claiming it was “the most unenjoyable experience I’ve had since I’ve been in coaching.” The Red Storm responded by winning their next six games and advancing to the Big East tournament semifinals for the first time in 24 years. The streak and season ended with a 95-90 loss to UConn, a dominant team that ended up winning its second consecutive NCAA tournament championship. Still, the Red Storm had some momentum, and it continued in the offseason when they signed top transfers such as guards Kadary Richmond (Seton Hall) and Deivon Smith (Utah), who were No. 1 and No. 12 in 247Sports’s transfer portal rankings. Pitino has admitted NIL investments from Repole and other played a major factor in luring transfers, telling reporters in January that “if the money was close” Richmond would be playing again at Seton Hall. To Repole, providing support was a no-brainer. “I’m always going to be Mike from Queens,” he said. “St John's played a big role in the success I've had in my life…The type of team that St John's has right now, you can't pay for this marketing. I'm hearing that applications are up, so people are excited. I'm sure enrollment’s going to be up. To me, this is sports business.” Still, it’s too simplistic to say St. John’s is only winning because of its NIL budget. After all, the Red Storm’s roster is not filled with sure-fire All-Americans and NBA players. The Big East’s coaches picked the Red Storm to finish fifth in the league in the preseason, while they were unranked in the AP’s preseason poll. And St. John’s only has two players in The Athletic’s latest ranking of NBA draft prospects: Richmond is 70th, while junior guard RJ Luis is 88th. Luis is 80th among ESPN’s top draft prospects, the only St. John’s player to make the top 100. Pitino, though, has the Red Storm exceeding expectations. St. John’s is shooting just 44.9% from the floor, which is 170th among 364 Division 1 teams, including 29.9% on 3-pointers, which is 340th in the nation. They are also making only 68.8% of their free throws, which is 286th in Division 1. But the Red Storm are relentless with their pressure defense, hustle and rebounding. They average 40.8 rebounds per game (tied for 6th in Division 1), force 15.6 turnovers per game (11th in the nation) and are third in analyst Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric. Luis and Zuby Ejiofor, both of whom transferred to St. John’s before Pitino’s first season, were named first team All-Big East on Sunday, while Richmond made the second team. Luis is averaging 18.1 points and 7.1 rebounds per game, while Ejiofor is averaging 14.1 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and Richmond is averaging 12.7 points, 6.1 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 2.1 steals per game. “I have to give (Pitino) credit for recognizing how the landscape has changed and adapting to that,” Ackerman said. “Not everybody’s been able to do that…He’s figured out how to win basketball games in an environment where it’s not always easy to maintain continuity or hold on to players or preach your coaching philosophy to athletes who may have other views about what’s of interest to them.” Pitino Combines Old School And New School Approaches Indeed, Pitino has been coaching since the mid-1970s back in the infancy of cable television and decades before social media, never mind NIL and the transfer portal. He remains a stickler that his players give 100% effort and isn’t afraid to get on his team, albeit perhaps in a somewhat toned-down manner. One day last month, Glenn Consor came across a clip from a Vice Sports documentary of Pitino yelling at halftime, asking players “where is your (expletive) toughness” and imploring them to play harder and not sulk. It brought Consor back to the late 1970s when Consor was the starting point guard on Pitino’s teams at Boston University. “That was mild,” said Consor, now a broadcaster for the Washington Wizards. “That was nothing compared to what we went through. He would lose it.” He added: “People see that and go, ‘Whoah, that’s really cool. It’s kind of like old school.’ I’m like, ‘No. You don’t understand.’ Yeah, it is old school, but it’s not that old school.” Still, Consor sees some similarities in Pitino’s coaching philosophy at BU and now at St. John’s. Before Pitino arrived, the Terriers were 10-15. By the second season, when Consor was a senior, BU was 21-9 and lost in the finals of the ECAC North conference tournament, barely missing the NCAA tournament. “He just transformed our work ethic,” Consor said. “He made us believe in ourselves. Our whole theme back then was to be the hardest working team in the country.” Pitino is doing the same at St. John’s. This is the fourth time he has led a program to a regular season conference title in his second season, and next week he will become the first man to coach six programs in the NCAA tournament. And he’s not slowing down. He continues to push his players in practices and games to reach their potential. “He makes me tired in my seat,” Repole said. “He’s just incredible to have that energy and do what he does seven days a week. He’s motivating me. I think he's the greatest college basketball coach of all time, and I think he's one of the best motivators.” The way things are going, no one around St. John’s wants the season to end. The Red Storm, an afterthought for so long, are now receiving attention in New York City and beyond. Pitino, 72, even appeared on The Tonight Show last Thursday night. He’s rejuvenated and elated, working in the city where he grew up and helping raise the profile of St. John’s on and off the court. Repole joked that Pitino will be coaching until he’s 90. “St. John’s might have to sign him to an 18-year contract,” Repole said. “I think he’s going to do it for another 18 years.” Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades