Shawn Vanzant is coming home.
It took a little cajoling, but the former Wharton star and 2007 graduate has officially been named as the Wildcats next boys basketball coach.
āIām very excited,ā Vanzant told the Neighborhood News. āI canāt wait to get to Wharton and get a full head of steam going. Iām excited to get back home.ā
Vanzant, 33, who has coached the boys team at Bloomingdale the past four seasons, will replace Tommy Tonelli, who announced that he was retiring from coaching after Wharton advanced to the Class 6A final four this past season for just the second time in school history.
Tonelli has always praised Vanzantās coaching acumen, long predicting that his former player would someday become one of the top high school coaches in the area if a college job didnāt come along first.
āI couldnāt be more excited and proud that he will be the basketball coach at Wharton,ā said Tonelli, who will continue in his role as a guidance counselor at the school.
It was a recent dinner with Tonelli, and a phone call with a former college teammate, that eventually persuaded Vanzant to take the job after he had declined previous overtures.
āAnybody who knows me knows I donāt like anything being given to me,ā Vanzant says. āI felt like Iāve been building something great here at Bloomingdale, and Wharton was really what coach Tonelli had built. I wanted to do that same thing at Bloomingdale.ā
But Matt Howard, a teammate at Butler where the duo helped lead the Bulldogs to consecutive NCAA championship games in 2010 and 2011, helped Vanzant look at it differently.
āHe said, āI get what you are saying, but at the same time sustaining something that great is a big challenge,’ā Vanzant said. āHe helped me see the other side of it. Whartonās never had a losing season. Iāve been a part of building that, and I know I can keep that going.ā
Vanzant, who has known Tonelli since he was nine-years-old and would show up on weeknights and weekends at Wharton for pick-up games, coached Bloomingdale to a 3-21 record his first season as a head coach in 2018-19, but the team has averaged 14 wins over the last three seasons and went 17-12 — and won a District championship for the first time since 2016 — this past season.
Having played for two ultra-successful coaches in Tonelli and Butler’s Brad Stevens, Vanzant, who is married with two young daughters, says he has incorporated both menās styles into his own.
āMy coaching style is very similar,ā he says. āOffense is easy, you compete and win on defense, and I expect you to compete at a very very high level. And you play for one another. Itās we over me, thatās something we always said at Butler.ā
Vanzant acknowledges he has big shoes to fill.
Although no official records are kept, Tonelli is leaving the coaching ranks as the all-time wins leader for Hillsborough County public schools. Since building the program from scratch when Wharton opened in 1997, Tonelli never had a losing season and finished with 528 victories and just 137 losses in 23 seasons ā for a sparkling .794 career winning percentage.Ā
Tonelli picked up his 500th win on Dec. 7 against Chamberlain. On Jan. 28, he won his 517th game against Vanzantās Bloomingdale team, passing former Chamberlain legend Doug Aplin to take the āunofficialā No. 1 Ā spot.
William Bethel, who coached at Middleton in the segregation era, was 551-88 in the Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association (at the time, the FHSAA of all-black schools). The Tampa Bay Basketball Coaches Association annually awards the William Bethel Award to the county coach who has gotten the most out of his team, an award Tonelli has won more than once.
Tonelli, 57, says the demands of coaching have made balancing two jobs too cumbersome and overwhelming. He had been contemplating retirement since last season, worn down by the demands and difficulties during the pandemic, but wanted to let the dust settle before deciding to actually retire.Ā
āI didnāt want the frustration caused by Covid to be something that chased me out of coaching,ā Tonelli said.Ā
As it turns out, it wasnāt Covid.
It was just time.
When the dust did settle, it revealed one of Tonelliās most successful seasons ever. The Wildcats were 28-3 and won the schoolās 12th District title, its second Regional title and advanced to the Florida High School Athletic Association Class 6A finals, where it lost to eventual champion Stuart Martin County.
In typical Wharton fashion, the Wildcats overachieved this year and rode an opportunistic offense and gritty defense to a better finish than most expected. Tonelli called it a ādream season.āĀ
In perhaps Tonelliās most impressive accomplishment, it marked the 17th straight season that the Wildcats won at least 20 games, a testament to his practice regimen and game preparation.
āCoach always had us prepared,ā says forward Trevor Dyson. āWe worked harder than almost everybody. We were always ready. Coach always made sure of that.ā
Tonelli, a former Chicago high school star and University of South Florida point guard, says he still feels he has something to give as a coach, and said he would ānever say neverā to a return to the sidelines one day, if the right situation comes along.
āBut right now, Iām done,ā he says.
