Jensen: Wright to make this Final Four all business

Ask Villanova coach Jay Wright about lessons he personally learned from coaching a different group of Wildcats at the 2009 Final Four in Detroit, he's not going to talk much about Xs and Os. You'll hear about traffic jams and other logistical headaches, about security.

It's different this time, Wright agrees, because of the last time.

"Not basketball-wise, but everything else," Wright said Monday as Villanova begins a week that will end inside a football dome in Houston with the Wildcats facing Oklahoma Saturday at 6:09 p.m. in the NCAA national semifinal.

It sounds obvious when Wright talks about how everything has to be geared toward focusing on basketball.

"Even though we talked to a lot of people before we went [in 2009] and got a lot of advice, and all the advice was correct, when you get there, it's just so big," Wright said. "It's hard when you're 22 years old. I think it got to me last time, as a coach."

He didn't mean the pressure of the moment or anything in the game itself, which also didn't go the way Villanova wanted, North Carolina winning, 83-69.

"I told our guys this, 'All the guys we're playing against have all been there. They know how to handle this,' " Wright said, referring to Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger, who got to the Final Four more than two decades ago coaching Florida, and North Carolina's Roy Williams and Syracuse's Jim Boeheim, who have won it all.

Wright talked about the Friday practice, the day before the national semifinal. There is an open practice at the site itself, NRG Stadium, but that's a shootaround wrapped around media responsibilities. The teams do their real practice somewhere else. Wright blames himself for what he thinks were two rookie mistakes in '09. He chose to do the private practice after the open workout, and he picked the wrong place for the private one.

"I picked Detroit Mercy, because the coach was a friend of mine. I thought we'd have privacy," Wright said. "It was 45 minutes from the arena."

Meanwhile, the first open practice at the arena, "there were 35,000 people. The kids were psyched up. They got a good sweat up. We hadn't practiced yet. We had to go 45 minutes in traffic. People said it was a 20-minute ride. . . . We get to Detroit [Mercy], everybody's shot, but we still had to practice. I had to cut the practice short because I felt like we all had been out of the hotel for like seven hours. The next day, I didn't want to do a walk-through because it was a long trip to the arena. It was all my planning that wasn't good."

This time, Wright said, they'll practice first, before the open shootaround.

"So whatever happens, we've got that practice in," he said. "There are just a million things like that."

They also are going to stay at Villanova longer, going out late Wednesday instead of first thing that day, practicing on campus that day.

"We feel like the more we can get done before we leave, the better," said associate head coach Baker Dunleavy, who talked about this all being new to him, too. He was in Detroit as a fan. He's taking all his cues from Wright's experience.

Among the advice Wright got in '09 from Final Four veterans - "simple things, like bring a police officer with you, because it's not your kids you're worried about. It's keeping other people off the hall where your kids live. I would have never thought of that. I think [Jim] Calhoun told me that."

Again, Wright said, "a lot of the advice worked, but there's a lot of things that I didn't ask about. I let the families be around all the time. I wanted them to all enjoy time with their family. Then we'll get together and focus. It was too much. We've got to stay focused."

"It's not like if you mess something up, hey, we'll just go 15 minutes longer," Dunleavy said. "We only have a certain amount of time on that court. And you don't want the guys on their feet too often, the closer you get to the game."

If you think it's only Villanova thinking about all this, no chance. It seemed to be on Roy Williams' mind almost immediately after North Carolina won the East region Sunday night. He deflected a question about other Final Four teams, saying he wanted to enjoy the moment, pointing out, "We're going to do media stuff for 14 hours this week, and we're going to practice seven minutes."

The first time, Wright said, his overriding attitude had been, "Let me let them enjoy it. Have fun with it. Then the time that we practice, we've got to focus. Well, there's so much fun to have, it's hard to re-focus when we have to."

And the whole vibe this time is, this group isn't showing up just to have fun.

mjensen@phillynews.com

@jensenoffcampus