VCU's Dream Class Soars, Martinez Martinez Blazes a Trail!

“I wasn’t going to pick up the phone,” said the elder Martelli, who won 444 games and made the NCAA Tournament seven times during a massively successful 24-year run at Saint Joseph's in Philadelphia. “They knew they weren’t getting a job just because of their name. Or they wouldn’t last if that’s the way they got it.

” So Philip and Jimmy essentially wiped “Martelli” off their resumes. The two brothers — Philip, 44, is 15 months older — each carved their own distinct paths. For Philip, it meant starting out as an assistant at Central Connecticut State, going without a paycheck for his first year while sleeping on a couch on an enclosed porch.

Asked how Philip paid the bills, Phil Sr. shrugged while his wife Judy gave a knowing look out of the corner of her eye and nodded silently in her husband's direction. Jimmy initially wanted to be a college administrator, wary of the stress coaching provides after growing up watching his father prowl the sideline while trying to make a mid-major program in the western Philly suburbs nationally relevant.

Yet when a job as an assistant popped up at Dickinson, his alma mater, right after he graduated, the lure of joining the family business proved too strong to ignore. Fast forward a couple of decades, and all three Martellis reunited amid the confetti-strewn floor at PPG Paints Arena on Sunday afternoon after Philip, now the head coach at Virginia Commonwealth University — with Jimmy sitting two chairs to his right on the bench as his top assistant — led the Rams to a second straight Atlantic 10 Tournament title and the school's 21st NCAA Tournament appearance. A few hours later, VCU (27-7) received an 11th seed in the South Region and will face sixth-seeded North Carolina (24-8) in Greenville, South Carolina, on Thursday.