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The Saint Joe’s Social Accounts Wished Phil Martelli a Happy Birthday, Which Doesn’t Sound Like a Big Deal, But it is
By Matt Schultz
Published:
The quiet beef between Saint Joseph’s University and Phil Martelli is something I think about a good amount. I’ve written about it a few times on this website and, it should go without saying, the strained standoff between my alma mater and our illustrious coach bums me out.
I love Phil. Phil’s the man. And I always thought the school did him extremely dirty by unceremoniously letting him go back in 2019. The man’s a Philly basketball legend, a winner, and an overall great guy who did nothing but act as a model ambassador for the university for over three decades – all until the new (at the time) athletic director, Jill Bodensteiner, stepped in and discarded him without a thought after 34 years. 34 years! Can you imagine? Unbelievable. And for what? To hire Billy Lange, who went 81–104 (.438) in six years on Hawk Hill and didn’t make a single NCAA tournament? Lange, who bailed on the team two weeks before the 2025-2026 season began to take a job as an assistant coach with the Knicks? You know who’d never do a worm-move like that? Phil! Jill really torpedoed the school’s culture for nothing! I’m getting mad about it all over again just tying it out here. But I digress…
The reason all of this is on my mind today is that the official Saint Joe’s men’s basketball account on Instagram and X posted about Phil Martelli on Monday, wishing the coach a happy birthday:
I just searched pretty thoroughly through the school’s official social accounts, and I cannot find a single post mentioning Phil since he was fired in 2019. That’s seven years! A seven-year Phil drought! And it’s finally come to an end. That’s not nothing!
To me, this feels like new athletic director Ash Puri trying to right the wrongs done by the previous administration (Bodensteiner left SJU to become the commissioner of the Horizon League in February, which is insane; she nearly gutted the SJU basketball program and somehow spun it into a bigger job). And if this is indeed Ash’s doing, I salute him. This is good. This is necessary. It’s a small step, yes, but I’m hoping it’s the first on the way to bringing Phil back to Hawk Hill. It’s long overdue. The time is now…
I’m open to all kinds of ideas for how to do this officially. Name the court at Hagan Arena “Martelli Court.” Put a statue of him and Jameer Nelson and Delonte West in front of the arena next to that newish big Hawk they got out there. Hire Phil in some sort of big senior advisory role (if he’d want to do something like that, seems like he’s having fun and staying busy nowadays) so he can help bring back the family-feel this program used to have, before Jill tried turning Saint Joe’s athletics into run-of-the-mill corporate dogshit with no respect for tradition or history, as if the university were a Best Buy or Nabisco or Exxon Mobil and was only concerned with the bottom line.
The fans hated all that the whole time. It was awful. It set the program back a ton. So let’s get Phil back in the mix. Let’s get this thing back on track here.
Also, Phil shared the tweet and added a thank you in there:
Hell yeah. Nature is healing. Martelli Court is gonna happen. I believe it.
Matt Schultz is a comedy and sports writer from Philadelphia. He’s written extensively for ClickHole, The Onion, and Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco. His work has been featured in Vulture, Deadspin, The A.V. Club, Paste Magazine, and other publications. Much of his sports journalism can be found on college basketball websites that don’t exist anymore (PhilaHoops Heads rise up…) email: M.Schultz@sportradar.com