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Steve Masiello was ready, more than ready. Rick Pitino had told him to be patient on more than one occasion, but when the Manhattan job opened this March, Pitino got word to Jaspers athletic director. Bob Byrnes.
Masiello was Byrnes’ guy.
Byrnes, who has as good a track record of hiring outstanding young coaches as any athletic director in the nation, gave Masiello his first college head-coaching job — almost 10 years to the day Pitino wouldn’t hire Mass as an assistant at Louisville.
“Rick had just taken the Louisville job when I was an administrative assistant at Tulane,” Masiello told The Post. “I got on a 5 a.m. flight and was sitting outside the gym for him by 7:30. I begged him to give me a job, any job.”
“He said, ‘You’re not ready. Go pay your dues,'” said Masiello, recalling his devastation. “I cried. But he was right. I was 22, 23. What did I know about being an assistant.”
Masiello paid dues no assistant should have to when he served under the volatile Bobby Gonzalez for four years. Dues paid in full, Pitino hired him as assistant in 2005 and started the clock.
“What I tell guys when they’re hired is, ‘You’re not being hired as an assistant coach,’ ” Pitino said. “You’re being hired as a future head coach.”
Pitino’s coaching tree has spread like a swamp maple. Mick Cronin at Cincinnati, Billy Donovan at Florida, Herb Sendek at Arizona State, and there are a couple of Pitino branches in the metropolitan area with Masiello at Manhattan and Kevin Willard at Seton Hall after a start at Iona.
“No disrespect to Steve Lavin, who did a great job at St. John’s last season, but when Coach Pitino picked St. John’s to win the Big East last year, he did it because he’s a New York [guy] and he loves the city,” Masiello said.
Pitino was born in the city and raised on Long Island. It was a dream come true and a challenge that proved too overwhelming when he got a chance to coach the Knicks from 1987-89. That’s where Masiello first met Pitino.
“I was a ball boy and I was in awe of him,” he said. “He was a rookie coach in the NBA and there he was yelling at Patrick Ewing and Mark Jackson.”
Pitino, 58, doesn’t yell nearly as much as he once did. He has Ralph Willard on his Louisville staff, the respected X’s and O’s assistant on his bench, and a monster squad lined up for next season.
He has former assistants all over the country who can trace their success to Pitino. VCU coach Shaka Smart was an assistant at Florida under Donovan, who was coached by Pitino at Providence.
“I remember when I got my first job I wondered, ‘Am I ready to be a head coach at the age of 28?'” said Donovan, who began his head-coaching career in 1994 at Marshall. “You don’t know. But I knew I was prepared.
“I was prepared because Coach Pitino gives you so much freedom and so much responsibility. It’s an intimidating at first because you’re coaching his team.”
Just not on game days, of course.
‘Very few head coaches aren’t secure enough to turn their program over to an assistant,” Masiello said. “Or they don’t trust their assistants enough to give them that responsibility.”
Pitino doesn’t give anything away.
“I tell my assistants when I hire them, ‘You’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life,’ ” Pitino said. “And you’ll be prepared to become a head coach if that’s what you want.
“But the two things that set the ones that are ready apart from the ones that are going to have unbelievable success is charisma and the ability to have an effect on people. Billy clearly had it, and I think Steve Masiello has it.”
Time will tell, but Masiello wasted no time turning on the charisma at his introductory press conference on April 22 at Draddy Gym.
“Everybody better watch out,” he said. “We are going to create a new brand, and it’s going to be the best in the city and we are going to take New York back over.”
Pitino must have been smiling.
lenn.robbins@nyppost.com