Couch: Saddi Washington didn't plan on winding up at MSU. But lifelong connections have him feeling home.

EAST LANSING – The comfort Saddi Washington is feeling right now in his new role as an assistant basketball coach at Michigan State is steeped in both personal history and recent unease.

Eight years coaching at the University of Michigan didn’t diminish his roots in Lansing, his familiarity with MSU, a 30-some-year relationship with Tom Izzo or his late father Stan’s legacy as one of the all-time greats in the program Saddi is now a part of. A framed photo of his dad playing for MSU, leaping high above the competition, sits on the windowsill in Saddi’s new office at Breslin Center.

“Man, this dude, he would have been beside himself (to see this),” Saddi said of Stan, who died two years ago.

There is also the comfort of employment and of a return to the routine of a job he’s made his career. For the first time in 18 years coaching college basketball, Saddi, 48, spent five weeks this spring uncertain where he’d coach next.

“It was a different space,” he said. “I mean, I’ve been very fortunate and blessed in one regard to not have to have all of these different moves (that most coaches make). Every move has been calculated to some degree. Even when (former Michigan) coach (John) Beilein made his jump to the NBA, before Juwan (Howard) got hired, we had some conversations and I knew, Day 1, I was OK.”

New Michigan head coach Dusty May decided to bring in his own staff. No hard feelings, Saddi said. But, after a decade at Oakland University under Greg Kampe and eight seasons under Beilein and Howard at Michigan, Saddi’s southeast Michigan coaching bubble had burst. Moreover, there weren’t a flood of new opportunities.

He endured a sense of vulnerability, his wife Channon said. He began to question the profession, how assistant coaches were valued, whether his accomplishments mattered. He leaned into his faith.

He wound up with Izzo.

“I was pretty impressed with his composure through all of this,” Channon said, “because I know there was some shock to his system.

“He had kind of been walking between the raindrops for 18 years, just not experiencing when people are let go or they transition and they leave folks behind. He had not experienced that.

“What I kept saying to him was, ‘I want you to remember what this feels like. So that when you are in a position to make decisions about other people's lives, you remember what this feels like, so you can have the appropriate empathy and be supportive of folks.’ ”

Saddi was a candidate for the Detroit Mercy head coaching job, which went to former MSU assistant Mark Montgomery in early April. That opened a spot on Izzo’s staff in East Lansing.

Izzo is someone who respects Saddi’s accomplishments, who trusts him, who’d gone to bat for him previously, helping him land the Michigan job, someone who’d spoken at his father’s funeral and shown up unannounced at his mother’s 75th birthday party.

The depth of their relationship outweighed Saddi coming from a rival. To Izzo, Saddi wasn’t really a Michigan guy. He was Saddi, son of Stan and of Lansing, someone Izzo had known since Saddi was a teenager starring at Sexton High School and playing summer pickup games at Jenison Field House with the likes of Magic Johnson and Steve Smith, Shawn Respert, Eric Snow, Mike Peplowski and Montgomery and every Spartan of that era.

Saddi had worked with, and for, a number of coaches Izzo knows. They all spoke highly of him, Izzo said, especially former Michigan associate head coach Phil Martelli.

“Martelli just swore by him,” Izzo said. “He said, ‘You’re my friend and I’m trying to make sure my friend does the right thing (with this hire).’ ”

Among Saddi’s roles, helping to develop MSU’s big men.

“(Saddi) brings a newness,” Izzo said. “He's not directly part of the family, like lot of the guys I've had. But he's indirectly part of the family because of how he grew up and his dad and everybody else. But it’s good to get a different perspective on things. And he's been very helpful and very good at that and, in his own way, just (seeing) things that, strengths that we had and weaknesses, strengths that they saw and weaknesses that they saw. It's good to hear from somebody else.”

Saddi’s interest in joining Izzo’s staff was piqued on the day MSU lost to North Carolina in the NCAA tournament — nine days after Howard was let go at Michigan — when Saddi saw Izzo’s now-famed response to a question about his program’s middling results recently: “I’m going to get back to a deeper run in this tournament or I’m going to die trying.”

“I’m like, ‘Whoa. Like, I believe you. And I want to be a part of that.’ I told him that,” Saddi said.

Saddi has been trying to beat MSU for 18 seasons, putting together scouting reports at Oakland and Michigan and sometimes recruiting against Izzo’s staff head to head.

That brings with it, “a different perspective,” Saddi said. And yet, “30 years of relational equity.”

“We can really have some authentic conversations,” Saddi said. “Like I know that he's coming from a real place and vice versa. And I have enough relational equity to know that it's not personal. So if he's not happy about something or if he challenges me or the staff in any way, like it’s not a personal attack toward us. And some people can't handle that.

“I'm here to help this program get to another Final Four, get to another Monday night.”

Saddi has been a part of tough conversations before at MSU. After an open gym run at Jenison in the early 1990s, then-MSU head coach Jud Heathcote delivered the bad news: They wouldn’t be offering Saddi a scholarship; they were going in a different direction.

It worked out. Saddi wound up at Western Michigan, where he became the school’s all-time leading scorer and led the Broncos to an NCAA tournament win in 1998. He also met his wife there.

Winding up at MSU wasn't on the radar

There was “a connection and curiosity at first sight” between Channon and Saddi when they met as sophomores at Western Michigan in the mid-1990s. This, despite their initial encounter.

“The first conversation he and I ever had was how I resented college athletes for being so well taken care of when my grades were higher than all of theirs,” she said. “And I was specifically talking about the basketball team.”

Channon (pronounced Shannon) grew up in Detroit in what she described as a “typical working-class family” that, through some “very adult situations”, wound up being yanked into poverty while she was still a child.

“In that moment, a child kind of loses their innocence and then things that kids shouldn't be concerned about suddenly become daily things that you think about,” she said.

That experience drove Channon to be independent and self-sustaining and to make sure her own children never knew that feeling.

But when Saddi found himself without a job this spring, not long after she’d walked away from her own career — first as a high school teacher, then, after getting a doctorate degree, as a school administrator — the uncertainty felt familiar. And she could handle it.

“Saddi came from a very different world, where the adult problems, he didn't experience them until he was an adult,” Channon said. “I think it felt a little more disruptive to him.”

Winding up at MSU, despite Saddi’s family and community ties, wasn’t on their radar before this spring.

“For us, I think at some point, it became outside of our thinking process. Because maybe we started to think a little too much like fans and a little less like professionals, if you will,” Channon said. “I think there was always maybe some underlying notion that that's never happened before — where you go from one rival to the next overnight. It just seemed like, could that really happen? Because there just didn't seem to have been a precedent for it.”

Regardless of where they wound up, one decision had already been made: They were moving closer to their son Caleb’s track coach in Farmington. They didn’t want Caleb, 16, commuting from Ann Arbor or East Lansing in rush hour. He had made a serious commitment as a year-around track athlete. They wanted to remove any and all obstacles during his junior and senior years of high school, just like they had tried to do for their daughter, Sidney, 21, who’s a gymnast at Ohio State.

This is a family that has no trouble getting past rivalries for the sake of their children. If they’re supporting Sidney at a gymnastics meet, you might find Saddi wearing Ohio State gear.

Their latest move, this July, means for the next couple of years Saddi will have an hour commute some days. Or he’ll stay with his younger brother, Famoun, in East Lansing or his mother, Veda, who still lives on Lansing’s south side.

“She's excited for me to be a little bit closer,” Saddi said of his mother. “I can pop home any time after work or a late night, I can pop over there just to check in on her. Especially with my dad being gone, that's really important for all of us. And I know that she’ll be excited to be able to come to games and and support the program. They always have been, but it's just a little different now.”

When Saddi was coaching at Michigan, his parents supported him there, too. They never quite could bring themselves to wear Michigan gear, but they wore colors close enough to blend in.

MSU is different. Saddi has early memories of his father doing color commentary on MSU broadcasts in the 1980s and seeing Navy beat MSU at Jenison on Thanksgiving weekend 1986, with center David Robinson and his new colleague, MSU associate head coach Doug Wojcik, leading the Midshipmen.

Saddi played against two of his other MSU coaching colleagues — Thomas Kelley in high school, when Kelley was at Grand Rapids Union and Saddi at Sexton, and Jon Borovich when Borovich was a freshman at Central Michigan and Saddi the senior star at Western. He and Borovich then coached together for a year at Oakland. Izzo’s right-hand man and long-time assistant video coordinator, Doug Herner, taught Saddi in high school. It was Herner who first told Izzo about Saddi when he was just beginning his high school career. That was just after MSU athletic director Alan Haller finished at Sexton. Saddi’s known Haller forever, too.

Saddi’s familiarity with MSU extends to its current roster. Not only did he scout the Spartans while at Michigan, he recruited Jaden Akins, Jeremy Fears Jr., and incoming freshman Jesse McCulloch.

“It couldn't have been an easier transition for me personally,” Saddi said. “I've only been here in the office maybe three weeks, but I've been here all my life.

“As much as it's a feel-good story, you still have to be competent enough to be able to do the job. I appreciate that (Izzo) recognizes that. Like, this is cool. This is sentimental. But can you come in here and freakin’ do the job? I believe that my career and the successes that I've had throughout my career put me in a position to say, ‘Yeah, this also makes sense.’ ”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.