Photo courtesy of DAVE KNACHEL

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech assistant coach Ryan Odom (center) instructs point guard Hank Thorns.

BLACKSBURG -- Dave Odom was having dinner with his wife and youngest son at his Winston-Salem, N.C., home 12 years ago when he received some surprising news.

Ryan Odom told his father, then the men's basketball coach at Wake Forest, with some apprehension that he wanted to go into coaching, too.

"I said, 'What?' It just knocked me over," Dave Odom recalled in a phone interview. "My mouth just flew open."

Ryan was then a Hampden-Sydney basketball player, a few months away from graduating with an economics degree. Dave's other son, Lane, was a college assistant at the time.

Dave had always known Lane would follow him into coaching, but Ryan had never once talked of it. Dave had figured Ryan would soon begin a "big-money" business career.

So at that dinner, Dave tried to talk Ryan out of coaching

It didn't work. Ryan Odom, 33, is now in his fifth season as an assistant coach under Seth Greenberg at Virginia Tech.

"I'm very, very proud of what he's done," said Dave Odom, 65, now the coach at South Carolina.

"He's studied the game. He's studied it from the standpoint of how to teach the game and understand the game and relate to the players.

"A lot of the young coaches ... think the way to the top is solely through recruiting. But I've tried to stress to him, 'You can recruit all you want, but eventually you've got to coach these guys and you've got to relate to them.'"

When South Carolina (13-17) plays LSU in the SEC tournament today, it could mark the end of Dave Odom's coaching career.

He announced earlier this year he would retire at season's end.

Lane Odom has been out of college coaching since 2004, when he resigned from Quin Snyder's staff at Missouri in the wake of an NCAA investigation of the program. He is now the coach at Charlotte (N.C.) Latin School and a part-time college basketball TV analyst.

Ryan Odom, though, has no intention of leaving college coaching. He hopes to be a head coach himself one day -- just like his father.

"There are a lot of things he does that I'm going to try to emulate," Ryan Odom said. "He's got a lot of great friends through basketball. ... If I can have that, then I will have had a good life and a good career."

While working as an intern at Bank of America the summer before his senior year of college, Ryan Odom realized the finance world wasn't for him. But there was a career that did intrigue him.

"Being around Dad and Lane at that time, ... and seeing kind of the benefits of being a coach, the chance to impact people's lives, ... it was appealing," Ryan Odom said.

"I had been around it my whole life. ... I was always going to games. I was always going to a practice."

Ryan Odom talks to his father and brother by phone almost every day. Basketball advice flows both ways.

"He'll throw out points of view maybe that I haven't seen," said Dave Odom, who has won 405 games in 22 seasons. "He'll reject something that I say -- 'Well, Dad, that may be true, but you don't understand this ... '"

Ryan Odom lived in Durham, Winston-Salem, Greenville, N.C., and Charlottesville before returning to Winston-Salem for his high school years after his father got the Wake head-coaching job.

"I didn't see Dad as much as a normal kid might," Ryan Odom said.

That's because for much of his career, Dave Odom coached in the era before NCAA recruiting rules limited the time coaches could spend on the road.

Thanks in part to the change in rules and Greenberg's emphasis on family, Ryan Odom is able to spend more time with his wife and their two sons, Connor, 6, and Owen, 1, than his father spent with him.

"As proud as I am of him as a young coach ... I am even more proud of him as a father and husband," Dave Odom said.

"You spend an unbelievable number of days and hours away from your family, so he has committed himself to the premise of, 'I'm going to be home and I'm going to be attentive to my family.'

"He does a much better job than I did with that because it's just a different time."

Greenberg coached alongside Dave Odom at Five-Star camps and under Terry Holland at Virginia, so he has known Ryan since his future assistant was a kid. Greenberg gave Ryan his first job in the business, hiring him as his administrative assistant at South Florida in 1996.

Ryan Odom served as an assistant coach at Furman, UNC Asheville and American before reuniting with Greenberg at Tech.

He never coached under his father, though.

"We've talked about it on two or three occasions," Dave Odom said.

"I thought it was better for him to go a different direction, at least early, and get a different point of view. ... He's seen some different systems now, so I wouldn't have any problem with it now if I were to take on something else."

Odom's role on the Tech staff has expanded this season because of the departure of former assistant Brad Greenberg, now the coach at Radford.

The laid-back Odom has taken over for Seth's big brother as the "sounding board" for Tech's fiery head coach.

"Brad was probably the voice of reason. He's tried to embrace that role," Greenberg said of Ryan Odom.

Greenberg is glad to have Odom on his staff, continuing the family business of basketball.

"He was raised on it," Greenberg said.