College basketball is played by the young and for the young, which is why it never gets old. For all the controversy and contradictions inherent in college athletics, this sport retains a competitive purity that is hard to find elsewhere. We realized just how much we appreciated that when the NCAA Tournament was canceled last March, leaving college hoops as the only major U.S. sport that was unable to complete its season. But that’s OK, because when young people play, tomorrow is always coming, a thought as comforting as the sound of leather tickling twine.
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It is in that spirit that we have compiled a list of 40 influential people in college basketball who are under the age of 40. We canvassed not just for the usual suspects (head coaches and up-and-coming assistants) but for people in all corners of the sport who are planting in the grass roots, toiling behind the scenes, speaking in front of a camera or efforting at a desk (probably while on a Zoom call). As the sport’s long-awaited rebirth approaches next month, this list, presented in alphabetical order, should serve as a primer not just for what’s happening in college basketball but what’s about to happen — and who’s going to make it happen.
Herewith, our one shining 40 under 40:
Adam Amin
Title: Play-by-play broadcaster, Fox Sports | Age: 33
Amin has an inordinate amount of experience for someone so young. This season he can be heard calling college basketball games on Fox, which in June plucked him away from ESPN and will also have him calling NFL and Major League Baseball games. Amin was just 24 when ESPN hired him in 2011. His star rose quickly during his nine years there calling mostly college football and basketball, as well as pro football, pro basketball, volleyball, tennis, softball, wrestling, and even the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. He also called two women’s Final Fours. Amin got his start as an undergraduate at Valparaiso, where he worked for the student-run radio station and called minor league baseball games. He will also be the play-by-play TV announcer for the Chicago Bulls beginning next season.
Chad Babel
Title: EYBL senior scout, Nike | Age: 34
Babel’s work for Nike gives him considerable cachet in the grassroots world. He serves as the company’s liaison to programs and players across the country, particularly in the East, and he is a member of the committee that selects who gets invited to play in the Elite 100 Camp as well as the Jordan Brand Classic. Babel cut his teeth with the New York Gauchos, who play on Nike’s prestigious EYBL circuit, and he later spent two years as a graduate assistant at Arkansas. Babel also worked as the director of elite camps for Hoop Group, and in 2015 he founded MADE Hoops, which has evolved into one of the premier grassroots circuits for middle schoolers. Several Division I coaches around the country subscribe to the MADE Hoops scouting service.
Mike Boynton
Title: Head coach, Oklahoma State | Age: 38
Boynton was pressed into surprise duty in 2017 when his boss, Brad Underwood, left Oklahoma State after just one season to take over at Illinois. The school promoted Boynton to the head chair even though he was 35 and had never been a college head coach. Boynton has kept the Cowboys competitive in the Big 12 while rebuilding the program, and this season he has the nation’s top recruit in 6-8 point guard Cade Cunningham. Even though the NCAA served Oklahoma State with a one-year postseason ban because of violations committed by a former assistant, Boynton’s entire recruiting class and most of his players elected to remain in Stillwater. That speaks volumes about their faith in him.
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Lee Butler
Title: ACC assistant commissioner for men’s basketball | Age: 36
Butler began his college basketball journey in 2003 as a freshman at Miami, when he started off as a practice player for the women’s basketball team. At the start of his junior year, he was invited to walk onto the men’s team. When his senior year was over he was given the Ultimate Teammate Award, and after graduating he secured an internship with the ACC office in Greensboro, N.C. He returned to Miami to work in the event management office in the athletic department by day while he pursued his master’s in sport administration at night. In 2010, Lee returned to the ACC to work in the championships department, where was assigned mostly to Olympic sports, and three years later he was promoted to his current position, where his duties include managing the conference schedule, overseeing the ACC tournament and working with the league’s supervisor of officials. He has been the conference’s point guard in developing protocols to play during the pandemic, and he serves as vice chair for the ACC’s racial and social justice committee.
Jamion Christian
Title: George Washington head coach | Age: 38
Christian has his work cut out for him in trying to revive GW, a program that has been to just one NCAA Tournament since 2007, but he has the chops to get it done. He was just 29 when his alma mater, Mount St. Mary’s, hired him to be head coach in 2012. Over the next six years, Christian took the Mountaineers to two NCAA Tournaments and finished first and second in the NEC the final two seasons. He then spent one season at Siena, helping the Saints to win 11 games in the MAAC after winning four the previous season, before leaving for GW in 2019. The Colonials finished 10th in the Atlantic 10 in Christian’s first season, but his track record suggests improvement is on the way, and the up-tempo, pressing style he learned during his season as an assistant to Shaka Smart at VCU should prove attractive to recruits.
Adam Cohen
Title: Assistant coach, Stanford | Age: 34
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It has been a while since Stanford basketball was relevant, but the Cardinal recently landed a consensus top-20 high school senior for the second consecutive year. Much of that credit goes to Cohen, who has been the program’s associate head coach since 2018. Cohen began as a student manager at Arizona when Lute Olson was the coach there. He later worked at USC, Rice, Harvard and Vanderbilt before being hired by Jerod Haase in 2016. Cohen specializes in developing point guards, but he is an ace recruiter who has a hand in all aspects of the program. If the Cardinal continues to sign elite recruits and starts winning a few more games, Cohen will emerge as a candidate for head jobs.
Jordan Cornette
Title: Host/analyst, ACC Network and ESPN | Age: 37
Cornette played basketball for Notre Dame from 2001-05, and he still holds the school’s career record for blocks. He is developing a diverse portfolio as a broadcaster that goes well beyond that pedigree. On top of his basketball duties, Cornette serves as host for ACC Network’s main football studio program. He also co-hosts two ESPN Radio shows — Sunday NFL GameDay, which he hosts with his wife, Shae Peppler Cornette, and the “Spain and Company” weekday show. Prior to coming to ESPN, Cornette was a studio host and analyst for “Campus Insiders,” a co-host of the “Kap & Co” weekday show on ESPN1000 in Chicago, and he was a college basketball game and studio analyst for CBS Sports Network.
Dalen Cuff
Title: ESPN analyst | Age: 37
We don’t see too many obscure Ivy League players make it big as broadcasters, but Cuff is doing just that at ESPN. He played for Columbia for four years, was named captain as a senior and is among the school’s leaders in games played, single-season 3-point percentage and made 3-pointers. Upon graduation, Cuff transitioned into the analyst’s chair for Columbia basketball games, and he later worked for NBC Sports Network and MSG Varsity. ESPN hired him as a game and studio analyst in 2016, and three years later the network featured him in its launch of the ACC Network. During the season Cuff also anchors ACCN’s signature studio show, “Nothing But Net,” as well as “All-ACC,” a nightly news show.
Evan Daniels
Title: Agent, CAA | Age: 35
When CAA hired Daniels over the summer to work with uber agent Jimmy Sexton in its coaches’ division, it acquired a diligent, persistent and well-connected portal into the college basketball world. Daniels was 18 when he started covering recruiting, and over the next two decades he became the sports’s leading recruiting expert through his work at Scout.com, 247Sports and Fox Sports. Daniels also spent six years as a member of the USA Basketball’s selection committee and was a regular voter for the McDonald’s All-American Game. In the years before moving to CAA, Daniels operated three scouting and consulting businesses for both college and NBA teams, including one that focused on international prospects. His “Sidelines with Evan Daniels” podcast routinely attracted heavy hitters such as Aaron Rodgers, Charles Barkley, Roy Williams and Donovan Mitchell.
Baker Dunleavy
Title: Head coach, Quinnipiac | Age: 38
Dunleavy comes from strong basketball bloodlines. His father, Mike Sr., played 10 years in the NBA and was a head coach for four NBA teams. His brother, Mike Jr., won an NCAA championship at Duke, played 15 years in the NBA and is now the assistant GM for the Golden State Warriors. Baker didn’t reach those same levels as a player — he appeared in 28 games during his three years at Villanova — but he has gotten a terrific head start on his coaching career. After graduation he tried working for Merrill Lynch but soon returned to Villanova in 2010 as director of basketball operations. Within three years he was made associate head coach and held that position as the Wildcats won the 2016 NCAA championship. Over the last three seasons at Quinnipiac, a school that joined Division I in 1998 and has never played in the NCAA Tournament, Dunleavy’s teams have a .500 record in the MAAC.
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Jamie Erdahl
Title: Sideline reporter/studio host, CBS | Age: 31
Erdahl played basketball and softball at St. Olaf College, a Division III school in her home state of Minnesota, before transferring to American and earning a degree in broadcasting and communications. Since coming to CBS in 2014, she has been a featured sideline reporter during CBS and Turner’s coverage of the NCAA Tournament. Erdahl has also hosted CBS Sports Network’s college basketball studio shows, and on fall Saturdays she works the sidelines for the “SEC on CBS” team. Erdahl also has extensive experience reporting on women’s college basketball, most memorably in 2017 when she covered Geno Auriemma’s 1,000th win at UConn for NESN.
Neel Ganta
Title: Graduate assistant, Illinois | Age: 22
Ganta was born and raised in Manhattan, Kan., as the son of Indian immigrants who work in the sciences at Kansas State. When he was young he played basketball with Tyler Underwood, whose father, Brad, was an assistant coach at the time with the Wildcats. Ganta attended K-State as a financial analysis and investment management major, but his passion for basketball was so great that he turned down a lucrative job offer from JPMorgan Chase to pursue a career in basketball analytics. In the summer of 2019, right before starting an internship with the Boston Celtics, Ganta traveled to Champaign, Ill., and showed Underwood, now the Illini’s head coach, an analytics project explaining how Underwood’s up-tempo, pressing system was putting his teams at a disadvantage because they fouled too much. As a result, Underwood implemented a more deliberate style, which helped Illinois go from being ranked 338th in the country in defensive free-throw rate to 20th last season and tie for third in the Big Ten. Since Underwood hired Ganta this summer, he has designed a web app that players and coaches can use to access the playbook, analytics tables, scouting reports and video, among other goodies. Underwood may be right when he says Ganta is too smart to be a basketball coach, but if he wants to stay in the business, he’ll have no problem finding work.
Brandon Gaudin
Title: Play-by-play broadcaster, Fox Sports and Big Ten Network | Age: 36
Gaudin calls NFL and college football games, and he is also the play-by-play voice of Madden NFL for EA Sports. But he has made a special imprint on college basketball, not just in his broadcast roles for Fox and BTN but for the brilliant “One Shining Moment-Quarantine Edition” video he produced inside his Atlanta apartment shortly after the 2020 NCAA Tournament was canceled. To create that video, Gaudin ordered a bunch of jerseys from Amazon (as well as a bag of confetti and other props), recorded the footage with his iPhone, and spliced it together using iMovie on his Macbook. The process took five long days, and the video has attracted more than 110,000 views on YouTube. As an undergrad at Butler, Gaudin was named Most Outstanding Communications Student, and he got his professional start calling Butler basketball games before spending three years as the voice of Georgia Tech football and basketball.
Todd Golden
Title: Head coach, San Francisco | Age: 35
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After finishing up his playing career at Saint Mary’s, where he is still the school’s all-time leading free throw shooter at 83.2 percent, Golden tried selling advertising for a living, but he couldn’t shake the hoops bug. So in 2012 he went to work for Kyle Smith at Columbia. After two years as director of basketball operations at Auburn, Golden was hired again by Smith to be an assistant at San Francisco. In 2019, Smith was hired away by Washington State, and USF picked Golden to replace him at the ripe age of 33. During his first season Golden led the Dons to a 22-12 record and 9-7 finish in the WCC.
Courtney Green
Title: Referee | Age: 36
Green was 24 when he started reffing junior high school and grassroots games as a way to make a few bucks on the side. A year later, an NCAA referee watched him work and suggested he give officiating the old college try. Green began working Division II and III games in 2009, and three years later he was brought into Division I. Since then he has distinguished himself with his judgment and poise while calling high-pressure games in the Big Ten, AAC and other leagues. Green has officiated two Big Ten tournament semifinal games as well as two Sweet 16 games in the NCAA Tournament. If he continues on this path, it’s only a matter of time before he is wielding his whistle at the Final Four.
Robbie Hummel
Title: Studio and game analyst, Big Ten Network and ESPN | Age: 31
Since ending his playing career in 2017, Hummel has wasted no time establishing himself as a high-profile broadcaster. He is familiar to BTN’s audience from his career at Purdue from 2007-12, during which he was named All-Big Ten three times and led the Boilermakers to a Sweet 16. Hummel played two seasons for the Minnesota Timberwolves and ended his career in Russia. Even while he was playing Hummel was preparing for a career in broadcasting. While he was at Purdue he did some work with CBS and SiriusXM radio, and in 2015 he participated in a sportscaster camp at Syracuse that was set up by the National Basketball Players Association. Hummel still breaks a sweat on the court once in a while, and he recently won a gold medal at the 2019 FIBA 3×3 World Cup in Amsterdam.
Casey Jacobsen
Title: Analyst, Pac 12 Network and Fox Sports 1 | Age: 39
Jacobsen came to Stanford in 2002 as a McDonald’s All-American and was named all-Pac-12 three times, but he always knew he wanted to get into broadcasting when he was done playing. The summer after his freshman season, he did a two-week internship at Sunshine Network in Florida, where he was mentored by Charles Davis, who is now his colleague at Fox. The Phoenix Suns selected Jacobsen in the first round of the 2002 draft, and he spent 12 years playing professionally in the NBA and in Europe. In 2008 he participated in the NBPA’s broadcast seminar at Syracuse. He has brought that diligent approach to his television work, and he is not afraid to be sharply critical when the situation calls for it. Along with his FS1 and Pac-12 Network duties, Jacobsen has worked as an analyst for the Suns and for Time Warner Cable, and he has called WCC games for Spectrum SportsNet.
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Joel Justus
Title: Assistant coach, Kentucky | Age: 38
In 2014, John Calipari hired Justus to be Kentucky’s director of analytics. That was a big leap from Justus’ previous job as the coach at Davidson Day High School in North Carolina, but he has continued to elevate. The following year Justus became special assistant to the head coach, and over the past four seasons he has worked as a fulltime assistant. With the summertime departure of Kentucky’s top assistant, Kenny Payne, for the New York Knicks, Justus will have an expanded role for the Wildcats this season. The increased responsibilities and exposure should put him in line to become a college head coach in the near future.
Samson Kayode
Title: Assistant national team director, USA Basketball | Age: 35
USA Basketball has become a force in college basketball recruiting through its Junior National Team program, and Kayode’s role in overseeing that gives him considerable influence. Part of Kayode’s responsibilities includes helping to decide which players should be invited. He also designs and implements a curriculum that develops their minds as well as their skills, and works closely with parents to ensure they also have the information and life skills they need. Beyond the junior program, Kayode is involved in identifying which NBA and NBA G League players should be invited to try out for one of USA Basketball’s teams. Kayode has experience in the NBA, having worked for the Golden State Warriors for two years as a video intern and then for the Detroit Pistons as a video coordinator and college scout. He started as a student manager for the basketball team at Morgan State, and he later served as the men’s basketball video coordinator at New Mexico State while he earning his master’s degree there.
Kerry Kenny
Title: Big Ten assistant commissioner, public affairs | Age: 35
Kenny’s basketball playing career ended at Lafayette, where he started as a manager and ended up a three-year letter winner and team captain. As a senior he served as the national chair of the NCAA’s student-athlete advisory committee, which sent him into a career in athletic administration. After starting his career as a media and external relations assistant at the Patriot League, Kerry is now in his 12th year with the Big Ten. He works out of the league’s New York office, where his duties include overseeing game operations, public relations, television administration and basketball scheduling. That means working closely with all of the league’s TV partners, which can serve as a breeding ground for developing relationships that often lead to future job offers. In recent years, Kenny has been a leader in the Big Ten’s efforts to enhance its health and concussion protocols, and he has been at the forefront in developing testing procedures in response to the pandemic.
Brandin Knight
Title: Assistant coach, Rutgers | Age: 38
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As a quick, hard-nosed point guard at Pitt from 1999-2003, Knight led the Panthers to two Sweet 16s and was named an All-American, and he still holds the school’s career records for assists and steals. He spent 10 years on the coaching staff at his alma mater, the last eight as a fulltime assistant, before going to Rutgers in 2016 to help Steve Pikiell resurrect a program that had long been considered a laughingstock. No one laughed at the Scarlet Knights last season as they went 11-9 in the Big Ten and put themselves in position to reach their first NCAA Tournament since 1991. Knight helped Pikiell land an excellent incoming recruiting class. If the momentum keeps building, Knight’s prospects as a soon-to-be head coach will rise accordingly.
Ulric Maligi
Title: Assistant coach, Texas Tech | Age: 36
Maligi has an impressive track record since graduating cum laude from Howard in 2006. At 21, he became the youngest assistant in Division I when he was hired at UT Arlington. After stints at Stephen F. Austin and Houston, Maligi spent three seasons working for Larry Brown at SMU. By the time Chris Beard hired Maligi at Texas Tech in 2019, he had spent 13 years working in the Lone Star State. Maligi played a critical role in helping Beard land arguably the best recruiting class in school history, and he helped the Red Raiders stay ranked for much of last season despite losing four starters from the team that reached the 2019 NCAA championship game.
Matt McCall
Title: UMass head coach | Age: 38
It helps to have highly successful mentors, and McCall had one of the best in Billy Donovan. When McCall was a student at Florida, where his father was a three-time letter winner in football, he was a manager on Donovan’s teams, and he started his career as the Gators’ director of basketball operations. After spending three years as an assistant at Florida Atlantic, McCall returned to Gainesville and worked as an assistant for four more seasons. In 2015 he became the head coach at Chattanooga, where he was named the Southern Conference’s coach of the year after leading the Mocs to a league championship in his first season. McCall is now entering his fourth season at UMass, and if the Minutemen, who were the seventh-youngest team in the country last season, show the improvement that many expect, McCall will find himself with some attractive options in the near future.
Gerry McNamara
Title: Assistant coach, Syracuse | Age: 37
McNamara was a bona fide legend as a player at Syracuse. As a freshman, the Scranton, Pa., native hit six 3-pointers in the 2003 NCAA championship game to lift the Orange to a victory over Kansas. As a senior, he was the subject of Jim Boeheim’s famous postgame rant at the 2006 Big East tournament arguing that “without Gerry McNamara, we wouldn’t have won 10 fucking games this year.” The Orange is still winning games with McNamara, who returned to his alma mater in 2009 as a graduate assistant and is now entering his 12th season on Boeheim’s staff. In 2015 the school announced that then-assistant Mike Hopkins would succeed Boeheim in 2018, but Hopkins left to become the coach at Washington, which prompted Boeheim to scuttle his retirement plans altogether. Boeheim turns 76 next month, and although there is no official succession plan at the moment, chances are high that McNamara will be the next man up when Boeheim decides to hang up his whistle.
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Brian Michaelson
Title: Assistant coach, Gonzaga | Age: 38
Michaelson was a pretty good high school player in his hometown of Beaverton, Ore., but he knew he wasn’t destined for a big-time playing career. So he enrolled at Gonzaga and joined the team as a walk-on in hopes of someday becoming a coach. Midway through his junior season, Michaelson was put on scholarship and he was named a co-captain as a senior. He returned in 2008 to take a job as an administrative assistant, was promoted three years later to director of basketball operations and then moved up to fulltime assistant in 2013. Mark Few has lost several key assistants in the seven years, but Michaelson has helped Gonzaga continue to recruit like the blue chip program it is and rack up more NCAA Tournament wins than just about any other team in the country.
Wes Miller
Title: Head coach, UNC Greensboro | Age: 37
There’s a reason Miller is frequently mentioned as a candidate whenever a power conference job comes open. He still carries the sheen of his playing days at North Carolina, when he began as a walk-on transfer, earned a scholarship as well as a spot in the starting lineup, and then wrote a book about his experience. Miller was early in his second season as an assistant at UNC Greensboro in 2011 when coach Mike Dement resigned. The school tapped Miller as the interim head coach, and he did so well he go the job the following spring. Now entering his ninth season, Miller is the winningest coach in school history and the longest-tenured head coach in the Southern Conference. He has twice been named SoCon coach of the year, has led the Spartans to two regular-season championships, and two years ago took them to the NCAA Tournament, where they lost by just four points to fourth-seeded Gonzaga in the first round.
Luke Murray
Title: Assistant coach, Louisville | Age: 35
Murray is another high-major veteran assistant whose name pops up frequently when jobs come open. He has been in the running for vacancies at Loyola (Md.) and UNC Wilmington, and in 2019 he turned down Buffalo because he believed Louisville was primed for a huge season. Murray has been an assistant to Chris Mack for the last six years, three at Xavier and three at Louisville. At both places he helped Mack’s teams bring in highly ranked recruiting classes and qualify for the NCAA Tournament. Murray got his start as an undergrad at Fairfield, when he would spend weekends networking at recruiting events such as the ABCD Camp in New Jersey. Shortly after graduating he was hired to be a graduate assistant under Sean Miller at Arizona, and he later worked on Dan Hurley’s staffs at Wagner and Rhode Island.
Kyle Neptune
Title: Assistant coach, Villanova | Age: 35
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Villanova has had a historic run of success this decade, and Neptune, who played at Lehigh, has been there for most of it. He is on his second stint at Villanova. The first was from 2008-10 when he was the video coordinator for the Wildcats’ 2009 Final Four team. After spending three years as an assistant at Niagara, Neptune returned in 2013 to the Main Line, where he has helped Villanova win seven Big East championships in eight years as well as two national titles.
Kevin Pauga
Title: Associate athletic director, Michigan State | Age: 38
When Pauga was working as Tom Izzo’s director of basketball operations in 2015, he was the subject of a New York Times profile that argued his facility with spreadsheets was giving the Spartans a competitive advantage. The former MSU student manager was such a whiz at data analytics that as a side project he launched a computer rankings website called KPISports.net, which has since become one of the main metrics the NCAA’s men’s basketball committee uses to put together the bracket. Pauga has served as a data analyst for the Big Ten, helping the league with conference scheduling and advanced statistics, and this year he developed an online portal that is enabling schools across the country to rebuild their nonconference schedules in real time.
Richard Pitino
Title: Head coach, Minnesota | Age: 38
Pitino has been in the limelight for so long it’s hard to believe he’s not yet 40. He was 30 when he was first hired as a head coach by Florida International in 2012. He stayed there just one season before heading to Minnesota to replace Tubby Smith. In his first season Pitino led the Golden Gophers to the NIT championship, and he has since taken them to two NCAA Tournaments and was named Big Ten coach of the year in 2017. Prior to becoming a head coach, Pitino spent eight years as an assistant at Louisville and Florida, among other places, and was associate head coach at Louisville under his father, Rick, as the Cardinals reached the 2012 Final Four.
Bob Richey
Title: Head coach, Furman | Age: 37
Richey is entering his fourth season as Furman’s head coach, and his 10th with the program. He led the Paladins to four straight 20-win seasons for the first time in school history, and his .737 win percentage ranks ninth nationally among active coaches. In 2019, Furman entered the AP Top 25, which was also a first for the program, and had the distinction of notching road wins in November over two schools, Loyola and Villanova, that had played in the previous season’s Final Four. The Paladins followed that up last season by going 25-7 and 15-3 in the SoCon. Before coming to Furman as an assistant in 2011, Richey spent five seasons on the staff at Charleston Southern.
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Niko Roberts
Title: NCAA coordinator of men’s basketball championships | Age: 28
Roberts has been preparing for this role his entire life. His father, Norm, is a former head coach at St. John’s and a longtime assistant to Bill Self at Illinois and now Kansas. Niko was a four-year walk-on for the Jayhawks and was hired by the NCAA in 2016. He works closely with the men’s basketball committee as it selects and seeds the bracket, and he oversees operations at sites during the first two weeks of the tournament. Roberts also works with USA Basketball and the NBA Academies to produce the Next Generation Sunday event at the Final Four, and he is one of the main directors of the NCAA College Basketball Academy, the newly created grassroots event for more than 1,000 high school prospects. Roberts works closely with Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s vice president of men’s basketball, which exposes him to consequential decisions that touch all areas of the sport.
Kellen Sampson
Title: Assistant coach, Houston | Age: 35
Sampson began his college basketball journey as walk-on at Oklahoma. After his father, Kelvin, left OU for Indiana, Kellen finished his career under Jeff Capel and was given the team’s Most Inspirational Award. Sampson worked as an assistant at Indiana, Oklahoma, Stephen F. Austin and Appalachian State before rejoining his father on the bench in 2014 at Houston, where they have transformed the Cougars into a top-25 program. Kellen is Houston’s designated successor as head coach when Kelvin, 65, leaves or retires.
Jon Scheyer
Title: Assistant coach, Duke | Age: 33
Scheyer put an indelible stamp on the program as a senior guard on Duke’s 2010 championship team. He joined Mike Krzyzewski’s staff in 2014 and four years later was promoted to associate head coach. That puts him in prime position to get a head job in a high-major program, much like former Duke assistants Tommy Amaker, Johnny Dawkins, Chris Collins, Jeff Capel and Steve Wojciechowski have done. And if Scheyer stays in Durham, he possibly could succeed Coach K when he retires.
Jordan Sperber
Title: Owner, Hoop Vision | Age: 27
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The breakdown videos that Sperber posts on his @hoopvision68 Twitter feed are mesmerizing, and his multi-platform content streams are devoured by fans and coaches alike. It all started when he was a hoop-addled high school junior in Delmar, N.Y. That’s when Sperber started Hoop Vision, a blog and Twitter feed focusing on the X’s and O’s of basketball. Sperber graduated from Villanova in three years but was not involved with the basketball program. He started doing some consulting for New Mexico State while still an undergrad, and then buffed up his basketball knowledge as a grad assistant at Nevada for a season and a video coordinator at New Mexico State for two. In 2018, Sperber left to focus fulltime on growing Hoop Vision. He still does some private consulting for teams and publishes a digital NCAA Tournament preview, but he is best known for the content he produces for his Twitter feed, newsletter, podcast and YouTube channel. Two years ago, Sperber had 2,000 Twitter followers. He now has more than 26,000, and his influence will only grow.
Travis Steele
Title: Head coach, Xavier | Age: 38
When Steele, a native of Danville, Ind., was an undergraduate at Butler, he served as an assistant varsity coach at a high school. He later spent two years as an assistant at Indiana before going to Xavier in 2009 to work for Sean Miller as director of basketball operations. Steele was promoted to associate head coach in 2015, and three years ago was named head coach after Chris Mack left for Louisville. In his first season Steele coached a depleted roster to a third-place finish in the Big East, and last season he led the Musketeers to a 19-13 record.
Brian Thornton
Title: Associate commissioner for basketball, AAC | Age: 37
Thornton was hired by the AAC last Tuesday, and he comes at a critical time as the league just lost one of its marquee programs, UConn, to the Big East. Thornton has the background and tools to help the league recover and grow. He played for two years at Vanderbilt and then transferred to Xavier, where he became that school’s first academic All-American. After trying to play professionally for a year, Thornton returned to Xavier to work for Chris Mack as director of basketball Operations. Over the next nine seasons he was an assistant coach at Furman, Winthrop and Ball State, but he didn’t have a desire for a long career in coaching. So in 2019 he took a job with the NCAA’s basketball development department, which put him in communication with college coaches, apparel companies, agents, grassroots coaches, administrators, pro leagues and other stakeholders around the sport.
Will Wade
Title: Head coach, LSU | Age: 37
Wade has been a fast-rising star in the coaching profession, but at this point he is being talked about for all the wrong reasons. He started as a student manager at Clemson, was an assistant on VCU’s 2011 Final Four team, got his first head coaching job at 30 when Chattanooga hired him in 2013, returned to VCU as head coach for two years after Shaka Smart got hired by Texas, and over the last two seasons has coached LSU to first- and second-place finishes in the SEC and a spot in the 2019 Sweet 16. Wade, however, has been in the NCAA’s crosshairs the last two years after he was heard on an FBI wiretap referring to a “strong-ass offer” he made to a prospective recruit. LSU has not yet been served with a notice of allegations, but the NCAA’s enforcement staff has already referred the case to the recently created Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which indicates the violations being investigated are of the most complex kind. That sets the stage for an interesting split screen this winter, as the Tigers will be good enough on the court to contend for an SEC title, but their head coach has to steer the ship through the gathering storm.
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Cavan Walsh
Title: Agent, WME Sports | Age: 29
Walsh built his brand as a bulldog recruiting reporter and analyst in the Midwest. He covered high school basketball for two websites based in Illinois, and he helped bring high-profile grassroots teams to play in a Nike-sponsored tournament operated by ChicagoHoops.com. He was also one of the co-founders of the High Academic Showcase camp. Five years ago Walsh was hired at CAA by Bret Just, who is one of the country’s most prominent agents for college basketball coaches. Walsh came with Just to WME last year, and he has continued to work with some of Just’s fast-rising clients, including Kermit Davis, Mike Hopkins, Craig Smith and Brad Underwood. Walsh also works with three assistant coaches who made this list: Luke Murray, Kyle Neptune and Kellen Sampson.
Katy Young-Staudt
Title: Managing Director, Ventura Partners | Age: 38
Young-Staudt is a prominent operator in the search-firm space, and she has led or assisted in dozens of head coaching searches in men’s and women’s basketball. That includes recent searches conducted on behalf of Washington State (which hired Kyle Smith), Texas A&M (Buzz Williams) and Wake Forest (Steve Forbes). Young-Staudt previously spent 7½ years working at Eastman & Beaudine, one of the leading search firms in the country. She has also worked as director of recruiting at Learfield, assistant athletic director for marketing at UC Riverside, and a vice president for development at Coaching Charities.
(Top illustration: Adrian Guzman / The Athletic)