ACC Coaching: New Kids On The Block

Three new schools and four new coaches.

Four new men’s basketball coaches join the ACC in 2024-25. That’s out of 18 schools, 22.2 percent. The only one of those programs that competed in the ACC last year was Louisville, which dispatched alum Kenny Payne, who lasted two miserably futile seasons.

Payne’s teams were 4-28, then 8-24. His first team had three league wins. His second won four. Payne is now an assistant to John Calipari at Arkansas.

Several new head coaches have ACC roots and all have modest major-college head coaching experience.

The Cardinals’ head coach is Pat Kelsey, highly successful at Winthrop and College of Charleston, where he replaced Earl Grant. Grant is now head coach at BC.

Kelsey, born in Cincinnati, has direct ACC coaching roots, working at Wake from the 2005 to 2009 seasons under first Skip Prosser and then Dino Gaudio. Prosser was head coach at Xavier in Cincinnati before moving to Winston-Salem. Gaudio, an assistant, stepped up to replace Prosser when his boss died in his office in 2007 after running recreationally in summer heat and humidity. Prosser was 56.

Kelsey later did an awkward imitation of Bobby Cremins, who finished his coaching career at Charleston. While at Winthrop Kelsey accepted the head coaching job at Massachusetts, only to change his mind 25 minutes before the press conference set to announce his hire. Cremins performed a comparable about-face with a near-jump from Georgia Tech to South Carolina in 1993, and jokingly called such a move “pulling a Cremins”. (Duke football coach Manny Diaz did a similar about-face between Temple and Miami in December 2018.)

Kelsey’s offensively aggressive Charleston teams were 75-27. The last two years they won consecutive Colonial Athletic Association titles, regular season and tournament, and were eliminated upon entering NCAA competition. He’d been considered a prime candidate for a big-time coaching job for the last several years.

The other coaching newcomer with ACC experience is Andy Enfield, hired by SMU after he was nudged out by Southern Cal. This season three of four new ACC schools got rid of its previous coach.

Early in his career Enfield, a high school valedictorian, served as an NBA assistant with Milwaukee and then Boston. He emerged as a renowned shooting coach, and worked for half a decade under Leonard Hamilton at Florida State.

Enfield’s first head coaching job was at Florida Gulf Coast, where he was 41-28 in 2012 and 2013. Newly elevated to Division I, the No. 15 Eagles were a brief sensation in 2013 as they reached the NCAA Sweet 16. Enfield’s “Dunk City” crew beat Georgetown and San Diego State before falling in the Sweet 16.

Having tasted high-profile success Enfield left Ft. Myers for Southern Cal in the Pac-12. His Trojans were 261-175 over 11 years and reached the NCAAs five times. Their best showing came in 2021 when they got to the Elite Eight and were dumped by top seeded Gonzaga.

California went with a proven Pac-12 quantity, former Stanford forward Mark Madsen. He arrived last season. Known since high school as “Mad Dog” for his hustle and physical play, the 6-9 Madsen played from 2000-09 in the NBA. Shaquille O’Neal said Madsen was the only player who could stop him during drills with the Lakers. “He used to beat me up in practice,” said the massive O’Neal.

After serving as an NBA assistant and a D-League head coach Madsen was hired in 2019-20 to run the team at Utah Valley, where he replaced Mark Pope, the new coach at Kentucky. (Utah Valley, cradle of coaches!) Madsen’s teams twice finished first in the Western Athletic Conference; the last two went 20-12 and 28-9. In 2024, his first season at Cal, the team was 13-19.

Unlike any of the ACC’s other recent additions, California’s program has an NCAA title to its credit, won under Hall of Famer Pete Newell in 1959. The Golden Bears also reached the Final Four in 1946 and 1960, the latter the same year Newell coached the US Olympic team to gold at Rome. Newell, renowned for his skillful grooming of post players, reportedly preferred the women’s game late in life because the players hewed more closely to the fundamentals.

Over at Cal’s Haas Pavilion, things haven’t gone so well lately. The Bears just completed their seventh straight losing season, with four 20-defeat efforts dampening enthusiasm in Berkeley. (Wonder why West Coast teams such as Cal and Stanford play in “pavilions” while eastern schools inhabit arenas?)

Then there’s Stanford, which just fired Jerod Haase after eight years. Haase played at Cal, and scored 13 points as a freshman in the Bears’ 1993 NCAA upset of Duke. After a year he transferred to Kansas and became a fixture in Roy Williams’ lineup. He went on to assist Williams at Kansas and North Carolina before taking his first head coach position at Alabama-Birmingham in 2012-13. He moved to Stanford, near his northern California roots, for the 2017 season.

The Cardinal — once also home to head coach and former Duke star Johnny Dawkins — posted losing marks in four of Haase’s eight seasons. They did win 20 games in 2020, but Covid put an end to postseason competition. Last year Stanford was unusually good from the 3-point arc. (The team’s .370 accuracy trailed only Utah in the Pac-12 and paled only compared to Duke in the ACC.)

Haase reportedly was put on notice his team needed to reach the NCAAs last season, but didn’t. That made it easier to emulate the ACC’s other new western enclaves to get a new coach.

Stanford’s coaching hire was reminiscent of Virginia’s when it brought in Tony Bennett in 2009-10. Like Bennett, Kyle Smith came to the ACC direct from basketball backwater Washington State. Smith, like Bennett, arrived with a reputation for coaching exactitude, in his case a mastery of analytics. Bennett had the “pack line” defense, Smith has what’s called “nerdball,” basing coaching decisions on analytics.

“He and his staff attempt to measure and value everything,” long-time sportswriter Brian Bennett shared in 2018. Chris Mooney, head coach at Richmond, called Smith “the smartest man in college basketball.” (Wasn’t that once said of NC State coach Herb Sendek, a Carnegie-Mellon grad?) Mooney added, “He’s really very intuitive and a very good evaluator of players. He also has a unique understanding of people and situations. Kyle would probably come to the same conclusions as his numbers, because he’s so intuitive.”

Smith won at Columbia in the Ivy League, then at San Francisco and most recently at Washington State. Even Smith’s life roots have a defensive tinge – he was born in El Paso, Texas, where Don Haskins’ Black-dominated squad used defensive pressure and a disciplined uptempo attack to shock Kentucky to defy racial preconceptions for the 1966 NCAA title.

Analytics has gained far more usage in sports since Smith arrived in the Pac-12 in 2018-19. Whether that alone can set Smith apart in the ACC is doubtful; others have picked up on the approach. But “Nerdball” was good enough to lead the Cougars to a 94-71 record over the past 5 years, including a 25-10 record in 2024 that earned an NCAA bid and honors for Smith as the Pac-12 Coach of the Year.