(Photo: Aiden Longbrake/WCSN)
TEMPE – After six weeks, a health scare, while navigating the Wild West that is the transfer portal, Randy Bennett stood in front of dozens of Sun Devil supporters for his long-awaited introductory press conference as ASU men’s basketball’s new head coach.
Bennett, a 63-year-old native of the Valley who went 589-228 across 25 seasons at Saint Mary’s, returned home shortly after being hired on March 23, but found himself in a hospital bed at the Mayo Clinic for a 10-day stay not long after. The veteran coach wasn’t able to return to the office until the eve of the portal opening and had to lean on his team of accomplished assistant coaches throughout the process.
By Thursday morning, the frenzy had died down enough for Bennett to address the media and meet with members of the Sun Devil Club at the Weatherup Center, ASU basketball’s practice facility. There’s still work to be done, as the roster needs to be rounded out, the staff finalized, and non-conference games scheduled, but Bennett and Co. have already laid the groundwork for a first year at his dream school, and with 12 confirmed players on the roster for next season as he tackles “a whole new card game.”
“People would often ask me, would I ever leave Saint Mary’s?” Bennett said. “Twenty years ago, I talked to (former athletic director) Lisa Love about this position, and I always thought this was a great job. So when people would ask me, I’d say, ‘There’s one: ASU.’”
Growing up in Mesa, Bennett’s relationship with ASU men’s basketball goes back decades.
He witnessed teams that featured the NBA talent of Fat Lever, Byron Scott, Sam Williams, and Alton Lister and saw the Sun Devils rise to as high as No. 3 in the AP Poll at the tail end of the 1980-81 season.
“Late 70s, 80s, ASU was (the) deal,” Bennett said. “The best players came here. You had to be the best of the best in Phoenix or Arizona to get an opportunity to go to ASU. That was my feel on what ASU was. ASU was powerful.”
The present day hasn’t been like the past.
The Sun Devils have gone 92-98, with only one NCAA Tournament appearance, since the start of the 2020-21 campaign, and the level of competition the program has had to contend with has only gone up after joining the Big 12 Conference, which featured five AP Top 25 teams in the last poll on April 7, two seasons ago.
Turning around a program while competing against a difficult table in the Big 12 is undoubtedly a tough task, but the best don’t back down.
“This conference is top one or two conferences in college basketball,” Bennett said. “There are some big-time programs. … I came here because I wanted to be part of that challenge, and I want players that want to be part of that challenge, and that challenge is you’re going to go play against the best.”
While Bennett joined the Sun Devils to take on a new challenge at a familiar school that sits at the power conference level, the fact that his old program’s dancing partner, Gonzaga, is leaving the West Coast Conference for the Pac-12 Conference, effective July 1, played a factor in his decision to leave Saint Mary’s.
“We (Saint Mary’s) won the league the last four years, they’ve (Gonzaga) tied with us for two,” Bennett said. “So, I kind of felt like, ‘Man, I don’t know how much more we can do.’ And with Gonzaga leaving, it’s going to be harder to do, not easier to do. You’re not going to get Quad 1 games, which in a league like the WCC, you have to get those games, and you have to get some in league.”
Bennett also mentioned that he feels he’s left Saint Mary’s in a better spot than the one it was in when he inherited the reins of the program, which helped to make it an “easy decision” when athletic director Graham Rossini called him.
Unfortunately, when Bennett arrived in Tempe, he was dealt an unexpected hand.
The new head coach didn’t disclose the details of his stay at the Mayo Clinic, but told the media and the members of the Sun Devil Club in attendance that he was out of the office for two weeks after his hospital stay.
Rossini later told the media that Bennett’s health started to turn in the afternoon after his arrival. The next morning, he was driven to the Mayo Clinic.
According to Rossini, John Anderson, the team’s athletic trainer, “did an incredible job identifying the situation.”
“Thank God for the Mayo Clinic,” Bennett said. “That’s the one thing I know. I don’t know where I’d be without them. … Now, I’m catching my stride and able to work long days, longer days. … I feel good now.”
With Bennett on the mend at the time, it was up to his coaching staff to stack the deck for success in the transfer portal. Luckily, Bennett brought a royal flush of coaching talent with him to Tempe.
One of the biggest names that Bennett was able to bring in was Rick Croy, the head coach of Cal Baptist from the 2013-14 season up until this past campaign, when he led the Lancers to their first NCAA Tournament appearance in program history, having guided them through the jump from the Division II level ahead of the 2018-19 season.
Croy was a member of Bennett’s coaching staff at Saint Mary’s from 2010-13, and despite making headway as a head coach, the appeal of a reunion led him back to his old boss.
“I just felt like this moment in college basketball, and where I was at in my career, the timing was incredible,” Croy said. “We’re here, we know it’s a great challenge. We know how we want to do it, now we just got to go execute.”
Croy was the second member of his family to commit to ASU, as his son, incoming freshman guard JRob Croy, flipped his commitment from Saint Mary’s to ASU in the wake of Bennett taking the job.
“It didn’t take him long to determine that this is where he wanted to be,” Croy said. “Shortly thereafter that, the opportunity for me presented itself, and I kind of had to check with him. It was kind of like an inversion of advice.”
Like Croy, David Patrick, a former Division I head coach who most recently served as an associate head coach at LSU, was unable to pass up the opportunity to live and work in the Valley and reunite with Bennett, whom he worked under from 2006-10.
Patrick was raised in Australia and is a member of the national team’s coaching staff, which has helped him bring talent from down under to his collegiate teams. He was able to show off the skill in the portal by helping to bring rising sophomore point guard Joel Foxwell and rising redshirt freshman small forward Marcus Vaughns to Tempe.
“It’s fortunate I’ve worked with Randy before,” Patrick said. “I knew what kind of player he wanted, what kind of person he wanted to be around. When you work for somebody before, you kind of know how he wants things done. He says for us it was a great job, but we knew what we were doing, what we were getting into.”
The staff – which also features Joe Rahon and EJ Rowland, who both came over from Saint Mary’s, and Drew Seidenberger, a former assistant and associate commissioner of the Pac-12, who will fill a general manager-like role – was able to bring in a number of intriguing transfers beyond just the Australians, including an ace in the No. 9 transfer portal player in On3’s national rankings, rising senior power forward Paulius Murauskas from Saint Mary’s.
As things stand, ASU currently has 12 players on its roster, with only two being returners – rising senior guard Bryce Ford, who’s recovering from hip surgery but could be back by October, and rising redshirt junior guard Vijay Wallace, who missed all of last year with an ankle injury that required surgery.
At the press conference, Bennett was able to share his vision for roster construction, expressing a desire for players who aren’t necessarily chasing NIL money and want to be part of something bigger than themselves, developing and winning over time at ASU.
“You got to decide how you’re rolling,” Bennett said. “You’re just going to try and buy a team and change out 10 guys every year? I’m not doing it, and you don’t have to do it. We all agree, you have to double down on leadership. … (You) just got to find out which guys you can work with, and which guys you feel like you can win with and run the program the way you want to run it.”
NIL might not be everything, and Bennett did say that he and his staff aren’t opposed to NIL, but it can be a difference maker. Bennett was transparent in saying that rising sophomore center Massamba Diop, who transferred to Gonzaga after averaging 13.6 points per game and 5.8 rebounds per game as a freshman, wanted a “number” that was “too high.”
Only time will tell how Bennett’s strategies fare in the Valley, but he’s succeeded with fewer resources at Saint Mary’s, turning a non-contender into a perennial tournament team. Year one will be about building the right culture and foundation for the program, but Bennett and his staff have their sights set on more than just that.
“I want to be here,” Bennet said. “My dream job. I thought, I still do. I think you can win championships here.”
