For Donny Daniels, Jeff Judkins, Guy Beach, Joe Cravens and thousands of other assistant coaches, this is the second season. It's recruiting season for college basketball, true, but it's also the season for polishing up the resume.
Weber State will be hiring its new head coach any day, and that means some lucky assistant coach will be getting a good job, with good players, in a good location. Or the job could go to a head coach or former head coach. There's a lot of candidates and only so many openings.It's no surprise people are interested in Weber State. Who wouldn't want to be a head coach? There's job uncertainty, too much travel, enormous pressure and lots of late-night work -- just the sort of perks everyone wants, right?
And you don't even get those until you finally manage to get hired.
"You first have to find someone who wants to hire you. It's one thing to apply, but there's a lot of qualified candidates out there," said Daniels.
Daniels is a quasi-expert on coaching jobs. In his 10 years at Utah as an assistant, his name has come up several times for head coaching positions. Some of those times he actually applied, as he did for the Nevada and Cal State-Fullerton jobs. Other times, his name just appeared out of nowhere.
Still, in the coaching business, it never hurts to have your name out there.
The field of candidates for the Weber job is impressive. That's because it's considered a fine opportunity. Maybe not North Carolina fine, but you get the idea. The Wildcats have arguably the best basketball program in the Big Sky Conference, an attractive and functional arena, and enough funding to compete on a I-A level. They have a winning tradition, relatively close proximity to a major airport and a state that loves basketball.
It doesn't hurt that they're coming off a year in which they beat North Carolina in the NCAA Tournament.
Among the considerations are Cravens, a Weber assistant who was a head coach at Idaho; Dick Hunsaker, a Utah administrative assistant who was head coach at Ball State; Fred Trenkle, the former head coach at San Diego State; and Roger Reid, former head coach at BYU. Then there's the long line of qualified assistant coaches that includes Utah's Daniels and Judkins, Weber's Beach and former BYU assistant Tony Ingle.
The trouble is, there are only 310 Division I head coaching positions nationwide, and just a handful of those become available on any year. Advertising a job opening in the NCAA News is like tossing a piece of raw meat in a shark tank. Although most assistant coaches insist it's the challenge that makes them want to be head coaches, there's another factor not to be overlooked -- money. While an assistant coach at Utah makes around $50,000 per year, head coach Rick Majerus' package is reportedly near $1 million.
Replace him and you could end up with a 1,900 percent pay raise.
Not bad, even when you factor in taxes.
Finding a head coaching job gets harder when good opportunities at smaller programs are gobbled up by overqualified, often famous coaches. Jerry Tarkanian, one of the winningest coaches of all time, ended up at Fresno State after leaving UNLV and then coaching in the NBA. Wimp Sanderson, the former Alabama coach, ended up at Arkansas-Little Rock. Jim Harrick led UCLA to the national title, left, and now coaches at Rhode Island. TCU's Billy Tubbs used to be at Oklahoma. How's an assistant supposed to compete with those guys for jobs?
Even at Weber State, they got big-time fever once. After being fired at UCLA, Larry Farmer ended up in Ogden.
Eddie Sutton has pretty much had a stranglehold on any and all head coaching opportunities over the years. He was the head man at Creighton, then Arkansas, then Kentucky and now Oklahoma State. Seems if there's a high-profile job out there, you're going to have to compete with Sutton to get it.
Then there's the college/NBA types such as Rick Pitino and John Calipari. Calipari was just fired by the Nets, but with his resume, he'll be able to return to college coaching whenever he wants; same goes for Pitino.
But landing a head job isn't the final step. If an assistant gets his first head coaching job and fails to win, he'll be fired -- and it's unlikely he'll get another chance.
Consequently, this week Daniels was both disappointed and happy when he wasn't hired at Nevada. On the one hand, he didn't get the job; on the other hand, he still has a position many would covet -- an assistant's position at a Top 10 program.
Meanwhile, a lot of his colleagues are going through the same emotions they do during the season -- stress, anxiety, exhilaration, fear -- as they wait by the phone for Weber State to call.