NCAA Basketball: Young coaches making their mark in the sport

Here is a look at a couple of NCAA Basketball coaches making their mark at a young age.

In recent years more and more younger candidates have been hired to head coaching positions, and not only been hired but have had almost immediate success. Two such coaches are Bashir Mason of Wagner and Ryan Ridder at Bethune-Cookman.

At 34, Mason is entering his seventh season at Wagner. His rise to the top chair on the bench was swift. After graduating from Drexel in 2007 he spent three seasons as an assistant at Marist and then did the same stint at Wagner, the last two seasons under Dan Hurley. He then took over the team in 2012, at age 28, at the time becoming the youngest coach in college basketball when Hurley left for Rhode Island.

Mason did inherit a team that won 25 games and went to the semifinals of the Northeast conference tournament the year before. In his first season, he led the Seahawks to a second-place finish in the conference at 19-12 and another trip to the conference tournament semifinals, a feat that the Seahawks repeated the following year.

Over the past three seasons, Mason has two 23-win seasons that include two regular-season titles and two trips to the NIT and win over St. Bonaventure in the 2016 NIT. Even though the Seahawks did lose 2 of their top 3 scorers they do return their next top five. The expectation is that Mason will again have the Seahawks in contention in the Northeast, continuing the run of success he started when he became the head Seahawk.

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In 2017 Bethune-Cookman won just 10 games and decided to make a coaching change. The Wildcats hired 32-year old Ryan Ridder. Ridder spent the previous four seasons at Daytona State College where he won 95 games and four conference championships. His lone Division I experience came when he spent three seasons at Campbell from 2011-2013.

In his first year as head man, Ridder guided the Wildcats to an 18-14 record, a win total the school hadn’t seen since 2012 and their first-ever regular-season Mid-Eastern Athletic championship. The eight-win improvement can be attributed to improvement in two areas. Ridder’s squad saw a 10-point hike in points per game, from 71.1 to 81.9 and they were one of the worst team’s in the country in field goal defense two years ago at 46%, that number improved to 42.5% last season.

The Bethune-Cookman roster returns six of its top nine scorers, which includes four of its five double-digit scorers from last season, all of whom will be seniors. This bodes well for a team that hasn’t had a lot of success and their coach who is still getting his feet wet at the Division I level.

Next: Breaking down each Big 12 recruiting class for 2018

Wagner and Bethune-Cookman have two of college basketball’s young guns and their fast-tracking success could surely lead more schools to take the chance on very young coaches that have little to no coaching experience at the highest level. For a sport that has seen plenty of its old-guard coaches passed around the carousel, this would be a fresh change of pace.

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