Rick Ray was fired after five years as the head coach of SEMO basketball. What does this mean and where might the program go from here?
Following five seasons leading the program, Rick Ray has been fired by SEMO basketball. He finished just 51-104 at the school, leading them above .500 in OVC play just once during his tenure. He simply didn’t do enough to make the Redhawks a successful program, even when the bottom half of the OVC hasn’t been the strongest historically.
Ray’s coaching career began as an assistant over two decades ago, serving at Indiana State and Northern Illinois before joining Matt Painter’s staff at Purdue. He would spend four years under Painter and then two years on staff at Clemson. In 2012, he became the head coach at Mississippi State, though the tenure was unsuccessful. Ray would finish 37-60 in three seasons, with the Bulldogs never finishing higher than 11th in the SEC.
Bringing aboard a coach with this resume was quite an accomplishment for Southeast Missouri State, but Ray just couldn’t get things going. He may have been a former SEC head coach with ACC and Big Ten experience, but it just didn’t work out. In his second year, the Redhawks greatly improved with 15 wins and a 9-7 mark in OVC play. However, the team regressed in each of his final three seasons.
In a conference regularly dominated by Murray State and Belmont, Ray just couldn’t build a contender, finishing 2-14 against those two programs. He inherited a stud in Antonius Cleveland but couldn’t bring talent to the Redhawks after his departure. Things have been especially bad on the defensive side of the ball, with the Redhawks playing some terrible ball as the season progressed, leading to the 7-24 mark in Ray’s final campaign.
Moving forward, Southeast Missouri State finds itself with an interesting new coaching hire to make. They did the unexpected when landing a former (albeit unsuccessful) SEC head coach with geographic connections when in need last time.
This time, they might offer the position to an assistant at a local D1 school. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hired a head coach from a lower division, but recruiting is clearly an important attribute for the next hire. There aren’t tons of athletes excited to play at an OVC bottom feeder; this next coach needs to invigorate the program.
While Austin Peay’s season has been a counterexample, the OVC belongs to Belmont and Murray State for the foreseeable future. The other programs in this league will have a hard time knocking off those two formidable teams, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. This Redhawks program has very little success since their 2000 NCAA Tournament appearance. However, if they can get the right coach to Cape Girardeau, then maybe things can start turning around.