Providence Basketball: 10 candidates to replace Ed Cooley as head coach

After twelve solid years leading Providence Basketball, Ed Cooley has accepted the head coaching position at Georgetown, leaving the Friars with a coaching vacancy. Cooley is a native of Providence and has spent his entire coaching career in New England but departs for a Big East rival and a chance to rebuild Georgetown into a successful program.

A native of Rhode Island, Cooley played collegiate ball at Stonehill, three decades before the school joined the D1 level, and also spent a year as an assistant at his alma mater. His coaching career really got started in 1996 when he joined Al Skinner’s staff at Rhode Island. Cooley would follow Skinner to Boston College the following season and spend nine more years under Skinner’s leadership.

Cooley’s head coaching career would begin when Fairfield hired him in 2006. After finishing below .500 in his first two seasons, he’d lead progress for the Stags, winning 23 games in his fourth season and taking the program to a MAAC regular season title and berth in the NIT in his fifth season. That year would prove to be his last in Fairfield, as Providence hired him shortly thereafter in 2011.

Inheriting a Providence program that had been dormant for several years, Cooley was immensely successful with the Friars. After rebuilding for the first two seasons, he then lead the Friars to five straight NCAA Tournament appearances, winning at least 20 games in each of those seasons. His finest season at Providence was last year, with a 27-6 finish, a Big East regular season title, and his first trip to the Sweet Sixteen. This most recent season was another solid year for the Friars, though they came up short in the end in the first round of the Big Dance; the seventh trip of his career.

With Cooley taking his talents to Georgetown, the Friars are thrust into their first head coaching search in a dozen years. Their athletic department looks quite different than the last time they were in one of these searches and there’s no telling what kind of coaches they will specifically target. Frankly, Cooley was a rather unproven mid-major coach who hadn’t even been in the NCAA Tournament at the time of his hire, but he still did fantastic work at Providence.

Today, we’re going to take a quick look at a number of potential candidates for the Providence job, though the Friars will likely consider many more names not on this list. Cooley has built an impressive program here at Providence, but the next head coach has an equally difficult task in keeping the Friars competitive in a Big East that gets tougher and tougher. Let’s get right into the names, proceeding in alphabetical order as follows.