NCAA Basketball: Coaching Carousel Update and Firings from early March

Houston Christian

There wasn’t a basketball team at Houston Baptist in 1990 when Ron Cottrell was brought to town, and he certainly shaped basketball for the Huskies over more than three decades. This program experienced a lot of success at the NAIA level early in his tenure before transitioning to the D1 level in the late 2000’s. Cottrell’s Huskies finished below .500 in each of the last seven seasons after a pair of postseason appearances in the mid-2010’s.

Cottrell assisted at Arkansas under Nolan Richardson back in the late 80’s before accepting his first head coaching gig at Houston Baptist. This has been his gig for more than half of his life and did include ten straight trips to the NAIA Tournament. The school, recently renamed Houston Christian, will be undertaking their first real head coaching search in more than a generation.

Houston Christian did win more than 500 games in Cottrell’s tenure, though many of those wins came back at the NAIA level. The program never sniffed the NCAA Tournament during his tenure and has been in rough shape in the Southland Conference in recent years. Houston Christian has won just six games this season and really hasn’t been trending in a great direction in recent years.

Let’s be honest, you’re not exactly making any kind of headlines in Houston when you’re at Houston Christian. There’s a rich hotbed of basketball talent in Texas, but this is a low-level Southland job with an athletics department that hasn’t conducted a coaching search in almost 35 years. It feels like the sort of gig that some successful non-D1 head coach will snag, though they could go that same route as in 1990, penning some sort of high-level assistant. It’s hard to see a major turnaround coming regardless of the hire.