Chris Beard is obviously a very good basketball coach, which we know not only from his work here so far, but also from his track record. He was head coach at five different schools before he came to us, plus Assistant and Associate Head Coach at Texas Tech. And, he had the best connections there are at Texas Tech: one of the all-time winning coaches in NCAA history. But he did not leave there to coach at a lower-level D-1 school, which one certainly would think he could have done with his experience and connections. Instead, he made three more stops before he arrived at D-1. The outshoot of all this was that he came to us as an unusually well-experienced and well-traveled coach, with connections at the juco, D-2 and D-1 levels, not to mention semi-pro.
So much the better for us. We do not have a coach who has to train on the job. He has looked at the game from every angle. I have no idea why he did not land a D-1 head coaching gig before us, but it doesn't matter, because someone else's loss was our gain. He came to Little Rock not as a half-baked, fair-haired boy getting basically a free ride because of the coattails of a big-name coach, but as a guy who had paid his dues in the business. Someone missed out on a good one, Glad we didn't.
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