King Rice and Monmouth players celebrate after Hawks’ upset of Seton Hall, the 10th high-major win of Rice’s tenure. (Photo by Gary Kowal/Monmouth Athletics)
Win or lose, King Rice will always say whatever is on his mind, regardless of setting.
Sometimes, after a particularly agonizing Monmouth loss, Rice’s candor can get taken out of context and weaponized against him. When his Hawks have more palatable results, Saturday’s win at Seton Hall—the program’s first of the season, first-ever against the Pirates and 10th against a Power 5 program in Rice’s tenure—being the latest example, the honesty becomes more refreshing and offers a clearer glimpse into an oft-misunderstood but committed champion to the simple cause of doing right by his players.
Monmouth, no stranger to playing non-conference schedules whose difficulty and arduous nature rival those played by some of the most successful names in the sport, upped the ante with one of its more aggressive slates this season. With trips to Michigan State, Rutgers, Wichita State and Seton Hall all within the first month of the year, and visits to Princeton and Auburn to come, Rice did not shy away from the sheer reality that his program needed the money from those guarantee games to survive. Even for a well-endowed mid-major like Monmouth, the ever-expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots is making life more adverse, but the veteran coach and former Dean Smith point guard now in his 14th year at the reins in West Long Branch is navigating the bumps in the road deftly and with a vision that allows him to confidently steer the ship despite the lack of wins in comparison to losses.
“I scheduled too hard this year for our group,” Rice conceded. “They didn’t deserve to have to go to all these places, but that’s what we had to do this year. Everybody’s laughing, everybody’s pointing the finger, everybody’s got something to say about something. And I just kept telling these guys, if we stick together, we’ll be right by the time we have to be right. We have a young group in our locker room. As the leader of the program, you have to keep their heads in a good place, and I’ll tell you like I told my boss: When we lost by 30 to Temple, I was too hard on my kids. It was about four or five days of me just frowned up, too hard on them. That led to how we played at Northern Illinois, and then after that, we had hard games. We should have won at Wichita, we didn’t make our free throws. Now we had practice time, and we got our first win.”
“It’s our job to keep their heads up, and it should get us super excited about another opportunity. It should make them believe what we’re trying to tell them, because you start questioning things when you’re 0-8. And I think with these guys playing the way they did, they’ll start believing in themselves again because they’ve been questioning things too.”
Abdi Bashir is living proof. The sophomore, son of a Somalian refugee, has taken the mantle as Monmouth’s leading scorer following the graduation of Xander Rice. After a productive showing on the Hawks’ summer trip to Italy, the 6-foot-7 wing scored 38 points and set a school record with ten 3-pointers at Rutgers on November 15th before reprising the high-volume role with 28 points in the Seton Hall win. Bashir will no doubt be a target for higher-level schools in the transfer portal in the offseason, a fact Rice acknowledged on more than one occasion in November, but is focused on the present and appreciating his time with a coach who has already made a difference on and off the floor.
“I say this all the time, he believes in me more than I believe in myself,” Bashir said of Rice. “When I first got here, I told him that I wanted to change my family’s lives, and he pushes me to that standard every single day. Obviously, it’s good hearing that he has that confidence in me, but I don’t want to put no time limit on my time with him because nobody else is gonna have me like he got me. He’s probably the best coach I’ve ever had. He’s just a player’s coach. He loves me, he brings me around the family…Julian (Rice’s youngest son) is like my little brother, Zander’s like my older brother and (King is) like a father to me.”
“I’m not just a basketball guy,” Rice said, recalling a promise he made to Bashir’s mother that he would make sure Abdi attended weekly mosque services in accordance with his mother’s request that he continue to affirm his Islamic faith. “I’m here to help their lives. And he knows I know he could have left this year, and he stayed for hardly no money. He ain’t got no check from me yet, no one has, not one dude on my team. We know what’s coming at the end of the year. Everybody get in line, it’s cool. We’re cool with it. But leave him alone right now, so he can be the kid he’s supposed to be, so he can be the guy that can take care of his family after this. Don’t call him now and tell him he should leave tomorrow. Let kids be kids.”
In addition to Bashir, Jaret Valencia is returning to the form that earned him preseason all-conference plaudits before hernia surgery shelved him for the first week of the season. And now in his junior season, Jack Collins has continued to be the Hawks’ glue guy as the Manasquan native is regaining his confidence and shooting touch after Rice admitted he was not getting his guard the shots he needed.
“I’m such a big fan of Jack Collins because he does all the dirty work, always,” the coach gushed. “And Jack hasn’t been getting clean looks this year. That’s bad coaching on my part. Abdi gets looks and Abdi can create them, but I wasn’t getting Jack enough looks, okay? Earlier in the year, we were shooting too quick. Jack would get it if we don’t shoot so fast. Now we’re slowing down, we’re screening, we’re making people play defense longer, and all of a sudden, the defense makes a mistake and Jack gets four or five open ones, and everybody in the building knew they were going in. It takes a while to get everybody on the right page. I want to shoot, too, and every kid wants to. My teams always get better as we go along, and maybe I’ll get smarter.”
Rice’s persistence in staying the course will help a
Monmouth team that will make its hay in Coastal Athletic Association play, where the Hawks were picked eighth in the 14-team league’s preseason poll. Whatever does happen, one thing is certain, that being a coach who has learned once again to reevaluate himself for the benefit of his team.
“I’m not the happy guy when I’m losing, guys,” Rice reiterated. “I’m not that cool to be around, and I have to change that and be the right leader for my group. When they need me to get after them, I get after them. When they need me to calm down and love on them, that’s what I’m going to do. Whatever it takes for your kids, you gotta do it, and I’ve been so fortunate to have a great group for a long time.”
“To be somewhere for 14 years means a lot of people care about you. I love this place, I’m doing everything I can to make us the best program that I can do. We’re gonna keep fighting. I love this group. Support this group, because we can hoop too. These kids stayed for a very little bit of money because they trusted me and my staff, and they know we’re gonna get them right for their future, whenever that comes. They’ll be better for it because they spent that time with us.”
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