Tobin Anderson not missing a beat in first summer at Iona, insists new-look Gaels will score points and compete

Tobin Anderson and Iona have come together in short time, and appear to remain MAAC contenders despite losing all but one player in offseason in wake of Rick Pitino’s departure. (Photo by Brian Beyrer/Iona Athletics)

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — Tobin Anderson still hears about Fairleigh Dickinson five months later, and understandably so. When you lead a team to just the second victory by a 16-seed in NCAA Tournament history, the magnitude of the upset will resonate for years after it happens. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Anderson’s new endeavor at Iona is already being compared to his one season in Hackensack, where he took FDU from a four-win team before his arrival and turned it into one of the last 32 outfits standing last March.

But after taking over at Iona in the wake of Rick Pitino’s departure and having to replace all but one player after the majority of the program entered the transfer portal, the question needed to be asked. Which is the bigger challenge: Taking over at FDU late in the offseason and molding the Knights into a formidable Division I roster, or having to replace everyone except Osborn Shema from a Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference championship team in practically 90 days?

“That’s an interesting question,” Anderson admitted. “I think they’re comparable. The advantage I had last year was I had three guys from St. Thomas Aquinas, the two guards (Demetre Roberts and Grant Singleton) who played for 120 college games, and Sean Moore played for 80. Here, there’s not one guy who played for us before, been in our program or knows how we do things. But all these guys that are here now, we wanted. We recruited every guy here.”

“Os came back, we formed a great relationship with him, he came back. So we basically re-recruited him. The rest of these guys are all our guys. There’s not one guy in that gym who’s not our recruit, our guy. So that’s great. I’m not saying it’s an impossible situation. When I was at St. Thomas Aquinas, we had a batting cage above the gym, for God’s sake. Everybody has bad situations. It’s a challenge, but every year’s a challenge.”

The first part of the challenge was establishing the framework of Iona’s identity. Anderson’s teams, be it at the Division III, Division II, or Division I levels, have been noted for their uptempo style and press-and-run nature. Off the court, the coaches and players have also bonded strongly with one another, something Anderson deemed to be of even greater importance considering the massive unknown variables entering the program.

“The first thing you want to do is you want to get the guys to understand how hard we have to play, how we have to compete, how we’re going to have to work,” he said. “We’ve done a lot. We’ve had dinners at my house, we’ve been to the 9/11 museum, we’ve been on a dinner cruise, we’ve had trivia night, we have a book club where every Sunday, two guys take a chapter and they present it to the whole team. We laugh, we joke, so there’s a little bit of everything. You can’t just have the basketball and not have the off-the-court stuff. But it’s also not a sorority. We can’t just have fun things and not work on the basketball.”

Helping Anderson work on the basketball will be a staff who is familiar with both him and the situations he has come across. Tom Bonacum, Kam Murrell and Ray Savage all follow Anderson from FDU to Iona, with Murrell also having played for the head coach at St. Thomas Aquinas after transferring from George Mason.

“It’s great to have this staff,” Anderson gushed. “I’ve got three guys from FDU that came with me. Tom Bonacum’s been with me, this is going to be his fifth year, and he can finish my sentences, which is not an easy thing to do. Kam Murrell played for me for two years, coached with me, and this is our fifth year together. He’s the same way. We’re really together, really on the same page. That part’s great. Guys get more attention.”

“This is my fifth head college coaching job, and three of them have been hard. I was at Clarkson, my first Division III job, and they hadn’t been over .500 in 25 years. STAC was coming off a 5-win season, and FDU. So I’ve had three hard jobs, and all those places teach you a few things. Let’s trust what works.”

What has worked for Anderson in the past is a sort of positionless basketball that is not necessarily predicated by size or build, but rather skill and versatility. At FDU, 6-foot-6 Ansley Almonor was the de facto center as the Knights battled larger teams, most notably Zach Edey and Purdue in the NCAA Tournament. None of that matters to Anderson, the son of a coach who has made a calling card out of using what he has to the best of his — and his players’ — ability.

“The more things we can do, the more versatile we can be, the better off we’ll be,” he said. “We like guys who can play multiple positions, do multiple things. We don’t have positions. Os isn’t a five man, he’s a basketball player. He can pass it, shoot it, dribble it. If we can put five guys out there who can pass it, shoot it, handle the ball and make plays, we’re a dangerous team to guard. And I think we can do that. If we’re not big enough, we’ll double the post. We played small last year at FDU if we had to. We’re going to play the best guys who can help us win. Interchangeable parts is a great thing.”

“We’re not necessarily big as far as big, bulky guys, but we have size on the wings. Terrell Williams, Greg Gordon and Wheza (Panzo), they play bigger than they are and they’re men. That helps. Cam Krystkowiak is hurt, but when he gets back, he’ll help us a lot, too. He’s smart, he knows how to play. We’re big across the board, we shoot the ball and we’re very unselfish, which is great.”

Iona is also very balanced in its roster makeup, with five freshmen complementing the upperclassmen and graduate transfers who, along with Shema, comprise the experienced end of the group. It would have been easy for Anderson to build the Gaels year to year and rely solely on graduate transfers for a quick fix, but for the long-term stability of the program, he opted for the diverse approach.

“I think for the program, it’s huge,” he said. “When you have nobody, how are you going to start? We didn’t start and say, ‘let’s get five freshmen, five older guys.’ It kind of depended upon how things were going, but I think the balance is great. There’s a good balance of older guys, more than last year, and I think the five freshmen are all going to help us. I think the program is in a good place right now for the continuity of the roster, the team. I feel good about that.”

Anderson has not shied away from facing premier competition in his first year in New Rochelle, scheduling a high-major opponent in Colorado and attracting some of the nation’s top mid-majors in Charleston, Colgate, Hofstra and Harvard, plus a multi-team event in the Gulf Coast Classic. The ledger draws comparisons to Tim Cluess’ teams, whose unique scheduling helped Iona get an NCAA Tournament at-large bid in 2012 and always helped the Gaels hit their best stride as MAAC play intensified. Anderson’s career arc also draws parallels to that of Cluess, who attended Iona's practice Friday and has remained one of the current coach’s role models.

“Whenever I was trying to get a job, I used to tell guys, ‘look at what Tim Cluess did,” Anderson recalled. “Here’s a guy who was in Division II, went to Division I and won like crazy. I’ve loved how his teams played, as a coach, he’s always been an open book. If you call him up and ask him about something, he’ll always talk to you about it. He’s always been an innovative guy, and he won big. If I could follow in his footsteps and do what he did, that’d be great. He’s definitely a guy that I look up to a lot.”

“I’m a big believer in playing the best teams you can play in the non-conference. We’re always going to play good teams. I’m not trying to protect a record. You have to get beat sometimes. We lost last year at FDU to Hartford, but that loss helped us. It made us better. People always say, ‘hey, you played well at the right time in March at FDU.’ I'm like, ‘we’re getting better.’ If we kept going until April or May, we’d have been a hell of a lot better team in May than we were in March. And this team is going to be the same way. We’re going to get better as the year goes along.”

Early returns seem to indicate Iona, with all its offseason turnover, will still be among the top tier of the MAAC when the season tips off in November. While the Pitino teams of the past three years were developed under the tutelage of a Hall of Fame coach and looked markedly better as the year went on, Anderson has overseen a community effort of sorts, where both he and his players have advanced a product that the coach hopes will endear itself to a strong Iona fan base with its attractive style and prolific offense.

“The character has been terrific,” Anderson gushed. “The way the guys have taken ownership, the leadership has been great. Idan (Tretout) has been great. He was the first older guy to sign and he was making recruiting calls, texting guys, he got guys to come. As much as they want to hear from a coach, to hear it from players has a stronger pull. Greg Gordon has been terrific as far as just how he plays and the energy he brings every day, Os has been terrific, he’s bought into what we’re doing. Wheza has been good, they’ve all been good.”

“I think we’re going to be an extremely fun team to watch. We’re going to play fast, we’ll play a lot of guys, we’re going to push the tempo at all times. I think people are going to love how hard we play, how tough we are. We’re going to score some points. We averaged 80 points a game last year at FDU with a team that was kind of offensively challenged at times. This team has more offensive weapons, so I think it’ll be a fun team to watch.”