We are still about 5 weeks away from the tip-off of the college basketball season, which means that we have plenty of time to prepare for the action ahead. We will do so via a series of season previews featuring the best players/coaches in the country. HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel continues our coverage with Fairleigh Dickinson head coach Jack Castleberry, who talked about being hired last March and his expectations for this season.
You went to college at VMI: how were you able to go from walk-on to team captain? A good amount of hard work. I was not a great player but figured out where I fit in. Coach Duggar Baucom really appreciated people who worked hard so if I did what he asked me to do then I was able to make an impact without scoring a lot of PTS. I was the “culture guy” in the locker room.
You later became an assistant for the women’s team at Siena: what is the biggest difference between coaching men vs. coaching women? I really enjoyed coaching both genders but there are different problems that arise. It made me a better coach because it forced me to become more detail-oriented.
During your time at Siena you became friends with an assistant for the men’s team named Tobin Anderson and you later became his assistant at FDU: how close have you 2 grown over the past decade? We actually go back a little further than that: I was a camper at 5-Star Camp when he was a counselor there. He was doing some ball-handling drills and sweating and working hard, which I admired. I practiced his drills during the summer, which made me a better player. I later reintroduced myself when I was at VMI and he piqued my interest in going to Siena. We stayed in contact and I told him that if he ever got a D-1 job that I would love to come work for him. I was lucky enough that his top assistant left and I was able to join his staff.
In 2014 you left college basketball to become a financial planner: why did you do it, and why did you return to the sideline just 2 years later? I have the most screwed up career path of all-time! I was frustrated with the business side of being a coach. The on-court stuff was awesome but I was frustrated with the lack of growth in my career path so I decided to try something else. There was a VMI alum I knew who was a financial planner and he brought me in to join him in Philadelphia (where my now-wife is from). I wanted to remain in the gym in some capacity and helped out at Cardinal O’Hara High School. Getting away from the sport gave me a better perspective going forward. When you are younger you are hell-bent on taking over the world without appreciating the opportunity to have an impact on young adults. By pure luck my former coach got hired at Citadel…and the rest was history.
Take me through the 2023 NCAA tourney as an assistant to Tobin at #16-seed FDU:
You beat Texas Southern in the 1st 4: how were you able to get your team refocused after a 1-PT loss to Merrimack in the NEC tourney title game just 1 week earlier (the Warriors were ineligible for the NCAA tourney due to being in the final year of their 4-year transition period from D-2 to D-1)? Even though we lost the title game we still know what was coming after it. We had to listen to some talk about “you do not deserve it” but I think it eventually was a driver for the success we had. It was not us against the world but we still wanted to prove that we belonged, which helped us get ready to go.
You had a 5-PT win over #1-seed Purdue, which set a record for the biggest upset in terms of point spread in NCAA tourney history (the Boilermakers were a 23.5-PT favorite): how did you do it, and how did that game change your life (if at all)? You probably would not be interviewing me if we had not won that game! That is the great thing about March Madness: it was probably the most favorable matchup of all the #1 seeds in terms of our style. We saw Purdue struggle when Rutgers pressed them so we wanted to make them play faster and shoot threes. We put all of our focus on Zach Edey and they did not make a ton of threes that night (5-26 3PM). Tobin had been winning for a long time and just had not received a lot of recognition. Some of our players from St. Thomas Aquinas had been in massive moments so there was not really any fear: we would not back down from anybody.
You had an 8-PT loss to FAU: what did you team learn from your magical postseason run that you think will help them this year? That we can play with anyone: when you buy-in to our style and see that it can work then it builds your confidence. FAU was an incredible team…but if we had not missed a lot of layups in the 1st half then I think we would have been in it at the end. We both liked to dictate tempo and had aggressive mindsets: it felt like we were playing against a bigger version of ourselves.
Less than 48 hours later you were hired as Tobin’s replacement after he took another job: how is it going so far, and when are we going to see Iona on your schedule? You will never see Iona on our schedule! It is great right now because nobody is pissed off at me yet. We can be a great team but I want to manage expectations because progress is not always a straight line. For example, we lost to Hartford last year and then beat St. Joe’s, which does not make sense.
Your schedule includes games against Seton Hall/Illinois: which of these games do you feel will present your biggest test? When you look at size/speed those 2 teams will be very tough. We are still focused on winning the NEC: we did so many incredible things last year but did not win a regular season/tourney title.
You lost your top-2 scorers in Demetre Roberts/Grant Singleton: how will you try to replace all of that offense? It will be by committee because those 5th-year seniors were special and you cannot replace them with just 1 guy. However, we bring back 7 guys who played double-digit minutes in the NCAA tourney so we have players who know how to score and have played in big games. It is like the FAU model and with the depth we have it is certainly doable.
What are your goals for this season, and what are your expectations for this season? The goal is to win the NEC, which is a perfectly attainable goal but will involve a lot of hard work. We expect to go after a conference championship: it is not about setting the bar lower but just admitting that we will have to work harder this year because we will have a bigger bullseye on our back.