ChirpBlog

On the evening of March 14, Bryce and Tara Drew sat for dinner at a restaurant inside the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. They were joined by the triumvirate of stewards for the basketball program at Grand Canyon University: Brian Mueller, the school president; Jamie Boggs, the interim vice president of athletics; and Jerry Colangelo, the former owner of the Phoenix Suns and one of the school’s major benefactors. As the group discussed GCU’s coaching vacancy, Tara noticed a familiar spark light up her husband’s face. “That’s when I thought, he’s going to take this,” she says. “As I much as I loved seeing him spend time with me and our son over the last year, I knew all along he was going to get back into coaching.”

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Three days later, Drew, 45, was officially back as Grand Canyon announced it had hired him to replace Dan Majerle, who had been let go following a 13-17 season and a fifth-place finish in the WAC. The decision provided a welcome resurrection for Drew, who himself was canned in ignominious fashion one year ago following a disastrous third season at Vanderbilt. During the ensuing 12 months, Drew licked his wounds, marinated on his mistakes, spent time with his family and worked for ESPN and SEC Network. Now he will take all of those hard-won lessons to Grand Canyon, a fresh face on the college hoops scene that, like its newly minted coach, is badly in need of a makeover.

“It was honestly one of the best years of my life,” Drew says. “From a personal standpoint, it was great to step back and do some things that I’ve been too busy the last few years to do. I wasn’t going to take a job just to take a job. I wanted it to be at a school where they were really invested in basketball and would give us the resources to be successful.”

Drew is understandably eager to move on from his dismissal from Vanderbilt. He had started the 2018-19 season by welcoming the best recruiting class in program history, but things turned sour in November when the gemstone of the class, 6-2 guard Darius Garland, suffered a season-ending knee injury. Garland became the fifth pick in the NBA Draft, but the Commodores never recovered, finishing 9-23 on the season and 0-18 in the SEC.

As the losses piled up in January and February, speculation about Drew’s status grew louder, but considering he was set to add another highly ranked freshman class to a team that was returning most of its players, he thought he was going to get another year. He found out otherwise when athletic director Malcolm Turner, who had taken over for the retiring David Williams in January, dropped the hammer during a meeting in Turner’s office. “It was surprising because there had not been any communication with the AD, even though I had tried on my end,” Drew says. “We had cleaned up a lot in terms of the culture of the program. Not getting to see that through and see how much better we would have been in Year 4 is what hurt the most.”

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It was a dizzying fall from grace for Drew, who burst into the nation’s consciousness in 1998 when he was a senior guard at Valparaiso and hit an iconic buzzer-beater to beat Ole Miss in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Drew’s father, Homer, was Valpo’s head coach that day. After a seven-year pro career that included stints with four NBA teams, Bryce joined his father’s staff in 2005 and took over as head coach when Homer retired six years later. During his five years there, Drew led the Crusaders to four Horizon League titles and two NCAA Tournament appearances, which convinced Vanderbilt to tap him to replace Kevin Stallings in 2016. Drew took the Commodores to the NCAA Tournament in his first year, but the team finished in 13th place in the SEC in 2017-18 and then bottomed out in Year Three.

In the days following his firing, Drew had a few feelers from other schools, but his heart wasn’t in it so he decided to take the year off. Many coaches prefer to leave town after they’ve been fired, but Drew remained in Nashville, where he and Tara had a good group of friends and their five-year-old son, Bryson, was happy in school. Bryce was also hoping to return to coaching, so he wanted to avoid moving his family twice in one year.

The first few weeks were challenging, especially for Tara, who was accustomed to being the head coach of the household. “It was definitely an adjustment because I was used to him being gone,” she says. Drew received plenty of counsel from fellow coaches in those early days. One piece of advice from his father stuck with him. “Enjoy this time now,” Homer said, “because you’re going to be coaching again soon.”

So that’s what he did, settling into the contented rhythms of domestic life. For the first time since he had become a dad, Bryce had time to take Bryson to a pumpkin farm and watch him play Little League baseball. They went on long walks, and if Bryson wanted to stop and play in a stream, then Dad didn’t have to hurry him along because Dad had nowhere else to be. Bryce cooked a little (if boiling pasta counts) and put Bryson through basketball drills using cones on the driveway. “It was great to be with my wife and son and be present instead of having my mind somewhere else,” Drew says.

His ESPN gig occupied him during the winter and afforded him the chance to visit various programs. As Drew watched practices and shootarounds and sat in on video sessions, he tapped notes into his phone, gathering nuggets for when he got his next coaching job. “He wants to be good at whatever he does,” says Drew’s brother, Scott, the coach at Baylor. “The more the season went on, the more comfortable he felt.”

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Drew enjoyed the work but sensed he wasn’t long for broadcasting. “I’m too competitive,” he says. “I’d be going along fine, and then I’d see the scores and get mad again.”

He was realistic enough to know he was unlikely to be hired by a power conference school, but he also didn’t want to go somewhere where he wouldn’t have a chance to be successful. The best-case scenario was to land at a mid-major school with a passionate culture for basketball. So he was in a receptive frame of mind when Colangelo and Mueller called to ask if he would be interested in the opening at Grand Canyon.

GCU may be a newcomer onto the basketball scene, but it has made quite an early impression. It was founded in 1949 and in 2004 became the nation’s first for-profit Christian college. It has since undergone an enormous expansion, growing from about 1,000 undergraduates in 2008 to 20,000 today with another 70,000 enrolled online. The school does not have football, so it views basketball as an important pillar of campus life. Mueller was the head basketball coach at Concordia University from 1983 to ’87 and is a fixture at practices and games. The basketball program completed its transition into Division I in 2017 and plays in GCU Arena, where the student section billed as the Havocs creates one of the country’s best homecourt environments.

Colangelo, who also used to own the Arizona Diamondbacks and is the former director of USA Basketball, has been a major force in GCU’s growth, not only guiding the basketball program but investing in what is now called the Colangelo School of Business. As Colangelo, Mueller and Boggs called around the country to scavenge for Majerle’s replacement, Drew’s name kept coming up. Drew had met Colangelo a couple of times over the years, but they had never spoken at length until the Drews visited Phoenix in March.

Drew was blown away by the campus and its state-of-the-art athletic facilities, and the GCU administrators were likewise impressed with his character and commitment to his Christian faith. Though the group pressed him on what went wrong at Vanderbilt — “He didn’t make any excuses whatsoever,” Colangelo says — they were more interested in his track record as a recruiter, which had been a problem in Majerle’s last couple of years. “We needed to get over that hump,” Colangelo says. “Whoever was going to be hired had to have a real plan in terms of recruiting. Bryce has already shown that he knows how to be successful in that area.”

Drew dove into his new job. Despite not being able to leave Nashville because of the pandemic, he hired three assistants and a strength coach in quick fashion. Then he signed two transfers and a high school senior, all of whom he had previously tried to recruit to Vanderbilt. “He has been on the phone nonstop,” Tara says. “I did not see him at all for the first month. I’d bring all his meals into his office.”

It has been 16 years since Drew played his last NBA game and 22 since that shot against Ole Miss, so his players were not familiar with that part of his résumé. “I didn’t know much about him, so I read his Wikipedia page,” says Alessandro Lever, a 6-10 senior center from Italy who was the team’s leading scorer (15.7 points per game) this season. “We talked on the phone a couple of times and we text each other. He’s really committed to make the program as successful as we can be.”

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Drew knows his teams need to do better than the last two he coached at Vanderbilt, but he will not be a demonstrably different coach this time around. “Winning and losing is such a fine line,” Scott Drew says. “If Bryce had never been successful at Valpo or when he first got to Vanderbilt, maybe he would have to make a lot of changes, but I don’t think he’ll have to make wholesale adjustments.”

He does, however, have some tidying up to do on the home front. Bryce and Tara have put their Nashville house on the market, although it isn’t easy trying to show a house to prospective buyers these days. They have to find a new home in Phoenix and a new school for Bryson. As for the basketball front, Drew knows there are also plenty of challenges ahead, but he is optimistic he can meet them. He has been through a lot, but he still has plenty of spark. “The last year was humbling for all of us, but he’s grown so much because of it,” Tara says. “He’s going to bring everything he has learned through this and be a much better coach and person than he’s ever been.”

(Top photo: Bryan Lynn / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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