Staff Updates: Men's Basketball
Our rundown of staff changes continues with a look at the all-new MBB coaching group.
Obviously, the biggest change in any major sport at Iowa this year has been the hiring of Ben McCollum as head basketball coach (we already profiled McCollum before his hire). McCollum was extremely successful at Northwest Missouri State, and brought a big chunk of his playing and coaching squad to Drake. He then posted a 31-win season with the Bulldogs before taking the Iowa job. Naturally, he’s bringing a significant portion of his Drake team with him to Iowa City.
Josh Sash
Sash joined McCollum’s staff after a year as the head coach at Indian Hills C.C. Like McCollum, he’s an Iowan through-and-through. He grew up in Oskaloosa (and, yes, he’s the brother of former Hawkeye safety Tyler Sash), graduated from William Penn in 2006 and got a master’s degree at Drake in 2009.
He was on the Keno Davis staff at Drake in “the Emmenecker year” when the Bulldogs went 28-5 and won the Valley, and followed Davis to Providence for a year, but most of his experience is at the JUCO level: One year as an assistant at Temple College in Texas, five years as an assistant at State Fair C.C. in Missouri, three years as an assistant at Indian Hills, a year as the head coach at DMACC in Des Moines, and the aforementioned stint as Indian Hills’ head coach. He also served out a two-year stint as an assistant under Kareem Richardson at UMKC, and three seasons as an assistant to Dave Richman at North Dakota State.
Like McCollum, Sash has been quite successful at the lower rungs of college basketball. His DMACC team went 29-4 and won a conference championship, and his Indian Hills squad recorded 29 wins and went to the NJCAA Final Four. He was ICCAC Coach of the Year at Indian Hills, and regional Coach of the Year at DMACC. You don’t get to that level of success at the JUCO level without a firm grasp of strategy and an eye for under-the-radar talent. But also like McCollum, his experience at this level of basketball is quite limited.
Luke Barnwell
When Fran McCaffery was hired at Iowa in 2010, one of his first assistant hires made some waves: Sherman Dillard, who had previously been running Nike’s basketball camps, would theoretically give Iowa much-needed entree to the high-end recruits the program wanted. After the smoldering crater left by Todd Lickliter’s AAU-adverse recruiting strategy, Dillard’s hire was an acknowledgement that top-end college recruiting had moved away from the high school game.
At first blush, Barnwell does the same. He spent the last two years as an assistant at Texas Tech, on teams that went 51-20 and ran to the Elite 8 in this year’s NCAA Tournament (and knocked out McCollum’s Drake squad in the second round). Prior to that — and perhaps more importantly — Barnwell spent the previous eight years as head coach of Sunrise Christian Academy, one of the top prep school teams in the nation. He was named Naismith High School Coach of the Year in 2021 and 2022, and won a high school national championship. He also coached a whole fleet of now-pros, including former Kansas star Gradey Dick and Tennessee guard Kennedy Chandler.
Tyler Tachman from the DMR has the whole story of how Barnwell ended up at Iowa, but in brief: Barnwell spent a year as a player at Emporia State while McCollum was working as an assistant, and that experience was a big deal for him:
“He's just different,” Barnwell said. “Like I said, a unique ability to lead you to do things that are really, really difficult and you somehow end up embracing it and enjoying it. You feel like he’s in it with you, not against you.”
In 2019, while Barnwell was still at Sunrise, he and McCollum reconnected over recruiting. The relationship grew from there:
"It became more about how to lead people and connect with people on a deeper level to help coach your team," Barnwell said. "It was like just as much that than it was Xs and Os and running offense and how to guard. And then that grew to where like he was somewhat of a security blanket when I needed an answer. Who do you call? How do we want to do something? How do we want to handle this situation? How do we want to guard this? And he’d be the guy I’d call.”
It’s clear that Barnwell isn’t simply a hired gun for recruiting. He’s got chops as a coach, and a truly remarkable relationship with McCollum for how briefly they were in the same program. But if the primary concern with McCollum is the step up into Big Ten recruiting, a guy with the experience and knowledge of Barnwell can be invaluable.
Bryston Williams
Where most of McCollum’s staff has worked their way up from the lower levels of basketball to here, Williams has worked in the other direction. He played for McCollum at Northwest Missouri State, and worked as a grad assistant for McCollum for two years after graduating. Rather than staying in college basketball, he jumped to the pros: Williams spent two seasons as a G-League assistant, then three seasons as an assistant for the Detroit Pistons under Dwayne Casey.
In 2021, Williams came back to college basketball, joining the staff of another Division II coaching success: Josh Schertz, who had turned Lincoln Memorial University into a powerhouse almost at the level of NMSU. Schertz took the Railsplitters to the 2020-21 Division II Final Four1, then got the job at Indiana State. Williams joined that staff, and helped turn the Sycamores back into a Missouri Valley Conference contender over the next two years.
In 2023, Williams was added to Jeff Linder’s staff at Wyoming; Linder was fired the following spring,2 just in time for Williams to join his former coach at Drake. He brought transfers Cam Manyawu and Kael Combs with him; both are now on Iowa’s roster.
Connor Wheeler
Wheeler was the one guy on McCollum’s Drake staff who had no prior experience with McCollum or at NMSU. After playing at the Division II level, he started as a grad assistant at Mizzou in 2016 during the disastrous tenure of Kim Anderson. He then joined Southern Illinois, working his way to Director of Basketball Operations. His first bench role came at Southeast Missouri State in 2022, where he stayed until moving to Drake last year. McCollum’s press release announcing Wheeler’s hire called him “a great up-and-coming coach.” His basketball ops and video background is obviously helpful.
Yes, this staff is decidedly based out of Missouri and Kansas. Any coach making the sort of move that McCollum is making is going to rely largely on the guys they know in filling those roles. But this isn’t simply a marriage of convenience or familiarity. The overarching theme here is McCollum’s brand of leadership, which sends these guys out as coaches and brings them back when called. Whether this staff is able to elevate Iowa basketball above what it’s been for the last two decades remains to be seen, but if it fails, it won’t be for lack of purpose.
A tournament eventually won by Northwest Missouri State, coached by Ben McCollum. Four years earlier, Schertz made his first run to the Final Four and lost to McCollum in the semifinal.
Linder, who was an assistant at Emporia State before McCollum’s time there, is now an assistant at Texas Tech with Barnwell. This story spirals on itself after a while.
Like the decision to keep Kyle Denning around