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COLUMBIA, Mo. — The Missouri men’s basketball coaching staff is getting some reinforcements in a key developmental area.

Coach Dennis Gates has hired Rob Summers as an assistant coach who will focus on helping the program’s frontcourt players.

The Tigers head coach will reunite with one of his assistants from the successful tenure at Cleveland State that preceded his time at Mizzou. He joins Ryan Sharbaugh and Matt Cline as former Cleveland State assistants and staffers now with MU.

Summers, who has been coaching at Miami (Ohio) University, will fill the assistant coach position previously occupied by David “Dickey� Nutt.

Nutt stepped back from a hands-on role midway through last season to undergo cancer treatment, and his title changed this offseason to reflect that adjustment. He’s as MU’s assistant to the head coach and senior adviser. His focus will be on scouting, analytics and film breakdown.

“Coach Nutt is talking to us. He’s still on staff,� Gates said in March before the Tigers’ exit in the Southeastern Conference tournament. “He still watches games. We want him to stay as involved as possible with our team and with the game of basketball that he identifies with so he can always have something to look forward to every single day.�

As Nutt pushes through chemotherapy, his role with Missouri basketball has produced some moments that lightheartedly challenged his recovery.

“One game, the nurses had to turn it off because his blood pressure went up. Sorry about that, Coach Nutt,� Gates said, chuckling. “But he loves it, man. He’s a ball coach.�

Focus on post

Summers’ specialties as a coach check important boxes for a Mizzou program that is looking to recover from an 0-18 run through SEC play and 19 consecutive losses to close out the season.

At Cleveland State, Summers was Gates’ offensive coordinator and worked primarily with post players.

In that role, he guided the Vikings to an uptick in scoring, going from 64.2 points per game to 70.9 and 75.4 averages before Gates left the school to take the MU job.

“As somebody who specializes in post development, Rob is the perfect piece to round out our coaching staff,� Gates said in a statement. “Very few coaches have frontcourt playing experience, and his knowledge and ability to teach the position will no doubt elevate our program. As our top assistant coach at Cleveland State, he has familiarity with our system and was behind all of our success at CSU. Rob has continued to grow as a coach as he spent the last two seasons as associate head coach at Miami, helping turn that program into a MAC contender. He is without a doubt a future head coach and we look forward to him joining our program as we strive to win championships in the classroom, on the court and in the community.�

The post development piece may be the most valuable for the Tigers, who have struggled to find consistent production from their frontcourt under Gates.

During this past season, Mizzou cycled through the likes of Connor Vanover, Noah Carter, Aidan Shaw and Jordan Butler while trying to find a serviceable combination of bigs. The result was a team that finished last in the SEC in rebounding with 31 boards per game, 2.5 rebounds fewer than the next-closest team.

That led to opponents grabbing 6.1 more rebounds than MU per game, a lopsided margin that lands 348th out of 363 Division I teams.

Summers boasts a couple of key success stories when it comes to developing college-level big men.

Center Anderson Mirambeaux has spent three seasons working with Summers, following him from Cleveland State to Miami. During a two-year span, the big man elevated his scoring from 1.5 to 14.3 points per game with 5.7 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 0.9 blocks to round out his stat line.

Summers has been credited with developing wing Torey Patton at Cleveland State, elevating him to a 2020-21 season in which he averaged 14.7 points and eight rebounds to land on the All-Horizon League first team. Forward Deante Johnson, a Horizon League All-Defensive Team selection, was another Summers protege who became a force on the blocks.

That track record bodes well for Summers’ future work with Butler, a 7-foot center who will be entering his second season, and incoming freshmen Trent Burns and Peyton Marshall, who stand 7-2 and 6-10 respectively.

Summers’ skill at coaching frontcourt players stems from his playing days. Standing 7 feet tall, he played center at Penn State and West Virginia. His last season with the Mountaineers saw him average nearly a block per game with 4.9 rebounds and a 63.3% field-goal percentage, still one of the best marks in program history.

Summers made a lasting impression on one of his West Virginia teammates, Joe Mazzulla, who is now the head coach of the NBA-leading Boston Celtics.

“Rob and I not only played together at WVU but we worked together in our first coaching job as assistants,� Mazzulla said in a statement. “From him, I learned the importance of recruiting and relationship building. Since then, I have watched him grow in teaching the game and he has worked extremely hard to become a well-rounded coach. He has great energy, passion and desire to learn. I know he will be a great addition to any staff he joins.�

Before settling into coaching, he played professionally in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Summers previously was an assistant at James Madison and the head coach of Division II Urbana in Ohio. He hails from Columbus, Ohio.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — For three quarters, the Missouri women’s basketball team played Iowa close.

That was on March 24, 2019, when the seventh-seeded Tigers lost 68-52 to the second-seeded Hawkeyes in a second-round NCAA Tournament battle. Iowa held Mizzou star Sophie Cunningham to just eight points in her last college game.

It’s been five years since that matchup, and those programs’ trajectories diverged drastically from that afternoon in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

Missouri’s loss marked the end of the Cunningham era — a run of four consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances. The Tigers haven’t been back since and look likely to slink through a defining offseason that aligns with women’s college basketball’s shining moment.

On the other hand, the Hawkeyes are at the core of that moment.

Some 233 days after beating MU in the tournament, Iowa picked up a commitment from a West Des Moines point guard named Caitlin Clark.

The same court on which Jordan Roundtree nailed to give Mizzou a first-quarter lead in 2019 has been the site of Clark routinely bagging plenty of shots from that range. It’s now adorned by a No. 22 decal on the spot where she became the highest-scoring women’s college basketball player ever.

Want more signs of the contrast between where Iowa and Missouri ended up? Just look at Monday morning’s news cycle.

The Hawkeyes were the top topic on “First Take,� ESPN’s flagship midmorning talk show.

“How important is tonight’s game for Caitlin Clark’s legacy?� asked the network’s lower-third graphic, setting up the most hotly anticipated college basketball game in nearly a year: Iowa vs. Louisiana State in the women’s Elite Eight. Clark vs. Angel Reese, a national championship rematch from last season, a spot in the Final Four on the line.

The morning also saw plenty of hype for the other star-powered women’s basketball clash of Monday night’s doubleheader, the battle between Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers and Southern California freshman JuJu Watkins.

Media analysts for women’s college basketball TV viewership or at least end up playing out in front of 7 million or 8 million viewers. Graphics for the doubleheader encouraged fans to clear their Monday night schedules. Rapper Travis Scott posted his excitement to his 11.9 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, including seven Y’s at the end of “.�

Meanwhile, in Columbia, the future of Missouri women’s basketball program plodded on quietly.

Mizzou has decided to retain coach Robin Pingeton for the last year of her contract, PowerMizzou’s Gabe DeArmond Monday morning. There hasn’t been any announcement from the athletics department or team, and a program spokesperson was unable to confirm the report.

No fanfare, no hype.

This had been a distinct possibility for the MU women’s program, given the timing of athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois’ departure. She had set the clear-cut bar for Pingeton’s employment at making it back to the NCAA Tournament this season. When the Tigers instead finished last in the Southeastern Conference, with 12 consecutive losses to close the campaign, it looked like the right mix for Pingeton’s dismissal.

Except there was no AD to fire her. And there still isn’t one.

So almost by default, Pingeton will coach into the last year of her contract. How the continued lack of clarity regarding her employment status will impact Mizzou is — no pun intended — unclear.

Hayley Frank, the multitime all-SEC player who arrived on campus not long after that 2019 loss to Iowa, is done after exhausting her eligibility. Point guard Mama Dembele decided to use her final year of eligibility after all — but decided to do so at South Florida.

The Tigers have a young core to build around. In her second season, Ashton Judd finished second on the team in scoring with 13.4 points per game and tied for the team lead with 6.4 rebounds per game. In her first season, Grace Slaughter added 11.5 points per game and shot 37% from 3-point range.

As the current, exploding women’s basketball moment shows, stars carry teams to new heights — in the NCAA Tournament, in TV ratings and in fan interest. Getting those stars means being in the recruiting mix for them.

Bueckers was the top recruit in the 2020 class, followed by Reese, Stanford star Cameron Brink and Clark — a top four that panned out with exceptional results.

Mizzou secured commitments from Aijha Blackwell and Frank in the 2019 class, the Nos. 9 and 26 recruits. Since then, the Tigers haven’t had a prospect ranked higher than 47th in a given class and don’t have an incoming freshman in the top 100 for next season.

There’s contrast elsewhere in the conference, too.

In other Monday coaching news, Tennessee alumna and women’s basketball coach Kellie Harper. She played for the Lady Vols in the Pat Summit era and posted a 108-52 record as their coach.

Tennessee consistently finished close to — but not quite at — the top of the SEC and never advanced past the Sweet 16 under Harper. This year, the Lady Vols were eliminated by an unexpected South Carolina 3-pointer in the SEC tournament semifinals and lost to Final Four-bound North Carolina State in the NCAA Tournament’s second round.

That’s evidently not up to the standard in Knoxville, where Tennessee would seemingly prefer to cash in on the flash of the current women’s basketball moment by, well, being part of it.

The question that Monday’s events ask, then, is how Mizzou will approach the sport when it’s at its brightest: Will the Tigers embrace or duck beneath its spotlight?

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Those pulled-out-again photos from his last stop at his now-new-again gig show him atop a ladder as he lifts a handful of snipped net toward the sky.

He remains, by the way, the last Missouri State men’s basketball coach to win a regular-season Missouri Valley Conference championship.

These days, because of his worn-out shoulders, it’s a grind to get his arms above his head. His spent knees would bark if asked to climb ladder rungs. What used to be a barely there, tightly trimmed black goatee has become a full beard. It’s streaked with gray.

Today’s version of Cuonzo Martin no longer is a great bet to keep up with his players when he teaches a drill.

That doesn’t mean he can’t become a home run homecoming hiring for Bears athletics director Kyle Moats.

Martin, 52, still has a burning passion for coaching. That’s never left, and it’s what now brings him back to where his college head coaching career started 16 years ago. The unanswered question, for me, was if he could get fired up about everything else that comes with coaching these days. Martin answered Monday.

“I don’t take this lightly,� he said during his Springfield reintroduction. “There were a lot of calls. But this was it for me. I felt like this is a place where you can win big. The fans are committed.�

Martin gestured to those fans.

“This right here says a lot. This means a lot to me. This means we are committed to being successful. We are ready to go. We are hungry for success.�

Martin left Missouri State after the 2011 season for stops at Tennessee, California and Missouri. He took each of those three other programs to the NCAA Tournament and got fired for the first and only time just one season after taking Mizzou dancing twice.

That ejection was tough. He had helped lift the Tigers from a pitiful place in program history. He didn’t find much patience when a transfer-laden class flopped in what became his final season. Martin had hoped coaching at Mizzou would be his final career stop. After he was let go, for the first time in his head coaching career, he stopped.

Martin took his buyout money and disappeared from the increasingly crazy college hoops circus, leaving others to sort out topics such as conference realignment; name, image and likeness rights; and the rapidly spinning transfer portal.

He and his wife, Roberta, relocated to the Orlando area and enjoyed making up for lost time with family and friends. Calls gauging his interest in coaching vacancies came in, but he didn’t feel that pull. He was more likely to text a photo of his dog than talk hoops. He got a kick out of taking his daughter to school. He made trips to Purdue to see his son’s Boilermakers play. He started writing, filling handwritten journals with reflections on a life that saw him rise from East ºüÀêÊÓƵ housing projects to the NBA, saw him beat a cancer diagnosis, saw him become a husband, father and coach.

With a 264-198 overall record, four NCAA Tournament trips, seven 20-plus-win seasons and 10 on the right side of .500, I started to think Martin really might be done for good. Interest from his first head coaching home changed things. Dana Ford was out after fan interest and attendance drained. Was Martin up for a homecoming? That pull was back.

Martin is more at peace with the world he rejoins compared with the one he left. Coaches who used to feel the daily disadvantage of trying to run a clean program while competing against blatant NCAA recruiting rule-breakers see parity in this wide-open NIL era. Now, players are getting paid at every program that has the NIL money to do so. It’s upfront, in your face and allowed. The level playing field Martin and other clean coaches wanted finally is here, oddly enough.

“If we don’t have this funding, it’s going to be very hard for us to be competitive,� MSU president Clif Smart said Monday during Martin’s introduction. “That’s just the reality we live in.�

Imagine hearing a school president say this 10 years ago. Heck, imagine hearing a school president say this a couple of seasons ago. During Martin’s last year at Mizzou, NIL still was a vague, somewhat scary thing the Tigers were told to be tentative about. Coaches were unsure to what degree they could be involved. Now? Thanks largely to Tigers football coach Eli Drinkwitz, Mizzou has a roaring NIL game. It’s officially part of a coach’s job, especially in the Show-Me State, where NIL rules are fast and loose and the NCAA will face an intense legal fight if it tries to intervene.

“We are in this thing for the long haul, and I think we have a chance to have success at a high level,� Martin said. “That’s the goal. If you commit to being great, this is a great place to be. Our goal is to win. Nowadays, you can win (here) at a high level. Don’t get caught up in high major, mid-major. You can win here, at a high level, given the right pieces.�

I see no reason Martin can’t lead the Bears from their recent basketball hibernation. Coaching changes are shaking up the MVC. Good timing for progress.

Martin has his fire back. He has changed in good ways and remained the same in others. He still wants to coach rugged defense. He still believes the best and most important part of his job is helping mold young men into great men. He still has plenty to give his sport, and anyone who knows him will tell you the sport is better when he’s in it.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri men's basketball forward Jesus Carralero Martin entered the transfer portal Monday, marking the third departure from a team that went winless in conference play last season.

Carralero appeared in 25 games for the Tigers, starting four. He averaged 12.8 minutes, 2.1 points, two rebounds, 1.6 assists and one steal per game.

Early in the season, he flashed some promising ability as a passer on the perimeter but wound up a relative non-factor on the offensive end of the floor as a reluctant shooter.

He has one year of eligibility remaining and after spending four seasons at Campbell before his lone season with Mizzou.

Carralero joins center Mabor Majak and guard Curt Lewis as MU players to depart through the transfer portal this offseason. Last week, Majak announced that he was transferring to Coastal Carolina.

The Tigers entered the offseason needing some portal departures to open roster space for five incoming freshmen and the transfer additions that will be necessary to retool following the program's worst stretch of conference play since 1907-1908.

MU has already added wing Jacob Crews from UT-Martin in the portal. 

Players have until the end of April to enter the transfer portal but can pick their new schools at any time.

COLUMBIA, Mo. — The break’s over, so when’s the takeover?

Spring break has ended at the University of Missouri, but the school’s search for a new athletics director is very much continuing. There are plenty of questions still rippling around the process, and the onset of April brings about another one: Is this the month Mizzou gets its next AD?

That’s a rhetorical question for most, save perhaps MU’s 11-member search committee and Turnkey ZRG, the executive search firm hired by the university.

When that tandem elects to proceed is its own decision. Patience, so far, has been the approach since Desiree Reed-Francois left Missouri for Arizona’s AD gig on Feb. 19.

As a slow mover — prudently or foolishly — in the athletics director hiring realm, Mizzou is part of a two-pronged trend in college sports administration circles. So far this year, there have been opposing timelines for searches and hirings: the blistering and the gradual.

It’s Aesopian in that way — there are tortoises and there are hares. The Tigers are among those with a shell.

Six Power Five conference athletics departments have found themselves looking for new leaders since the start of 2024, and they’ve operated on quite different timelines.

Texas A&M was the first domino to fall in the train of athletics director openings. Ross Bjork left College Station for Ohio State in mid-January. The Aggies went the route that Mizzou is going, hiring the same search firm, Turnkey.

A&M’s search lasted just under two months, ending with the hiring of Trev Alberts from Nebraska. That, in turn, created an opening at Nebraska. There, an interim university president spearheaded a search that lasted less than a week, using Parker Executive Search, a past MU partner, for help. Troy Dannen, barely settled into his new gig at Washington, was hired — and he requested an immediate start date.

Washington’s ensuing opening was an interesting one, given that Dannen had just been hired in October and overseen an eventful 5½ months in charge. The Huskies also paired up with Parker for another search, and it didn’t take long. They poached Pat Chun from Washington State in another process that lasted less than a week — quick hiring work once again.

Chun’s departure created one of two remaining Power Five openings besides Missouri, though placing Washington State — one of the two Pac-12 programs left out of that conference’s realignment dispersal — on the same tier as the Tigers isn’t quite fair.

Outside of that train of exits and hirings was the move that most directly impacted Mizzou: Arizona’s hiring of Reed-Francois, which came about a month after the financially troubled athletics department ousted its former AD.

Now, the list of open Power Five athletics director jobs includes:

• MU, which boasts Southeastern Conference participation but also faces some questions regarding power structures and, still, Reed-Francois’ exit.
• Washington State, which also needs a men’s basketball coach and faces an uncertain future following the collapse of the Pac-12.
• Arizona State, which has been AD-less since mid-November and might shift to a different financial and operational model at the direction of its university president.

It’s far too early to say whether the weeklong or monthslong searches have produced better results. And in Mizzou’s case, the national picture of processes doesn’t matter.

What’s important at MU is finding the right athletics director — a descriptor so obvious that it’s essentially meaningless. Once again, it’s the search committee’s discretion that will craft the prospective definition of what’s “right,� though some early priorities for the future AD have emerged.

And to a certain extent, the time a search takes is only a number. Would there be much of a difference for Mizzou’s operation if the university hired its next athletics director on, say, Monday versus next Wednesday? On April 1 versus May 1?

The chance at securing any advantage that comes from a quick hiring has disappeared from even the rearview mirror: The two major ongoing storylines for Mizzou athletics are at stages that won’t be particularly shaped by the date of an AD hiring.

With one month left in the college basketball transfer portal window, firing women’s hoops coach Robin Pingeton and hiring a replacement would likely take the eventual new athletics director too long for that program to salvage the offseason. It still could happen, but that Pingeton remains in place suggests the interim administration won’t be making that particular move. At this point, the new AD might find his or her hands tied by the time frame of the basketball offseason.

More details on the proposed renovations of Memorial Stadium’s north concourse are expected to come up at the UM System Board of Curators’ April 18 meeting, based on the time frame of previous actions on that project. That process has continued without Reed-Francois, and even if a new AD is on campus in time for that meeting, that person likely will need a hefty briefing and not be able to play a significant role.

Of course, those inside and outside the athletics department probably would rather see a new boss walk through the doors sooner rather than later — at a certain point, a drawn-out search process becomes problematic, not patient.

Where that point on the timeline is remains to be seen. With the AD hiring hares already finished, a black-and-gold tortoise is trekking along the path to a contract and checkered flag in hopes that it can call its pace and process a win.

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