City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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After various reports had him both a leading candidate and also no longer a candidate for the Drexel head coaching position, Army coach Zach Spiker will indeed be making the move down to Philadelphia and taking over the Dragons’ program.

Drexel confirmed the news of the hire Friday morning in a press release. The Triangle’s Adam Hermann was first with the news on Thursday afternoon after a 17-day search that began when 15-year head coach Bruiser Flint was let go on March 7.

"Zach Spiker is an exceptional coach and a person of integrity," Drexel Athletic Director Dr. Eric Zillmer said in a statement. "Zach has unbelievable energy and will bring an excitement to the Drexel fan base. His personality and playing style fits the aspirations of our University as a creative, fast-paced, and innovative place of higher education."

Spiker will be formally introduced at an event on Tuesday.

Flint, who won 245 games in his Drexel tenure, oversaw the worst season in the program’s history last year. The Dragons went 6-25 and lost in the quarterfinals of the CAA Tournament, their third losing season in the last four years.

So the administration, led by Zillmer, decided to go in a new direction, focusing on coaches with Ivy and Patriot League backgrounds. Also reported to be involved were Lehigh coach Brett Reed and Saint Joseph's assistant Geoff Arnold, among others.

According to one of his former players, academics is something that Spiker took very seriously.

"He really emphasized academics, every time we had a meeting we started with my grades first and then basketball," said Ella Ellis, who played at the military institute from 2009 to 2013. "Every time we talked, for him it was more about us graduating and becoming leaders for the United States Army, and even though winning games obviously was important to him, he wanted to make sure that we were set up for success in other areas also."

Spiker has spent the last seven years at West Point, where he’s guided the Black Knights to a 102-112 record. Though that winnign percentage (.477) might not jump off the page, Army is a notoriously difficult job to win games at. Only two other coaches have led Army to 19-or-more wins (as Spiker did this past season) in the last 50 years--Bob Knight and Mike Krzyzewski.

Ellis, who was a freshman when Spiker took over the West Point program just days before the start of the 2009-10 season, got to see the team's development over his four years there.

"We had some hiccups early, obviously, getting used to each other's personalities and stuff like that, but when he came in, he treated us like family, he treated me like a son," said Ellis, who scored more than 1500 points in his college career and was a two-time First Team All-Patriot League selection. "He was hard on me for four years, and because he was hard on me I became the player that a lot of other schools didn't think I would become."

The 2013 Patriot League Coach of the Year, Spiker is a native of Morgantown, West Virginia, and played at Ithaca College before graduating in 2000. After that, he was a grad assistant at Winthrop from 2000-02 under eventual Wichita State head coach Gregg Marshall, before a stint as an administrative assistant at West Virginia.

His first full-time Division I coaching job was as an assistant at Cornell from 2004-09, under current Penn head coach Steve Donahue.

CoBL will have more on this story as it develops