Campbell finally gets its man, three weeks and a national title after it hired him
Thirty-six hours before he stood in front of the public with a camel pinned to his lapel for the first time, John Andrzejek was riding a boat down San Antonio’s River Walk alongside the NCAA trophy — a trophy Florida actually left at the hotel and had to retrieve before leaving the airport for Gainesville on Tuesday.
But Andrzejek had a shred of net to brandish as he was introduced as Campbell’s new coach Wednesday afternoon, proof that his method — the Kyle Smith method, the Todd Golden method — works. He was double-dipping throughout the NCAA tournament, calling Campbell recruits one minute, watching film the next, but the former Florida assistant can finally turn his full attention to his new job.
A job, he pointed out, he was offered and accepted long before he was sized for a ring.
“You wanted me to be your basketball coach,” Andrzejek said Wednesday, “long before I became a national champion.”
Andrzejek’s new fame is merely a bonus for Campbell, which wanted someone who had not only more to offer than the standard basketball coach, but something different. While the school has great facilities and a motivated and wealthy, but small, pool of donors, it also hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 1992. Andrzejek is only 32 and started out as a student manager under Smith at Columbia, where the now-Stanford coach honed his cutting-edge analytical approach to basketball.
When you’re a school like Campbell, in the Colonial Athletic Conference with urban schools like Northeastern and Drexel and big public schools like UNC Wilmington, Delaware, Stony Brook and Towson, you’ve got to find an edge somewhere. Why not grab a branch of college basketball’s most analytics-focused coaching tree and take a big swing?
“If we try to do the exact same thing that UNCW is doing, or the same thing that Charleston is doing, that doesn’t benefit us, right?” Campbell athletic director Hannah Bazemore said. “We needed something different, something new. And I think the analytical piece of what he’s going to bring is exactly what we need to get that spark from a recruiting standpoint. Because if we go toe-to-toe with some of these other schools and what they have and the location that they’re at, we’re going to be at a disadvantage. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for.”
But it’s not just style of play, where Andrzejek referenced the “dunks, 3-pointers and free throws” shot-selection mantra of his like-minded mentors as well as winning on shot volume — through offensive rebounds and avoiding turnovers — even when shots aren’t falling. It also applies to recruiting, where Andzrejek can adapt the data mining lessons he learned under Smith at San Francisco and Washington State and Columbia and under Golden at Florida to a different level of recruits — both domestically and internationally.
His new associate head coach, former Davidson player and assistant coach Landry Kosmalski, said he was used to triaging thousands of potential recruits as a Division III head coach at Swarthmore, a job that requires casting the widest of nets; he got a crash course in Andrzejek’s methods while his new boss was finishing up with Florida, generating leads for Kosmalski to pursue — exactly what he was hoping to learn when he took the job.
“We try to use data as much as we can to influence all of our decisions in the program, but it’s just a tool in the toolbox,” Andrzejek said. “There’s other stuff that goes into the team. But in terms of recruiting, we do have an algorithm that looks at prior production at the college level, and projects how that player would be able to play for us here at Campbell, and how good they would be. We can also look at that for international players as well. So it’s a good tool to identify some under-recuited, undervalued guys that might be good fits.”
Speaking of good fits, Bazemore said the search started out with 51 candidates, but by the time the list was down to four, the other three candidates were already being compared to Andrzejek. She closed the deal on March 20, immediately after Florida won the SEC title, just before Florida’s three-week run to the title.
Was she, watching Florida advance, trying to find a balance between being excited at the additional recruiting cachet her new coach would bring with each passing round and wanting him to, you know, get started already?
“What was awesome about it is he actually did both at the same time,” Bazemore said. “It would continue to come up over and over again through the process, how much of a worker he was. I was able to see that in front of my face, to see him taking phone calls and getting evaluations on recruits throughout the entire tournament.
“And so he’s fielding phone calls from recruits, but at the same time he’s giving it all to Florida. I don’t know if the man sleeps. To see him in action early on, to be exactly what we were told he was, to be exactly who we thought he was, is nothing but affirming we made the right decision.”
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