Mark Phelps will never forget his first job. He was 15, too young to drive but old enough to find work at the Lynnhaven Mall food court in Virginia Beach, Va.
 |
| Mark Phelps |
“It was a place called The Great Hot Dog Experience,” Phelps, now 47, said Tuesday.
Phelps can’t recall ever being without a job over the next 32 years.
Then March happened.
After five seasons as the head basketball coach at Drake, where his teams were 77-86, Phelps found himself in a strange place — out of work. A branch from one of college basketball’s mightiest coaching trees came crashing down when Drake fired Phelps a week after Creighton eliminated the Bulldogs in the second round of the Missouri Valley Conference tournament.
No team to coach, no hot dogs to sell.
“It was almost like a forced vacation,” said Phelps, who described his job the last three months as “reconnecting with his young family,” which includes wife Alissa, 4-year-old son Owen and 2-year-old daughter Laney.
“This job, at the level of Division I college basketball, it’s very demanding of your time,” he said. “There were certainly anxious moments, like, ‘Where are we going to be?’”
The answer came Tuesday when Missouri announced Phelps as the latest addition to Frank Haith’s ever-changing coaching staff. Phelps, who spent 12 years as an assistant under Herb Sendek at North Carolina State and Arizona State, replaces Rick Carter, who left Mizzou for an assistant job at Xavier. Phelps becomes Haith’s seventh assistant in three years.
Phelps first met Haith when they coached in the Atlantic Coast Conference – Haith as an assistant at Wake Forest and later the head coach at Miami, Phelps at N.C. State. During the 2005-06 season, all of Missouri’s current coaches worked in the ACC: Haith was in his second season at Miami; assistant Dave Leitao was in his first as the head coach at Virginia; assistant Tim Fuller was the director of basketball operations at Wake Forest; and Phelps was in his final season at N.C. State.
“We are all so excited to welcome Mark into our basketball family,” Haith said in a news release. “I’ve known Mark for a number of years and have always admired his approach to the game of basketball. He is tireless with his preparation and gets the most out of his players because he is there putting in the work with them.”
Last season, Phelps was one of eight Division I head coaches who had previously worked as an assistant under Sendek, joining Arizona’s Sean Miller, Illinois’ John Groce and Ohio State’s Thad Matta. Phelps won more games in his first five years than any coach in Drake history, but he couldn’t recapture the success of his predecessor, one-year wonder Keno Davis, who in 2008 led the Bulldogs to 28 victories and their first NCAA tournament in 37 years. While Davis parlayed his lone season at Drake into the head coaching job at Providence, Phelps’ Drake teams were never better than .500 in the Valley.
“It’s certainly a different experience going from an assistant’s chair to the head coach’s chair,” Phelps said. “Your plate has a lot more things on it. … The other thing I’ll say, and I’m excited about this, it’s going to be nice taking 25 things on your plate down to eight, nine or 10. I’m excited about being more hands-on with players, on the court, sweating with them, working out.”
After getting fired in March, Phelps said he “looked inward first” and considered ways he could improve as a coach before taking his next job.
“I feel like I’m a better person, a better coach, a better father and better husband than I was five years ago,” he said. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch].
