‘Relentless’ Jai Lucas begins tenure as Hurricanes basketball coach

[ad_1]

CORAL GABLES — A new era in Hurricanes basketball started Monday morning.

UM introduced new basketball coach Jai Lucas, the son of former NBA coach John Lucas and, until recently, the associate coach at Duke. And with the Hurricanes’ season over after a disastrous 7-24 campaign, Lucas has to hit the ground running.

“I’m sure a lot of you are asking, ‘Why Jai Lucas?’” Lucas said. “To understand that and answer that question, you really have to know me. My whole life was preparing me for this moment. I became a coach long before I knew this was my calling and what I was supposed to do.”

This is Lucas’ first head coaching position, but he has been around some high-level coaches in his career. His father was an NBA coach, and Lucas played under Billy Donovan at Florida and Rick Barnes at Texas. Barnes hired him to his first assistant coaching position with the Longhorns, and he worked under John Calipari for two seasons at Kentucky.

Lucas left the Wildcats to join Jon Scheyer’s staff at Duke, where he spent three seasons before coming to UM.

“I like to think I didn’t skip any steps,” Lucas said.

Lucas has a large rebuilding project ahead of him. Miami is just two seasons removed from its first-ever Final Four appearance but fell off mightily over the past two years. Jim Larrañaga stepped down as head coach in December, and UM won just three games under interim coach Bill Courtney. The Hurricanes had their worst season since 1993-1994.

Lucas, who met with the team on Sunday, may need to build a new roster from scratch. Seven players on the team are seniors or graduate students, and any other player — including promising young prospects like Jalil Bethea and Austin Swartz — could transfer. UM already lost its two incoming four-star freshmen, Ben Ahmed and Matthew Able, who were released from their signed letters of intent.

Lucas can start putting his team together in the coming weeks. The transfer portal opens on March 24.

“It’s going to be a big…

[ad_2]
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/relentless-jai-lucas-begins-tenure-194500274.html

Author : South Florida Sun Sentinel

Publish date : 2025-03-10 19:45:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.