Garcia makes leap to Division I coaching
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When Drew Garcia accepted an assistant coaching job with USC Upstate’s men’s basketball program this offseason, he knew he was getting into a bit of a rebuilding project.
The Spartans won just seven games last year, and the school is less than three months removed from firing its athletic director amidst a sexual harassment scandal.
Still, that seems like a manageable challenge after Garcia’s last job, which was, well, just a flat-out building project.
Garcia, a 2002 Central Catholic graduate, joined new coach Dave Dickerson’s staff at USC Upstate in early May after spending the last four years as the first men’s basketball coach in the history of Chatham University. That unique challenge has helped prepare him to make the jump from Division III to Division I.
“There’s a certain level of stress that comes with having that final say,” Garcia said. “That’s something I underestimated as an assistant. When you’re a head coach and every single little decision comes down to you, you have that pressure, even if it’s a small decision. It wears on you. I’m definitely going to be a better assistant now because I’ve experienced that and I know what it means to ease the pressure of the head coach.”
Really, handling difficult situations is an integral part of Garcia’s basketball DNA. It’s a major reason he decided to make a career out of coaching in the first place.
Garcia was a junior at Tulane in 2005 when Dickerson was hired as the Green Wave’s new head coach. In late August, just a few days before classes were set to start, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, forcing millions — including the Tulane men’s basketball team — to evacuate the city.
“A lot of us didn’t even have our things from college,” Garcia said. “We just kind of evacuated real quick, then they shut the city down.”
Garcia and his teammates spent that semester at Texas A&M, more than 400 miles away. They went to class, practiced and even played some of their home games there as New Orleans began the early part of the recovery process.
“I know how hard it is to keep a team together just in general,” Garcia said.
“The way that staff handled it, the way they were able to keep us together as a team and as a family was really impactful on me as a 21, 22-year-old. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is where I want to go. I want to do something like this. Whether it’s in college, high school, whatever, I want to coach.’”
So Garcia scrapped his plans to attend law school and dove headfirst into the coaching world. He took a graduate assistant job at Marshall and parlayed that into a spot on the coaching staff at Division II Flagler College. After two years there, Garcia moved back to Pittsburgh, taking a job as an assistant at Carnegie Mellon.
He was just finishing up his third year with the Tartans in 2014, when Chatham announced its decision to admit male undergraduate students for the first time in its 145-year history. As part of the move, the school would be adding a Division III men’s basketball program, and was in need of its firstever head coach.
Garcia threw his name in the ring. He had a slight connection with Chatham athletic director Terlynn Olds, who had also coached at Flagler, but also candidly admits, “I actually think a couple of people turned it down because it was a tough situation.”
That’s actually pretty understandable. Whoever took the job would be dealing with recruiting to a school that had not only never fielded a men’s basketball team, but had never admitted male undergraduate students to that point. That might be enough to scare off some more established coaches, but Garcia, 30 years old at the time, saw it as a “cool and unique opportunity.”
“I knew that whether I failed or not, as far as just getting a team together, having successful seasons, I knew that all those challenges were going to help me in some way,” Garcia said. “Not just to put on your resume, but to go through the challenges of constructing a roster, forming the first team, gaining an identity, ordering the first uniforms, scoring the first basket, taking the first team picture ever.
“I knew we were going to lose a lot, and maybe a lot of coaches would shy away from that. But maybe there’s something to be said about just going through the tough times during Katrina and all that other stuff, where I wasn’t afraid of that. I knew there were going to be some difficulties, but I knew in the long run it would help.”
Garcia went 22-56 over his three years at Chatham, but there were some bright spots, most notably the program’s first Presidents’ Athletic Conference tournament win over Geneva in 2016.
More than anything on the court, Garcia said his time at Chatham taught him about the importance of integrating the basketball program into the overall university community. Chatham’s decision to go coed was not without its detractors, and Garcia knew his program would be under a bit of a microscope.
“I think really that was my first two or three years at Chatham, just getting out and meeting everybody,” Garcia said. “Just kind of calming everybody’s fears. Yeah, these are male athletes, but they’re going to fit into what this school has been for 145 years. It’s still the same kind of philosophy, they’re going to be the same kind of student, they just happen to play basketball at the same time.”
The time at Chatham also helped Garcia become a better recruiter. At that level, with no athletic scholarships to offer, it became just as much about quantity as quality. Garcia said for his first year, he and his staff had more than 100 prospects apply to Chatham. There were hundreds more that didn’t even get to that stage in the process.
“I learned to kind of have a salesman’s approach to it, just in terms of like, don’t be afraid of the word ‘No,’” Garcia said. “You’re probably going to call or text or email 100 kids before you get a ‘yes’ out of one of them.”
That’s a skill Garcia knows will probably translate to his new job at USC Upstate. He had been in contact with Dickerson, his coach at Tulane, on and off since he graduated. Dickerson had been an associate head coach for Thad Matta at Ohio State from 2010-17, and took the head USC Upstate job this summer. One of his first calls when filling out his staff was to Garcia.
“He got the job, we talked about it a little bit and we decided it was a good fit for both of us,” Garcia said. “It’s been a long time coming, but we never really broke the conversation from the time I played for him all those years ago.”
Once again, Garcia will be part of a coaching staff making an uphill climb. Dickerson is taking over for Kyle Perry, who was fired after just one season with the Spartans. Around the same time, the school fired athletic director Julio Freire amid allegations of sexual harassment and workplace harassment.
As the athletic department tries to rebuild its image, Dickerson, Garcia and the Spartans have plenty of work to do on the court, as well. USC Upstate finished 338th out of 351 teams in Ken Pomeroy’s Division I rankings last season.
Garcia, of course, isn’t afraid of taking on a challenge.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do here,” he said. “It’s been some tough times here. I guess I’m drawn to these situations where you’ve got to resurrect something or just completely create it from nothing.”