Ualbany eyes cuts
Ballooning deficit spurs restructuring plan Basketball coach won’t be back next year
The University at Albany wasted little time in addressing the future of its men’s basketball program.
Less than 18 hours after Ualbany’s season ended, the school announced Monday morning that coach Will Brown will not return next season. A university news release stated that the parties agreed “to mutually part ways,” although Brown’s contract was set to expire after this season.
The decision was somewhat startling in that Brown had been at the school for 21 years, in
cluding 19½ as head coach, and led the program to five America East championships and five NCAA Tournament appearances.
An 83-77 loss Sunday to Hartford ended Brown’s Ualbany record at 315-295 (.516 winning percentage). The Great Danes finished 7-9, their third straight losing season and the fourth consecutive year they have lost in the America East Tournament quarterfinals.
“After nearly 20 years coaching at Ualbany, I have decided that it is time for me to seek a new challenge, and after meeting with (athletic director) Mark Benson, we have agreed to mutually part ways,” Brown is quoted as saying in the news release.
The news was first reported by WNYT sports director Rodger Wyland, the play-by-play announcer for the university’s basketball and football games.
“Anyone who knows me knows this decision was extraordinarily difficult,” Brown said, “but I leave the University at Albany with an enormous sense of pride in the positive impact that my staff, my family and, most important, the student-athletes I had the honor of coaching have had on Ualbany basketball and the greater Albany community.”
The school said a “national search” for Brown’s successor will begin immediately.
Among the first to declare his attentions to apply for the vacant position was Lucious Jordan, a former Colonie High and Ualbany player who is currently an assistant at Massachusetts.
“I think everybody’s disappointed, as I am, even though I want the job,” Jordan said by phone from St. Louis, where the Minutemen were getting ready to play their regular-season finale Monday evening. “I never want to see a guy like Will Brown lose his job. He’s been there for 20 years and done a hell of a job.”
Brown, 49, signed a five-year contract extension before the 2016-17 season.
Under Brown, Ualbany won America East championships in 2006, 2007, 2013, 2014 and 2015, going to the NCAA Tournament in each of those seasons. The Danes also made three other postseason appearances under Brown: the 2012 and 2017 Collegeinsider.com Tournament and the 2016 College Basketball Invitational.
“We are grateful for all that Will has done for Ualbany athletics,” Benson, who was at Sunday’s game in Hartford, said in the news release. “Will’s tenure on the bench for the majority of our Division I history and his five championships have left indelible memories with our fans. We wish Will and his family all the best as they move forward from Ualbany.”
Text requests to Brown and Benson for further comment were not immediately returned.
Brown took over for Scott Beeten in the middle of the 2001-02 season, at 30 becoming the second-youngest Division I coach in the country at that time.
He was a Ualbany assistant under Beeten for a season and a half, and before that coached Sullivan County Community College to a 90-10 record over three seasons.
A Long Island native who played at Dowling College, Brown began his coaching career as an assistant for three seasons
at The College of Saint Rose in Albany. He picked up his 300th Ualbany victory on Dec. 14, 2019, when the Danes beat Niagara 84-80 at SEFCU Arena. He got his 400th career coaching win, including his time at Sullivan, on Jan. 16 in an 83-75 home triumph over New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The 610 games that Brown coached are second-most in school history, trailing only Richard “Doc” Sauers, who was on the bench for 1,041 games over 41 seasons.
Between 2011-12 and 2017-18, Brown’s teams never won fewer than 19 games, going 153-83 (.648) in that stretch.
He was the 2015 America East Coach of the Year and the same year was a finalist for the Hugh Durham Award as the nation’s top mid-major coach.
The beginning of the end may have been after the 2017-18 season, when former star players Joe Cremo and David Nichols walked away from the program after their junior years. Cremo transferred to Villanova and Nichols to Florida State.
Brown also has been criticized for his reliance on junior college and transfer players to fill out his roster. The Danes have only one freshman recruit, guard Will Amica from Syracuse, on the current roster.
On the plus side, Brown brought in quality students.
His players have won four America East scholar-athlete of the year awards, most of any coach in conference history. He has been active in the “Coaches vs. Cancer” cause, raising funds for cancer research. Brown and his wife, Jamie, donated $10,000 to kickstart a drive to help cancer patients during the early stages of the COVID -19 pandemic.
“His ‘Coaches vs. Cancer’ was a great thing that he did in the community,” Ualbany football coach Greg Gattuso said on a Zoom call Monday. “Our offices are 20 feet apart. We’ve had a really solid relationship. I’ve been places where the basketball coach and football coach couldn’t be in a room together. We’ve shared a positive relationship and a love of the university, and any time something like this happens it’s a sad day. I think coaches are always the same. We always are pulling for each other.”
One of Brown’s sons, Jackson, was on this season’s roster as a freshman walk-on. His other son, Landon, is in middle school.