UNC Asheville basketball coach Mike Morrell guides team from worst to first in Big South

Mike Morrell had worked his way up the coaching ladder — small colleges, a lower-level assistant at Clemson, then seven years as a top aide to Shaka Smart at VCU and then Texas.

It was 2018, and Morrell had been someone else’s assistant for 13 years. He was ready to be in control.

“I’ll just say this,” Morrell recounted with a laugh recently. “You don’t move on from a program like Texas, just to become head coach of a 4-27 team.”

“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “It was tough.”

Morrell actually made news in the college basketball world during that 2018-19 season, his first at the helm of UNC Asheville. But it wasn’t the way he probably would have preferred.

Morrell, a one-time standout basketball player and golfer at Milligan College in east Tennessee, was not only coach of a team that finished 4-27, but it also was the youngest team in the country.

More than 75 percent of the minutes that season were played by freshmen.

Morrell is still getting national attention, but for different reasons.

His UNC Asheville team was the Big South’s regular-season champion, and the Bulldogs (24-7) will face ninth-seeded Charleston Southern (10-20) at noon Friday in the opening game of the men’s quarterfinals at Bojangles Coliseum.

Morrell last week was named Big South Coach of the Year, UNC Asheville standout Drew Pember was tabbed as Player of the Year, and four Bulldogs earned all-conference honors.

He’s just the coach

Morrell prefers to take a back seat, when it comes to handing out praise.

“Hey, it’s the players and the staff who got us here,” he said. “Drew Pember is the player of the year, yet it took me half of last season to figure out how to coach him.”

Charleston Southern’s Barclay Radebaugh, a Lincolnton native who will coach against Morrell on Friday, disagrees.

“Mike Morrell took a great team and kept them great all year,” Radebaugh said. “He deserves to be coach of the year. It’s amazing, what a marvelous job he has done.”

Morrell didn’t see any of this coming in 2018, during those bleak days in Asheville.

After seven years with Smart, he was ready to try being a head coach.

“Well, I certainly liked the idea of going to Asheville,” he said. “As a kid, I used to go to the Southern Conference tournament at the old Asheville Civic Center. I always liked Asheville.”

UNC Asheville had enjoyed three straight 20-win-plus seasons under Nick McDevitt, who left in 2018 to become head coach at Middle Tennessee.

In came Morrell. But most key players off the 2017-18 team that went 21-13 and played in the NIT were gone. He started nearly from scratch. Of the 15 players on the roster, 13 were freshmen or sophomores.

“There were some good players on that team, but we were young,” he said. “I knew it would be hard.”

The road back

Several times during a recent conversation, Morrell said that guard Tajion Jones is a big reason why the Bulldog program stayed afloat.

“I don’t think Tajion gets the credit for hanging around,” Morrell said. “He decided to stay with me, to get another degree.”

He said Jones passed up chances to transfer, instead providing the program with a building block. Davis led the team in minutes played, scoring and other categories during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons. He is second in scoring (14.9) this year.

Meanwhile, Morrell was building the lineup. The Bulldogs improved 11 games in 2019-20, finishing 15-16. That was followed by a 10-10 season in 2020-21, and then a winning record – 17-15 – last year. The Bulldogs played in the College Basketball Invitational, beating Stephen F. Austin in the first round.

“We had a lot of close losses last season,” Morrell said. “I told our assistants, ‘If we could just keep this thing together, we could be good next season.’ ”

A big piece of the puzzle was solved when Pember transferred from Tennessee to UNC Asheville. Pember leads the team in scoring (20.4) and rebounds (9.2).

Another important addition, Morrell said, was guard Fletcher Abee, a transfer from The Citadel.

“Nobody talks about his role,” Morrell said. “He was another key piece that we needed.”

Abee, who played at Freedom High in Morganton, gives UNC Asheville a real 3-point shooting threat.

No master plan

Now the Bulldogs are playing for an NCAA Tournament berth, knowing that as regular-season champ in the Big South, they’re assured of at least a spot in the NIT.

“That is nice to have in your back pocket,” Morrell said of the NIT. “But hey! We’ve gotten to this point. That (the NCAA) is the next step.”

So here we are, five years removed from that 4-27 season.

It might look like Mike Morrell’s master plan, drawn up during the midst of that miserable first season, has finally fallen into place.

Uh, not really, the Bulldogs’ head coach said.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Drew would be this good, and that we would be this good,” he said, adding that there was no master plan.

“We just kept working, and we added pieces where we could,” he said. “Tajion hung around, we worked hard, and we got better.”