Frank Martin fills out USC staff with new assistant who has ‘relentless work ethic’
The South Carolina men’s basketball team has its new assistant coach.
The school announced Wednesday it had hired Saint Louis assistant Will Bailey to fill the opening left when Perry Clark retired from Frank Martin’s staff.
“I’m excited to add Will Bailey to our staff; he is a perfect fit,” Martin said in a statement. “We have known each other since our America East days when I was at Northeastern and he was at Maine. He has a relentless work ethic that he uses in recruiting and player development. It is no surprise that everywhere he goes, the program starts to win.”
Across 15 years of Division I coaching, Bailey has been at Chicago State, Maine, East Tennessee State, La Salle and the past four seasons at Saint Louis. A team captain as a player at UAB in the mid-1990s, he was a tenacious defensive player.
“I’m very excited to be joining coach Martin’s staff here at the University of South Carolina. He is well respected in the college coaching community and in the SEC,” Bailey said in the statement. “The University of South Carolina is an outstanding institution with a great reputation for both athletics and academics. Coach Martin has built a great culture here and has a vision for the future of which I am proud to become a part of. I am super excited about this opportunity.”
At Saint Louis, he helped head coach Travis Ford turn around a program that had fallen on hard times following the death of Rick Majerus. The staff made the NCAAs in Year 3 and was projected to return this year, before the tournament was canceled.
At La Salle, he was part of a program’s rapid rise to a Sweet 16 run in 2013, before things fell off. In that season, he was credited with developing a trio of strong 3-point shooting guards.
During his time at ETSU, he was part of a staff that made the NCAA tournament three times in his seven years. That included the first year after replacing Ed DeChellis, and then two trips in Bailey’s final two seasons. He coached three conference players of the year in that stretch.
Those teams were built around power guards, the sort Martin has traditionally favored.
The guard group Bailey will get to work with includes Jermaine Couisnard, who took over the point guard role as a redshirt freshman, and Seventh Woods, a former four-star recruit who transferred home from UNC. He’ll very possibly also be working with A.J. Lawson, the team’s top scorer last season, but Lawson still has his name in the NBA Draft.
Martin’s staffs haven’t recruited the Midwest too heavily, outside Couisnard (from the Chicago area) and a few prospects from private schools in Kansas. Traditionally they get talent from the Northeast, Canada and the Southeast, but Bailey joins assistant Chuck Martin as staffers with strong links to the Midwest. Bailey’s presence should bring more energy on the recruiting front.
This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 10:55 AM.
