Why Lamont Paris was a good fit for South Carolina
Lamont Paris wasn’t an overnight success after he took over the basketball program at Chattanooga.
But his ability to take the Mocs from back-to-back losing seasons in his first two seasons to a Southern Conference championship and NCAA tournament appearance three years later stuck out to South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner during his search for the next Gamecocks coach.
Paris was introduced as the school’s 33rd men’s basketball coach in school history on Thursday, and Tanner went into detail about why the 47-year-old was the best fit to lead the program.
“He got punched in the mouth early on, then built that thing up. He improved his NET ranking (a metric used to pick teams for the NCAA tournament) at Chattanooga every single year from the first year to this year it was 63 or so, and it resulted in a championship for him,” Tanner said. “The body of work made a big difference.”
Paris’ body of work included 20 years as an assistant, including seven at Wisconsin, before landing the head coaching job at Chattanooga in 2017. At Wisconsin, the Badgers made the NCAA Tournament every year and appeared in two Final Fours.
Tanner said Paris’ path was similar to another recent hire that he made more than a year ago in football coach Shane Beamer. Although Beamer was never a head coach like Paris, he spent 20 years as an assistant coach with stops at Power 5 schools such as Mississippi State, Georgia, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma and USC.
“I said I’m not going to draw a comparison to Shane Beamer, but when I started looking a while ago and where he started, where he’s been and the process, being at Wisconsin, being at Akron and getting to where he is at Chattanooga, it gave me that opportunity to say, ‘He is a sitting head coach,’ ” Tanner said. “ ‘He’s gone to a program that needed some work when he got there, and he proceeded to make it happen.’ I know there was another school that was ahead of us in the process and I thought he could possibly come off the board, but he didn’t. He was still playing.”
Chattanooga in the NCAA tournament came up just short against Illinois 54-53. The Mocs led for all but the final 25 seconds. A day after losing, Paris was in the process of looking at flights to come interview at South Carolina.
Paris said there were some issues in booking a flight, so he jumped in his car and drove from Chattanooga to Columbia, which is about a six-hour trip.
“I was talking to (USC associated AD) Chance Miller about going to pick him up (in a plane) but an hour later, Chance said, ‘He’s driving,’ ” Tanner said. “I thought maybe we should intercept him, but I thought, ‘That’s OK, let’s let him come on.’ ”
Once Paris got to Columbia, Tanner was impressed by what he saw from him in person. He showed that personality during the press conference, and Tanner said he will be no problem fitting into the university and the fans.
But more importantly, the goal is to get the Gamecocks back to the NCAA tournament, something that has happened just once since 2005.
“The expectation is to get to the postseason with our basketball program on a regular basis,” Tanner said. “I just want to be clear and he said to me, ‘I have a habit of being in the postseason.’ He’s only been a head coach a short period of time but the tract that he came from — he’s been in nine of those and played in 26 games. That speaks volumes.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 8:00 AM.
