Growing up in Whitefish Bay, Wis., a village north of Milwaukee located on the shores of Lake Michigan, JR Blount thought he might someday become a coach. But it wasn’t exactly an obsession when he was 14 years old. All Blount wanted while at Dominican High School was to play basketball in college and perhaps beyond.
Pat Baldwin was an assistant coach at Wisconsin-Green Bay from 2002 through ’04, and Blount was one of the first young prospects he recruited. Baldwin had joined the staff at Loyola Chicago by the time Blount opted to play for the Ramblers, and Baldwin sensed where the young man was inevitably headed.
He couldn’t have known that Blount would be named head coach at the University of San Diego this spring, but the foundational building blocks were evident.
“One thing all head coaches have in common are leadership qualities. There’s competitiveness, there’s toughness and then there’s organization and smarts,” said Baldwin, who is joining Blount as an assistant. “If I could look back at JR as a player that I was recruiting and look at him now, a lot of those correlate to who he is today. It doesn’t surprise me he’s in this position right now.”
Blount, who replaces Steve Lavin as the Toreros’ head coach, was an accomplished player for Loyola, starting 117 of the 119 games he played in four seasons (2006-09) and totaling more than 1,600 career points. Having earned undergraduate degrees in psychology and sociology, Blount was a good enough player that he spent a season with the Leicester Riders in the British Basketball League, where he averaged 20.3 points and 5.2 assists.
He also knew it was time to jump tracks. “It was a great experience,” he said of his one season as professional player. “But I always wanted to coach.”
Now, after 15 years of apprenticeship as an assistant coach of every level of NCAA basketball, Blount is intent on flipping the script at San Diego. The Toreros are coming off a 12-21 campaign and have enjoyed just one winning season since 2019. They haven’t made it to the NCAA Tournament since 2008, which is also the most recent season they finished above .500 in West Coast Conference play.
Things are about to change at San Diego, athletic director Kimya Massey believes. The university opened its new $35 million Basketball Performance Center a year ago this month. The two-story, 28,000-square foot complex features a full basketball court, an additional shooting court, weight room, sports medicine and hydrotherapy facility, coaches offices, locker rooms, player lounge and film room.
On the heels of that facility upgrade, Massey calls Blount’s hiring “a pivotal moment for our program.” The bar is clearly set higher.
“JR’s vision aligns with our belief that San Diego men’s basketball should compete in the upper tier of the WCC and position itself to be a regular NCAA Tournament participant,” Massey said. “We are excited about what lies ahead under his leadership.”
The assignment isn’t unfamiliar to Blount. He comes to San Diego after five seasons as a top assistant under head coach T.J. Otzelberger. They arrived together at Ames, Iowa, following the 2020-21 season, when the Cyclones went 2-22 and were winless in Big 12 Conference play.
From there, Blount helped Otzelberger orchestrate a stunning reversal of fortunes. Iowa State went 124-53 over five seasons, including 38-18 in conference play the past three years. The Cyclones advanced to the NCAA Tournament all five years and this past season made it to the Sweet 16 round for the third time over that span.
The two situations aren’t exactly the same, Blount acknowledges, but “there are some similarities” in the approach required to turn things,
“You come in and talk about changing a culture, but it’s about how you do it. You do it based on what you do every single day. We’ve just got to get better every single day,” Blount said. “When you do that over and over again, that’s how you can change things fast and expedite success.”
At Blount’s introductory news conference late last month, USD President Dr. James Harris III said he was sold during the interview process when Blount described how he would conduct the first practice with his new team.
“I would say he had me at two words: No basketball,” Harris recalled. Instead of jumping into fundamentals and late-game strategy, that first practice, Blount had explained, would be about bigger things.
“I want to be about the development of young men. Obviously, we're going to concentrate a lot on the basketball court. But there is an importance that happens off the court, as well,” he said. “We’ll have a saying of GBD, which is Get Better Daily. We’ll also talk about how we do anything is how we do everything.”
Just as legendary coach John Wooden showed his UCLA players how to properly tie their shoes, Blount will start with the basics of how everyone should conduct themselves.
"That first day I want to make sure how we know how we’re going to walk in the building is a certain way,” he said. “How we’re going to say hello and good morning is a certain way. The importance of we’re all being cohesive when we stretch. The importance of the timeliness and the efficiency of how we do things before practice is instrumental in our program. To me, it’s going to be all about our daily habits.
“We’ll be able to formulate our standards and we’ll formulate our culture and identity of who we are. Then I think you get the results. There’s a process to all of this and you can’t skip any steps in that process.”
Blount credits Otzelberger and Niko Medved, currently the head coach at Minnesota, with having significant influence on his development as a coach. He worked under Medved at Drake and Colorado State, which was his jumping off point to Iowa State.
“Niko taught me how to build a roster. To have those relationships that are really genuine and at the same time be able to coach them and pour in that investment to them,” he said.
“TJ, for me, it was every single day. We had routines. Those daily habits he formulated with me and our team, those things helped us win. He taught me the focus of being able to go out and stay regimented and have a plan for everything you need to do.”
Blount was eager for a head-coaching assignment, but it had to be a good fit. “I have three core principles of love, humility and excellence. Those principles all align with the university and the standards of both Kimya and President Harris’ vision, as well.”
Baldwin, who first met Blount during the recruiting process nearly a quarter-century ago, was one of the first assistants added to the USD staff. “He was sitting in my living room when I was a 14-year-old kid,” Blount recalled. “He coached me for four years, but more importantly he’s been a mentor, somebody who guides me, always had my back. It was an easy decision and a full-circle moment.”
Also on board are Blount’s wife, Ashley, and their three daughters, Maya, Zuri and Gema. While identifying himself as “a girl dad,” Blount became emotional during his introductory news conference while talking about the women in his life.
“They’re very special to me. I’m a quote-unquote tough guy from Milwaukee, but my daughters can make me soft really, really fast,” he said. “Their support and the support of my wife Ashley have been non-stop. They will make me go.”
On the court, Blount has been a defensive specialist. Otzelberger gave Blount lots of responsibility in practice, including to run the Cyclones’ defense, which ranked in the top 15 nationally in overall Kenpom defensive efficiency, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. They were No. 1 nationally at 87.5 points allowed per 100 possessions in 2023-24.
Defense will be a priority for the Toreros, who were 260th nationally in that category this past season. “It’s really important that we have an identity where on defense we dictate and disrupt,” Blount said. “We want to play a fast pace on both sides of the court. We want to be physical and play with force. And defensively, we want to turn our defense into offense. That will allow us to play fast.”
Blount said USD’s schemes won’t be complicated but will be disciplined and involve “hard playing.” He wants his players to be prepared but feel some freedom on the floor.
Their first team at Iowa State began the season 12-0 before losing by five points to top-ranked Baylor. He said a strong start by the Toreros next season can feed confidence.
“You start to see the guys believe and they see that what they are doing every single day is helping them win games,” Blount said. “It’s not like just we’ve got to come out and have some miraculous performance or somebody’s got to score 30 points.
“It’s just, `Man, what we do every single day works.’ When you start to establish that, the guys starting believing in it and that’s when you have accountability not only from the coaches but from the players. When you get that, I think you really start to roll.”