STARKVILLE — Once he accepted the job as Mississippi State University men’s basketball coach, Rick Ray said he returned to Clemson, S.C., with 867 emails and 347 text messages on his cell phone.
The task for MSU’s first new men’s basketball coach in more than 14 years will be to return some of those messages.
Ray, who spent the past two years as men’s basketball associate head coach at Clemson University, faces a monumental task of putting together a coaching staff and a talented roster in a short amount of time.
“I have to build a relationship with players in a short amount of time and I have to get them to believe in our system,” Ray said Monday in his introductory news conference. “It will take a little time, but you have to have patience because it will happen.”
Ray replaces Rick Stansbury, who retired in March as the school’s all-time wins leader after 14 seasons as head coach. Ray will inherit a roster that will lose junior front-court players Renardo Sidney and Arnett Moultrie, who announced they will declare for the NBA draft. Freshman point guard DeVille Smith also has filed paperwork to leave the program.
“(The player attrition) should not hinder how you feel about the program,” Ray said. “Those things will happen when there is a coaching change. I just need to make sure we don’t have more attrition.”
Ray wasn’t about to mislead the current players when he met with them Sunday about the challenges they will face learning a new system and adjusting to a new head coach. None of the current players attended Ray’s news conference due to required class attendance, according to MSU spokesperson Gregg Ellis. MSU players won’t be allowed to speak to the media until Ray meets with them one-on-one.
“I’m not going to sit here and try to sugar coat this thing and say this is going to be something that’s going to be easy for you in this transition,” Ray said he told the MSU players. “But I’ll tell you this, if you’ll give me your all, if you’re open and you give 100 percent of yourself on the basketball court, you’ll see I come from a tradition of winning. The program I’m going to run is going to be a situation where guys are going to flourish.”
Part of the expected returning nucleus includes four-star recruit and Southeastern Conference All-Freshman team member Rodney Hood. The 6-foot-8 wing player scored 10.3 points and grabbed 4.8 rebounds per game last season and was mentioned four times in Ray’s opening speech as a major part of MSU’s future.
“Rodney Hood is a guy who is very important to our program, but I don’t want to belittle the other guys,” Ray said. “I want Rodney Hood to be a guy that commands double teams. I want the other team to be focused on him so he can make the other guys better.”
MSU forward Wendell Lewis and junior outside shooter Jalen Steele also are expected to return after being major parts of the rotation this past season.
Ray also needs to convince the members of the 2012 recruiting class Stansbury’s staff assembled to stay in Starkville. Houston point guard Josh Gray, who Stansbury referred to as possibly the best point guard prospect he has had in a decade, reportedly has asked to be released from the national letter of intent he signed to attend MSU, but Ray denied Monday that Gray felt that way.
“I talked to Josh probably around 12:30 a.m. (Monday) and he said he was open to me coming down and sitting with him face-to-face getting a chance to know me,” Ray said. “We talked about basketball and his role on the team. I told him you still signed up to be a Bulldog and it’s still going to be a good situation for you.”
Ray also will have to address the recruitment of Kemper County forward Devonta Pollard. Earlier this week, the McDonald’s All-American eliminated MSU from his list of finalists, citing the coaching move as a major factor. The spring signing period for the 2012 class begins April 11.
“We want to recruit Mississippi first,” Ray said. “Mississippi is the most important state to our program. Then we want to lock down the border states. We want to put a wall around Mississippi. With this day and age in recruiting, you have an advantage when you can get those (in-state) guys on campus.”
Ray said Monday the hiring of assistant coaches will “take some time,” but that he would like to retain one member of last year’s coaching staff.
However, The Dispatch learned Monday that Phil Cunningham, Stansbury’s top assistant for the past 12 years, isn’t interested in joining Ray’s staff even after being personally invited by MSU Director of Athletics Scott Stricklin an opportunity to discuss that idea. Cunningham, who was the lead recruiter for Pollard, told The Dispatch
that Stricklin called him Sunday in New Orleans while he was at the coaching clinic and asked if he would fly back with them so they could talk about the possibility of joining Ray’s staff. After not being considered for an interview to replace Stansbury or for an interim head coaching spot, Cunningham, who recruited Jarvis Varnado, Arnett Moultrie, and Jamont Gordon, declined the invitation and is working on a deal to be an assistant coach at another school.
Without a staff or guarantees all of MSU’s signees will stick with the school, Ray admitted he doesn’t know what his first MSU team will look like.
“The most important recruits are the ones on the team,” Ray said. “We will reach out to the guys we have signed, but I want to reach out to the guys we have on our team already. I have reached out to some and received good feedback. I can answer that question better in two weeks.”
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