MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Titan Q]

Titan Q As a Weslyan fan you had to be thrilled hearing his responses because you probably got the feeling " Millikin won't be good with this guy" It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience. Just all seems really weird that there weren't better options .

I did not get that feeling.  I got the feeling this is the kind of person Millikin MBB needs.  I think he will do well.  Just my personal take.

There are quite a few successful head men's basketball coaches across all levels who didn't play.

[ChickenHoops]

Q-cast with new Millikin Head MBB Coach Tom Noonan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pau-0N2Hr7k

Titan Q As a Weslyan fan you had to be thrilled hearing his responses because you probably got the feeling " Millikin won't be good with this guy" It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience. Just all seems really weird that there weren't better options .

As an academic institution, what is Milliken's forte? Compare them to peers. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
 

[Gregory Sager]

As an academic institution, what is Milliken's forte? Compare them to peers. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. 

1. It's Millikin, not "Milliken".
2. Your question was already covered here a couple of days ago:

three of MU's four top majors (Registered Nursing/Registered Nurse, Musical Theatre, and Drama and Dramatics/Theatre Arts) are not good draws for recruiting male student-athletes,

[north central]

As an academic institution, what is Milliken's forte? Compare them to peers. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. 

1. It's Millikin, not "Milliken".
2. Your question was already covered here a couple of days ago:

three of MU's four top majors (Registered Nursing/Registered Nurse, Musical Theatre, and Drama and Dramatics/Theatre Arts) are not good draws for recruiting male student-athletes,

Honestly that point is probably not taken seriously enough. Millikins academic strengths are certainly not conducive to having good male athletes . I know very few good basketball players who are into fine art or nursing . No knock on those majors but it's just facts .

[ChickenHoops]

Sorry about the spelling error. Thanks for the replies

[north central]

Titan Q As a Weslyan fan you had to be thrilled hearing his responses because you probably got the feeling " Millikin won't be good with this guy" It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience. Just all seems really weird that there weren't better options .

I did not get that feeling.  I got the feeling this is the kind of person Millikin MBB needs.  I think he will do well.  Just my personal take.

There are quite a few successful head men's basketball coaches across all levels who didn't play.

You're absolutely right there are many coaches around the country that haven't played but most of them were managers or at least around the basketball program while college students. If I was an AD in the CCIW I would look at the most successful guys : Ron, Jon , Mike and notice those guys all played in the CCIW and had either individual and/or team success as players and had success as assistants or head coaches prior to getting their current jobs. Even Vince and Steve had good( steve great ) playing careers and success as assistants in the league before being given the jobs. I wouldn't think winning 14 games counts as successful. So my point is hiring someone with this little experience or success at the college level is not typical.  Smart AD's typically look at what the teams that are winning are doing and try to replicate that in some way. He will be completely over matched from a coaching standpoint against Ron, Jon, Mike , Vince, Edwin, and Steve. If someone was ranking the coaches in the CCIW right now he would be unanimously last. Thats not good.  If we really being honest, this hire was made because Lori knows Tom is just happy to have the job and won't ruffle any feathers or put pressure on the administration to change.

[Gregory Sager]

Q-cast with new Millikin Head MBB Coach Tom Noonan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pau-0N2Hr7k

I don't do drinking games, but if I did, a good one would be, "Drink every time that Bob mentions his alma mater's team or its players in this interview of the new head coach of a completely different school."

Seriously, though, it was a good interview. Bob always does a nice job of touching all the bases in terms of guest-relevant topics with his Q-cast interviews. I came away from it with a solid sense of Tom Noonan as an amiable and thoughtful coach. The Millikin press release doesn't indicate anything about his career prior to his hire as Decatur St. Theresa's head coach in 2010, nor does it list his graduation date from MU, but it looks like he graduated from Millikin in the mid-Oughts, as he last played baseball for the Big Blue in 2005. (Fun fact: He seems to have gone 1-for-5 in his career as a Millikin position player. He did mention in the interview that he was not exactly a key cog for the Big Blue baseball team.) That means that he's been out of school for two decades, he's in early middle age, and he's clearly someone who's been around the block a few times, knows how the world works, and appears to be comfortable in his own skin.

I have a couple of thoughts about the interview. The first is that it's clear that Noonan is not going to try to reinvent the wheel. When Bob asked him how he views Millikin's recruiting footprint in the Noonan era, he fell back on the same-old, same-old I mentioned here the other day, stating that he's going to keep his recruiting within a 100-mile radius of the MU campus, and that he would continue Kramer Soderberg's mission to mine the St. Louis area for talent. (Not to keep throwing shade Bob's way, but I found it hilarious that anyone who watched the interview came away knowing a lot more about who Illinois Wesleyan has recruited from the Gateway City and its environs than who Millikin has recruited. )

I don't really get that, because it seems like a recipe for perpetuating mediocrity. The name "Noonan" isn't gold in St. Louis basketball the way that the name "Soderberg" is. Does he really expect to outdo his predecessor's success down there in terms of recruiting? And is the drying-up population of central Illinois really a sufficient recruiting base in and of itself? It would seem to me that expanding Millikin's reach would be a good idea. Speaking of that 100-mile radius, the Indiana border is only 90 miles east, yet Millikin (unlike other CCIW schools) seems to be allergic to recruiting the state that is synonymous with high school basketball. Yeah, that mostly means the same sort of small-town kids that MU's always gathered from this side of the border, but there's that many more of them if you cross the state line. Plus, Indianapolis is less than three hours from Decatur -- and Indy's a massive hotbed of hoops talent. Also, traveling one hundred miles NNE doesn't even get you to Kankakee from Decatur. Back in Joe Ramsey's heyday in the '80s he got some outstanding (All-CCIW level, even) talent from Chicago's South Side and the south suburbs to come play ball at MU. While it may not make sense for Noonan to bump into five or six other CCIW coaches in a suburban gym who're all chasing the same kids at a Glenbard North game or a Maine West game, it sure wouldn't hurt him to look in on players at, say, Homewood-Flossmoor or the Riches or the Thornton Fractionals.

[Gregory Sager]

My second thought about the interview is the same one that northcentral and WUPHF had:

The really alarming part was when asked why Millikin has been bad he didn't have a good answer which makes me think he doesn't know what it takes to be good. 

He did not have a good answer, not at all.

But in all fairness, the this is how I'll do better than my friend and former supervisor is always a tough one. 

WUPHF's point is true as far as it goes, but Noonan's answer to Bob's question regarding Millikin's woeful lack of success since 1989 was, nevertheless, most certainly weak sauce. For those of you who haven't seen the interview yet (and you all really ought to watch it), Noonan answered Bob's question by saying that the frequent turnover at Millikin's head coaching job impeded the ability of the Big Blue to compete for the past 37 years because each coaching change led to a large shift in program philosophy that always put Millikin hoops back at square one.

I don't know Tom Noonan, so I can't say for certain whether he's manufactured an excuse because he's a company man who is already covering for his employer or if he really believes what he said because that's a common explanation among the Millikin fan base -- in which case someone ought to be testing the Kool-Ade sold in Decatur. As an answer it seems to me to be pretty transparently a load of baloney.

Since 1989 Millikin has had six head coaches:

coach	seasons	# of seasons
Joe Ramsey	1989-90 to 1995-96	7
Tim Littrell	1996-97 to 2006-07	11
Marc Smith	2007-08 to 2010-11	4
Matt Nadelhoffer	2011-12 to 2016-17	6
Mark Scherer	2017-18 to 2020-21	4
Kramer Soderberg	2021-22 to 2025-26	5

I think it's a truism that a coach gets a mulligan for his first year, maybe his first couple of years. But even if he's starting from scratch -- and the only MU coach on this list who truly started from scratch was poor Matt Nadelhoffer -- there should be definite progress by the third season, and by the fourth it's probably mostly or all your team in terms of whom you've recruited, and they employ the style you've implemented and the plays you've taught and called. It's your program by then.

So at best I think we can give Noonan's statement some credence as far as the hiring of Nadelhoffer is concerned, and, on the face of it, the hiring of Soderberg. But even that generous second example has a huge hole in it as well: Soderberg was the chief assistant coach for the last two years of Nadelhoffer's tenure, and for the entire span of Scherer's. That's not constant change; that's a pretty consistent source of continuity throughout three head-coaching spans. What's more, Tim Littrell was Joe Ramsey's second chair as well, so there's coaching continuity running through that entire 18-year stretch of Millikin men's basketball. The only stretch of those 37 years in which there wasn't a baton being passed from a Millikin head coach to a Millikin chief assistant coach was the Marc Smith era -- the absolute nadir of Millikin men's basketball.

Bob didn't push Noonan on this point, and I can see why. The Q-cast isn't 60 Minutes, and Bob isn't paid big bucks by some media conglomerate to be a hard-hitting journalist. Bob's not going to ask questions that will scare away every other head coach in D3 from coming on his show. (Well, everyone but Mike Schauer, whose relentless honesty and candor is backstopped nicely by the fact that he's his own boss. ) Can't blame Bob one bit for that.

But I don't mean to be hard on Tom Noonan. Like WUPHF, I think that he's going to be caught between a rock and a hard place whenever he's asked to explain why his alma mater hasn't been able to get the job done on the hardwood for close to four decades now ... as if his new job wasn't tough enough already.

Just two questions of northcentral, though:

It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience.

How in the world is this relevant? Tom Noonan was not just a head coach of a high school basketball program in Illinois for over a decade, he was a very successful head coach of a high school basketball program in Illinois for over a decade. His record at St. Theresa's is in the Millikin press release for all to read, and Bob reiterated Noonan's record at St. Theresa's in the Q-cast interview. Kramer Soderberg hired Noonan to be his second chair. Would he have done that if Noonan's lack of college basketball playing experience mattered in any way, shape, or form?

College is twenty years in Noonan's rear-view mirror at this point in his life. It's irrelevant now whether he spent those long-gone years in the MU gym or out on the MU diamond. All that matters is that he's spent most of the past two decades coaching basketball.

Institutional support has to increase or he is doomed. If he isn't going to hold Lori and the administration accountable then we will be right back here in 4 years.

Please, exactly how does one hold his boss(es) accountable? That street only runs one way.

Since Noonan's a former baseball player, this movie clip seems especially appropriate.

[Gregory Sager]

If I was an AD in the CCIW I would look at the most successful guys : Ron, Jon , Mike and notice those guys all played in the CCIW and had either individual and/or team success as players and had success as assistants or head coaches prior to getting their current jobs. Even Vince and Steve had good( steve great ) playing careers and success as assistants in the league before being given the jobs.

"Even"? Perhaps it wasn't your intention, but this makes it sound as though Steve Djurickovic can't be mentioned in the same sentence as Ron Rose, John Baines, and Mike Schauer. Whose team went 14-2 and won the 2024-25 CCIW championship?

Also, you seem to be adding to your original point by saying that it takes someone who not only played college basketball, but played it in the CCIW, in order to succeed as a head coach in this league. And I don't think that that's true at all. You know who else doesn't think so? Grey Giovanine.

Prior CCIW experience is helpful, but it's not even close to being necessary in order to achieve success as a head coach in this league.

I wouldn't think winning 14 games counts as successful. So my point is hiring someone with this little experience or success at the college level is not typical.

Seems like you're moving the goalposts on this one. You've gone from "he never played this sport in college" to "he's had little experience or success at the college level," which implies a broader statement that includes coaching experience as well as playing experience. But at least we can agree that his head coaching experience on the collegiate level is non-existent, and that his coaching experience as an assistant at the collegiate level is limited to a four-year stint at his alma mater when it went 23-41 in CCIW play, never finished in the first division, and made one CCIW tourney appearance as the #5 seed and got knocked out in the quarterfinals.

[WUPHF]

But I don't mean to be hard on Tom Noonan.

He might say that he was talking to someone from a school that benefited from having only two coaches since Division III became a thing, more or less.  I have to think though that Tom Noonan would agree that everything you said was fair.

Also, very interesting points about the recruiting plans.

[north central]

My second thought about the interview is the same one that northcentral and WUPHF had:

The really alarming part was when asked why Millikin has been bad he didn't have a good answer which makes me think he doesn't know what it takes to be good. 

He did not have a good answer, not at all.

But in all fairness, the this is how I'll do better than my friend and former supervisor is always a tough one. 

WUPHF's point is true as far as it goes, but Noonan's answer to Bob's question regarding Millikin's woeful lack of success since 1989 was, nevertheless, most certainly weak sauce. For those of you who haven't seen the interview yet (and you all really ought to watch it), Noonan answered Bob's question by saying that the frequent turnover at Millikin's head coaching job impeded the ability of the Big Blue to compete for the past 37 years because each coaching change led to a large shift in program philosophy that always put Millikin hoops back at square one.

I don't know Tom Noonan, so I can't say for certain whether he's manufactured an excuse because he's a company man who is already covering for his employer or if he really believes what he said because that's a common explanation among the Millikin fan base -- in which case someone ought to be testing the Kool-Ade sold in Decatur. As an answer it seems to me to be pretty transparently a load of baloney.

Since 1989 Millikin has had six head coaches:

coach	seasons	# of seasons
Joe Ramsey	1989-90 to 1995-96	7
Tim Littrell	1996-97 to 2006-07	11
Marc Smith	2007-08 to 2010-11	4
Matt Nadelhoffer	2011-12 to 2016-17	6
Mark Scherer	2017-18 to 2020-21	4
Kramer Soderberg	2021-22 to 2025-26	5

I think it's a truism that a coach gets a mulligan for his first year, maybe his first couple of years. But even if he's starting from scratch -- and the only MU coach on this list who truly started from scratch was poor Matt Nadelhoffer -- there should be definite progress by the third season, and by the fourth it's probably mostly or all your team in terms of whom you've recruited, and they employ the style you've implemented and the plays you've taught and called. It's your program by then.

So at best I think we can give Noonan's statement some credence as far as the hiring of Nadelhoffer is concerned, and, on the face of it, the hiring of Soderberg. But even that generous second example has a huge hole in it as well: Soderberg was the chief assistant coach for the last two years of Nadelhoffer's tenure, and for the entire span of Scherer's. That's not constant change; that's a pretty consistent source of continuity throughout three head-coaching spans. What's more, Tim Littrell was Joe Ramsey's second chair as well, so there's coaching continuity running through that entire 18-year stretch of Millikin men's basketball. The only stretch of those 37 years in which there wasn't a baton being passed from a Millikin head coach to a Millikin chief assistant coach was the Marc Smith era -- the absolute nadir of Millikin men's basketball.

Bob didn't push Noonan on this point, and I can see why. The Q-cast isn't 60 Minutes, and Bob isn't paid big bucks by some media conglomerate to be a hard-hitting journalist. Bob's not going to ask questions that will scare away every other head coach in D3 from coming on his show. (Well, everyone but Mike Schauer, whose relentless honesty and candor is backstopped nicely by the fact that he's his own boss. ) Can't blame Bob one bit for that.

But I don't mean to be hard on Tom Noonan. Like WUPHF, I think that he's going to be caught between a rock and a hard place whenever he's asked to explain why his alma mater hasn't been able to get the job done on the hardwood for close to four decades now ... as if his new job wasn't tough enough already.

Just two questions of northcentral, though:

It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience.

How in the world is this relevant? Tom Noonan was not just a head coach of a high school basketball program in Illinois for over a decade, he was a very successful head coach of a high school basketball program in Illinois for over a decade. His record at St. Theresa's is in the Millikin press release for all to read, and Bob reiterated Noonan's record at St. Theresa's in the Q-cast interview. Kramer Soderberg hired Noonan to be his second chair. Would he have done that if Noonan's lack of college basketball playing experience mattered in any way, shape, or form?

College is twenty years in Noonan's rear-view mirror at this point in his life. It's irrelevant now whether he spent those long-gone years in the MU gym or out on the MU diamond. All that matters is that he's spent most of the past two decades coaching basketball.

Institutional support has to increase or he is doomed. If he isn't going to hold Lori and the administration accountable then we will be right back here in 4 years.

Please, exactly how does one hold his boss(es) accountable? That street only runs one way.

Since Noonan's a former baseball player, this movie clip seems especially appropriate.

The reason I pointed out the lack of playing experience and successful assistant coaching experience is because the most successful guys in the league have that blueprint and I think that blueprint obviously leads to consistency . Of course there's not just one formula for success but if the top teams are doing something completely different than what your doing and you have consistently been bad then why not switch it up. The bigger point is how many college head coaches get hired with no successful playing or coaching experience. That's really rare.

There are ways to hold your boss accountable. At the interview you ask questions and/or requests of things you need to be successful and if they agree to those things and don't follow thru you have to call them out.


Greg I agree his answer about the recruitment plan was just not good. Millikin won't be able to consistently out recruit IWU for St Louis Kids or good central illinois kids. Tom  definitely needs to tap into the south suburbs,west burbs , Indiana some as well, but does he have those relationships ? 100 miles is ludacris. There just isn't enough talent that you can get in that vicinity that other good d3's can't get.

[north central]

Titan Q As a Weslyan fan you had to be thrilled hearing his responses because you probably got the feeling " Millikin won't be good with this guy" It's crazy a guy with no college basketball playing experience is a head coach in the CCIW. Maybe the only coach in the league without college playing experience. Just all seems really weird that there weren't better options .

I did not get that feeling.  I got the feeling this is the kind of person Millikin MBB needs.  I think he will do well.  Just my personal take.

There are quite a few successful head men's basketball coaches across all levels who didn't play.

Ok that's fair but I can't believe you walked away from that interview thinking " Ron Rose is going to have his hands full now that Tom Noonan is in charge " .   
Question when is the last time Millikin finished ahead of IWU in the CCIW standings ? I genuinely don't know and can't remember a time when it happened during my time in the league

[Gregory Sager]

The reason I pointed out the lack of playing experience and successful assistant coaching experience is because the most successful guys in the league have that blueprint and I think that blueprint obviously leads to consistency . Of course there's not just one formula for success but if the top teams are doing something completely different than what your doing and you have consistently been bad then why not switch it up. The bigger point is how many college head coaches get hired with no successful playing or coaching experience. That's really rare.

Correlation doesn't equal causation, though. As I said, when you've been out of college for 20 years, which sport you played back when you were an undergraduate is irrelevant. What matters is which sport you've been coaching over those 20 years since college; where and at what level were you coaching it; and do you have parallel experience at the job you're now seeking. And in those last two matters we both agree that Noonan comes up short. He can obviously coach this sport well -- his St. Theresa's record conclusively proves that -- but college is a different matter, because the most important part of a D3 head coaching job is recruiting, something you don't have to do as a high school coach. And in terms of his college coaching experience, his assistant coaching résumé is limited (and not very successful) while his head coaching résumé is nonexistent.

There are ways to hold your boss accountable. At the interview you ask questions and/or requests of things you need to be successful and if they agree to those things and don't follow thru you have to call them out.

That explains the "accountability" part, but it doesn't explain the "holding them" part. Calling out someone for not fulfilling a promise is useless when you not only don't have power over that other person, but the other person has power over you. If Tom Noonan says to Lori Kerans three years from now, "You promised me I'd have A, B, and C for Millikin men's basketball when I took this job, and yet you've failed to give me A and B and you've only given me half of C, and as I said three years ago I can't compete in this league without A and B and all of C," she will then reply, "Well, things change. Times are hard right now, Millikin is struggling, and the school can't give me a budget sufficient to provide what each of my coaches want, so I can't give you A, B, and all of C. If that's not good enough you can walk away from this job with no hard feelings on our end."

That's why I put in that Moneyball clip in my last post. If you tell the boss that you can't compete with what you have and you need more resources, your boss explains that the money's not there for those resources, and you still persist, your boss will just look at you like Steve Schott (Bobby Kotick) looked at Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and say, "Is there something else I can help you with?" And then you either slink out of the boss's office mumbling under your breath or you quit. Either way, you're not holding the boss accountable ... because that's a functional impossibility.

[Gregory Sager]

Question when is the last time Millikin finished ahead of IWU in the CCIW standings ? I genuinely don't know and can't remember a time when it happened during my time in the league

It was 2008-09. That season Millikin finished 6th with a 6-8 record and Illinois Wesleyan finished 7th with a 5-9 record. That was the year before the roof caved in on Marc Smith and two years before he got the pink slip from MU.

[north central]

The reason I pointed out the lack of playing experience and successful assistant coaching experience is because the most successful guys in the league have that blueprint and I think that blueprint obviously leads to consistency . Of course there's not just one formula for success but if the top teams are doing something completely different than what your doing and you have consistently been bad then why not switch it up. The bigger point is how many college head coaches get hired with no successful playing or coaching experience. That's really rare.

Correlation doesn't equal causation, though. As I said, when you've been out of college for 20 years, which sport you played back when you were an undergraduate is irrelevant. What matters is which sport you've been coaching over those 20 years since college; where and at what level were you coaching it; and do you have parallel experience at the job you're now seeking. And in those last two matters we both agree that Noonan comes up short. He can obviously coach this sport well -- his St. Theresa's record conclusively proves that -- but college is a different matter, because the most important part of a D3 head coaching job is recruiting, something you don't have to do as a high school coach. And in terms of his college coaching experience, his assistant coaching résumé is limited (and not very successful) while his head coaching résumé is nonexistent.

There are ways to hold your boss accountable. At the interview you ask questions and/or requests of things you need to be successful and if they agree to those things and don't follow thru you have to call them out.

That explains the "accountability" part, but it doesn't explain the "holding them" part. Calling out someone for not fulfilling a promise is useless when you not only don't have power over that other person, but the other person has power over you. If Tom Noonan says to Lori Kerans three years from now, "You promised me I'd have A, B, and C for Millikin men's basketball when I took this job, and yet you've failed to give me A and B and you've only given me half of C, and as I said three years ago I can't compete in this league without A and B and all of C," she will then reply, "Well, things change. Times are hard right now, Millikin is struggling, and the school can't give me a budget sufficient to provide what each of my coaches want, so I can't give you A, B, and all of C. If that's not good enough you can walk away from this job with no hard feelings on our end."

That's why I put in that Moneyball clip in my last post. If you tell the boss that you can't compete with what you have and you need more resources, your boss explains that the money's not there for those resources, and you still persist, your boss will just look at you like Steve Schott (Bobby Kotick) looked at Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and say, "Is there something else I can help you with?" And then you either slink out of the boss's office mumbling under your breath or you quit. Either way, you're not holding the boss accountable ... because that's a functional impossibility.

I think this is where a coach or former coach needs to call out the administration publicly because that's the only way stuff will change . As you mentioned it seems like Millikin is doing the same ol thing with this hire and Lori knows Tom is just happy to have the job and won't ruffle feathers . But until someone publicly embarrasses Millikin and its administration nothing will change.  This is why I think Millikin didn't go after a more high profile experienced coach because a more experienced coach would have made certain demands prior to taking the job .