Twenty years ago this month, March 2005, Brian Peabody was told that his assistant coaching job at Western Carolina was gone, lost in the dismissal of head coach Steve Shurina.
It was a long drive back to Tucson. At 41, the long-successful Peabody faced a career crisis he could have never imagined.
Almost exactly a year earlier, 2004, Peabody’s job as Pima College’s head basketball coach also went poof, gone when wildly unpredictable PCC chancellor Roy Flores told Peabody he would no longer be allowed to recruit anyone outside of Pima County, therefore rendering Peabody’s program toast.
If you’re counting, that’s two jobs lost in 12 months. How does any coach recover from that, even a man who had coached Salpointe Catholic High School to a pair of state championship games and gone 243-57 there in 11 years?
Yet in 2004 and 2005, the teams Peabody coached went 7-23 and 8-22. Upon retreating to Tucson, after being turned down in an attempt to get the coaching job at Yavapai College, it took two years for Peabody to find another head coaching spot.
Amazingly, Peabody coached Ironwood Ridge High to the state championship in his first year on the job, 2007-08. Since then he has won a combined 384 games at Ironwood Ridge and Pima College, surpassing 700 career victories, rewriting the book on what has become one of the three or four most successful basketball coaching careers in Tucson history.
But no one could have imagined that Peabody’s 33rd year as a head coach would top all of the above. Pima College is 32-0. The Aztecs are ranked No. 1 in the NJCAA Division II poll. They lead the nation averaging 103 points per game.
Pima head coach Brian Peabody makes a point to one of the game officials after the Aztecs were called for a foul in the first half against Chandler-Gilbert in the Region I, Division II playoff final in Tucson on March 7, 2025.
What could go wrong? Clear some space in the trophy case for the national championship trophy later this month, right?
That’s where Peabody’s perspective becomes one of the most valuable components of the Aztecs’ undefeated season. The man who watched Pima lose a last-minute decision in the 2018 NJCAA championship game, the man whose Salpointe teams of 1997 and 1999 lost heartbreaking state championship games, will be the last to think that a 32-0 start to the basketball season can be exchanged for a cutting-down-the-nets ceremony in Danville, Illinois, two weeks from now.
Peabody is a dues-payer. If he has learned anything across almost four decades in the coaching business, it’s that you can be humbled in a heartbeat.
In 1995, Tucson High and UA grad Chuck LaVetter coached Eastern Arizona College to a 31-0 regular season and won a region playoff to go 32-0. Until now, it was the only undefeated regular season in Arizona’s men’s junior college basketball.
Alas, LaVetter’s team lost to Okaloosa-Walton College of Oklahoma in the first round of the NJCAA championships. A parade scheduled for downtown Thatcher was canceled.
Don’t expect Peabody to inquire about a possible parade on and around Anklam Road anytime soon. As far as he is concerned, the season begins now.



