Former U of A staffer Ben Tucker grateful to bring Embry-Riddle into McKale Center

Because Ben Tucker told his mom at age 10 that he wanted to become a college basketball head coach, then went to Arizona in part so Lute Olson could teach him how, it’s not really a surprise that he became exactly that 12 years after his UA graduation.

But until taking over Embry-Riddle’s still-young basketball program in 2023, Tucker had become well-established in the sort of place that says chill out and don’t be in a hurry.

He was an assistant coach at UC Santa Barbara, occupying a comfortable job in a successful program located in one of America’s most idyllic cities. Working under former UA associate head coach Joe Pasternack, Tucker was a part of Gaucho teams that had four 20-win seasons and two NCAA Tournament appearances over five seasons.

He could have hung on longer, then maybe tried to jump straight into a Division I head coaching job at some point, but that childhood goal kept tugging harder and harder at him, and Tucker said he wasn’t wild about the high cost of living for his young family in Santa Barbara.

Besides, the five years Tucker spent as a UCSB assistant were the most he’d spent anywhere in his coaching career.

“It’s not a bad thing, but I woke up in the morning and knew what was going to happen,” Tucker said. “I knew what we were gonna do in practice. I knew the terminology. I knew what things we were gonna do, who we were trying to recruit.

“There’s some comfort in that, but also, I’m still young, and I wanted to have some new experiences and be challenged in a different way as a head coach.”

It was different at Embry-Riddle, and Tucker knew it before he even got the job running the Prescott-based school’s NAIA men’s basketball program. Unlike at high-major Division I programs, where jobs typically stay open for only a matter of days before a pre-vetted replacement is hired, Embry-Riddle hired Tucker like pretty much any other university employee.

“It was a six-week, seven-week process with interviews and all that,” Tucker said. “Two weeks before school started, I got on campus. … We took over, schedule was done, roster was done, everything else. It was almost like high school as far as like, ‘Hey, here’s your team, here’s where you’re going, and good luck.’”

The Eagles went just 8-19 overall and 7-13 in the Great Southwest Athletic Conference in 2023-24, but Tucker was named GSAC Coach of the Year last season when the Eagles went 13-15 and 8-6.

By then, Tucker had a full year to figure out how to fill his Embry-Riddle roster, finding suitable players, both athletically and academically.

He knew he wasn’t in Santa Barbara and D-I ball anymore. Tucker said he had “essentially about four scholarships” to divvy up with his entire team, scrambling to piece together financial packages as best as he could, while also having to find guys who met the school’s academic standards.

For a place with a full name of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, it isn’t hard to imagine the kind of players he was able to find: Mostly those studying engineering and business, but also one meteorology major and, naturally, two guys enrolled in the school’s flight program.

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“A lot of the kids who go into that, they kind of reach out to find us,” Tucker said of his aspiring pilots.

To find the rest, Tucker says he uses connections along with traditional recruiting methods, emphasizing Embry-Riddle’s academic strengths and then, if the door cracks open, letting the school sell itself.

“Once we get them on campus, they see it’s a real college campus… and then they see Prescott, and they’re like, ‘Oh, this area is really beautiful, and it’s different than I thought,’” Tucker said. “We have a really high success rate once we get that initial interest, and we weed through who can do it, who can make it academically, and who can’t.

“So we have a lot of success recruiting. It’s just a narrower pool to start with.”

Now, with a veteran team and two full seasons behind him, Tucker could have his best Embry-Riddle team yet. The Eagles lost just 87-85 to The Masters, the No. 9-ranked preseason team in NAIA this season, in the GSAC semifinals last season, and they were picked to finish fourth in what is one of the country’s best NAIA conferences this season.

The Eagles already started this season with a win, beating Chandler’s Justice University 87-63 on Thursday in Prescott, though their next stop will look a little different: They’ll be entering McKale Center for the Wildcats’ second and final exhibition game, invited in part because UA couldn’t get NCAA approval to play the Mexican national team.

With Wildcat ties within and around him, Tucker jumped on the opportunity. At Arizona, Tucker never did get to work a regular-season game with Olson, who sat out 2007-08 and retired just before the 2008-09 season, but he moved up from a student manager to assistant basketball operations director under Sean Miller.

Tucker also spent the 2016-17 season under UA associate head coach Jack Murphy at NAU when Murphy was the Lumberjacks’ head coach, while Tucker’s two Embry-Riddle assistants have Arizona ties, too: Doug Beilfuss is a UA grad, and Ben Olesen is a former Washington State player whose fiancée graduated from Arizona recently.

“From a coaching-staff perspective, when we’re on the road, we’re watching Arizona games in the hotel,” Tucker said. “It’s super special. I told coach Doug when I got the job it was something I was going to try to do. For him it’s really special and obviously for me to go to McKale.”

It’ll also be something to see, Tucker said, for a bunch of guys who will be engineers, businessmen and pilots before long.

“I’m excited to show these guys how special McKale Center is — the crowd, how good the program is, the players, the coaches,” he said. “Most likely, they’ll never get to play in another environment like that again in their lives.”