Former Arizona assistant Justin Gainey prepares Tennessee to face Wildcats

After coaching and mentoring Christian Koloko during his freshman year at Arizona, watching the 7-foot Cameroonian take the first steps toward becoming the menacing rim-protector he is today, Justin Gainey now has to figure out how to beat him.

Gainey, an assistant coach at Arizona during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons, is now on staff at Tennessee. Vols head coach Rick Barnes gave Gainey the assignment of scouting the Wildcats and devising a game plan for their Top 25 showdown with UA on Wednesday.

It’s awkward. Yet Gainey has already had it worse. He had to coach last week against his own son, former Salpointe Catholic High School standout Jordan Gainey, when USC Upstate came to Knoxville. Tennesse won, 95-52.

“It doesn’t get any more stressful than that,” Gainey said. “I didn’t have to scout on that, but just having to go through that has kind of prepared me for this.”

Of Arizona’s current players, Gainey said he knows Koloko the best, since he was with the Wildcats during Koloko’s freshman year of 2019-20 and was assigned to get to know Koloko’s family as part of the UA’s “core player-coach stuff.”

While fellow freshman center Zeke Nnaji overshadowed Koloko in 2019-20, Gainey said he saw the potential for Koloko to dominate inside. Gainey watched as Koloko shook off a missed pair of free throws with 1.4 seconds left in overtime of a 74-73 loss to Oregon at McKale Center.

“With Christian, I was with him every step of the way and (his success) doesn’t surprise me because of how hard he works,” Gainey said. “He’s naturally gifted. He has a lot of tools, but he also has a great work ethic and he loves Arizona. He wants to be there, and I think that’s huge. His freshman year, he didn’t play a lot and it would have been easy for him to say, ‘Man, I’m transferring.’ A lot of guys in his situation would have left. But he was so engrained into the program, and believes so much in it that it never crossed his mind or his sister and support systems.

“He never flinched, the Oregon game and all that stuff. He just kept getting better, kept working. And now he is one of the best big guys in the country. Especially when you talk about a defensive big, there’s not a lot better than him.”

Nnaji shot into the first round of the 2020 NBA Draft. Koloko was also rising, the way Gainey described it.

Just a lot more quietly.

“He put on a lot of weight that first year — his shoulders and back started to develop,” Gainey said. “I just remember when we first got him, he was better than we anticipated. We thought it was going to be a slower process. And he was getting in games, significant games, like down the stretch in that Oregon game. So where he is now doesn’t surprise me because when you mix his work ethic with his talent, that’s what you get.”

Gainey said he also grew to know sophomore guard Dalen Terry well through his recruitment — Terry signed a letter-of-intent in November 2019 — and developed a relationship with some of UA’s international sophomores through the groundwork associate head coach Jack Murphy did in 2019 and early 2020.

Gainey left the Wildcats in April 2020 to become Marquette’s associate head coach, spending the COVID-plagued season of 2020-21 in Milwaukee before head coach Steve Wojciechowski was fired in March 2021 following seven seasons with the Golden Eagles.

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“It’s been a whirlwind,” Gainey said. “I definitely did not anticipate that happening at Marquette, but in this business you’ve got to go with the flow. You’ve got to be resilient. That’s what me and my family had to rely on.

“It was a unique transition because of COVID. We didn’t really get to work out with our guys in the summer (of 2020) so I kind of had a late start to develop an in-person relationship with the guys. It just feels like I was there a quick minute and then I was out, but it was great.”

Like many college coaches, Gainey said he learned to be more adept with Zoom and online recruiting during the COVID-19 recruiting shutdown while at Marquette, after having also gained valuable experience under then-UA coach Sean Miller at Arizona for the second time in his life.

Over two decades ago, Miller was an assistant coach under Herb Sendek at N.C. State when Gainey was a Wolfpack point guard.

“He was kind of the point guard coach and he invested a lot of time in me,” Gainey said of Miller, who later hired Gainey away from Sendek’s Santa Clara staff. “He believed in me, he kept working with me and I ended up having a solid college career, in large part because of the time he invested in in me. He gave me the opportunity to join his staff and I was super appreciative of that as well. I learned a lot from him that I still use to this day. He’s one of the best coaches in the country.”

Meanwhile, Gainey’s son, Jordan, led Salpointe Catholic to the Class 4A state title in 2020 alongside UA walk-on Grant Weitman. Jordan Gainey spent last season playing prep school ball at South Kent School in Connecticut.

Jordan Gainey landed an offer to play for USC Upstate, where he’s already become the Spartans’ second-leading scorer (9.7 points) as a freshman this season while taking more than half his shots from 3-point range and hitting those at a 48% rate.

“I’m so proud of him,” Justin Gainey said. “You talk about being resilient. He went to three different high schools in four years. Then COVID hit and you couldn’t go through the normal recruiting process. He went over to South Kent and was still COVID, so it was kind of limited but I thought he really showed what he can do and who he could be. I thought in Tucson he was just scratching the surface.”

Both father and son are experiencing new environments this season. Justin Gainey said mutual connections helped lead to a job at Tennessee with Barnes, who had lost two assistants from last season.

Then, over a month after Gainey took the job, the Wildcats popped up on Tennessee’s schedule. Arizona and Gonzaga agreed to postpone their scheduled December game after the UA hired former Zags assistant Tommy Lloyd as head coach. Tennessee essentially to replace Gonzaga.

For Gainey, that meant looking at the Wildcats in a whole different way.

“Did I expect a top-five or whatever they are? I don’t know if anybody could have projected that but I knew they’d be good,” Gainey said. “With (Azuolas) Tubelis, he carried a heavy load as a freshman so you knew the jump he was going to make and you could see it with Kerr (Kriisa) because of his grittiness, his toughness, his whole swagger. Maybe the national media might have slept on them a little bit or didn’t quite see it, but from our staff’s standpoint, we knew it.

“And Coach Barnes wants to play the toughest schedule in the country every single year. We played Villanova. We played Carolina, we played Texas Tech. We were supposed to play Memphis (before the Tigers pulled out over COVID issues), we got Arizona, we go to Texas. We did not think this was gonna be a cakewalk, or we wouldn’t have signed up for it.”