After USA Basketball offered Tommy Lloyd the job of coaching its top junior teams in 2024 and 2025, the organization tried matching him up with potential assistants who also had national-team experience.
Out popped Grant McCasland’s name.
“They give the suggestion and they say, ‘Do you know this guy? Would you like to work with him?’” Lloyd said. “Obviously, when they gave the suggestion (for McCasland), I was like, Yeahhh … I don’t know. Maybe.”
Lloyd grinned.
“No, I’m joking,” he said. “Of course. Of course we’ll work together, and we had a great time.”
Arizona basketball coach Tommy Lloyd, who also served as head coach of the USA U18 team for the FIBA U18 AmeriCup, issues instructions during USA Basketball’s U18 training camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado, May 28, 2024.
USA Basketball had, perhaps inadvertently, paired together two close friends with a relationship that goes back decades, one that will be renewed, maybe somewhat awkwardly, when Lloyd’s Wildcats play McCasland’s Texas Tech team on Saturday in Lubbock, Texas.
“He happens to be probably my closest friend in the coaching business, so I’m not necessarily looking forward to playing against him,” Lloyd said on his radio show Thursday. “But it is what it is. He and I would have never guessed that when we took these jobs, but here we are.”
During his weekly press conference Friday, Lloyd said he didn’t remember when it all started, the exact moment he and McCasland crossed paths. Just that, probably over two decades ago, Lloyd was an assistant coach at Gonzaga and McCasland was an assistant at Texas’ Midland College.
“I don’t even know if I had a cell phone,” Lloyd said.
They came into contact, in some form, because McCasland was working with junior college prospects that Lloyd was recruiting for Gonzaga. Both are similar in age — Lloyd is 50 now while McCasland is 48 — and both were launching coaching careers after modest playing careers: McCasland was a walk-on at Baylor while Lloyd was a Division III star at Whitman College who played a year of semi-pro ball in Australia.
Before long, in Nigeria, of all places, they found even more in common.
Lloyd said he was given the chance to work a clinic there that was run by Masai Ujiri, who later played a role in drafting Arizona’s Christian Koloko as the Toronto Raptors’ president.
“They wanted me to bring a junior college coach, so Grant and I went with Masai and a few other people, and had an awesome experience,” Lloyd said Friday, having also noted on his radio show that “you go to the middle of Nigeria, in the middle of nowhere, and you kind of bond. We formed a great, great relationship there.”
The clinic lasted for seven days, and basketball was only part of it.
“We became really good friends,” McCasland said.
Texas Tech coach Grant McCasland speaks to the media at the Big 12 Men’s Basketball Media Day event in Kansas City, Missouri.
They worked together on a higher basketball level last summer, when Lloyd and McCasland, along with another assistant in Notre Dame coach Micah Shrewsberry, led USA to the gold medal in the FIBA U18 AmeriCup event in Argentina.
While McCasland said he was sure his relationship with Lloyd helped him land the job, Lloyd said he didn’t really know Shrewsberry going into last summer.
That changed, too.
“He was a great guy,” Lloyd said of Shrewsberry. “That was as much fun as anything — the interactions you’re able to have with other coaches. I got to know Micah really well. You’re kind of on a three-week expedition, where it’s just kind of you against the world, so to speak. So you have a lot of time together. It was a lot of fun to hang out with those guys.”
During the Big 12’s media day in October, McCasland joked that the experience also could help the Red Raiders for games like Saturday’s.
“I’m thankful I got to learn all of Tommy’s system at Arizona, so now we know how to compete,” McCasland said. “No, that’s actually not true. Tommy wouldn’t give me any information. I think he’s changing all his calls.”
True or not, it really doesn’t matter. McCasland is actually known to run more offensive sets than Lloyd does anyway in UA’s free-flowing style.
“I’m sure he’s really familiar with what we do, which is fine now,” Lloyd said. “At the end of the day, if he’s familiar or not familiar, we’ve still got to go out and execute.”
If nothing else, McCasland has watched a lot of the Wildcats this season, and indicated this week he’s hardly surprised that Lloyd’s team has won its first five Big 12 games after a dreary nonconference season.
“It’s his enjoyment of it being difficult. I don’t think he shies away from it,” McCasland said. “There can be a fear of ‘Is it ever going to turn around?’ He just doesn’t see it that way. I do see him not being results based in terms of his approach. He’s process-based.”
Whether the Wildcats go to 6-0 in the Big 12 with a win over the Red Raiders or not, the matchup will be a new territory for their relationship.
Maybe it was inevitable that those two young assistants would grow into high-major coaches who would be playing each other in a high-major conference, but Lloyd said they never had that conversation. It’s happening anyway.
