For a coach who has never faced the Arizona Wildcats, Mike Jones can probably draw up a pretty good scouting report off the top of his head.
Moonlighting with USA Basketball can do that to you.
The Old Dominion coach, who will bring the Monarchs into McKale Center for a nonconference game Saturday, worked extensively with USA Basketball during the 19 years he led Washington, D.C.-area powerhouse DeMatha High School, winning three gold medals as an assistant and another as a head coach of USA’s U16 team in 2019.
All that experience gave him a chance to coach UA guard Caleb Love at several USA Basketball junior minicamps. He watched Jaden Bradley become a finalist for the 2019 U16 team he took to Brazil for an Americas Championship.
Jones also grew familiar with Carter Bryant, who was on the watch list for the U16 team in 2021 that Jones was named the head coach of, before Jones had to withdraw because he took a college job as Virginia Tech’s associate head coach that offseason.
“Bradley was with me for probably a month, maybe even a little bit longer,” Jones said. “Caleb Love was always at our minicamps, and he was working with the older group. I’ve been with him and been in drills with him. … I know (Bryant) was on our list because I watched film and all that other stuff” on him.
Jones has some insight on UA basketball history, too: He has a friendly relationship with Miles Simon, the Most Outstanding Player of the 1997 Final Four after the two served as assistants for the USA Basketball team that won the 2016 FIBA U17 World Cup in Spain.
They coached together again the next spring for USA in the annual Hoop Summit game, an exhibition played annually between USA and an international team of high school-age all-stars.
Then more.
“We both were younger coaches and we both got selected, and our relationship kind of went from there,” Jones said. “We stay in contact briefly here and there. I’ve congratulated him on his job movement and over the years, he’s done the same for me.”
Then there’s his USA Basketball tie with UA’s Tommy Lloyd. While Jones helped USA Basketball develop high-school level talent, Lloyd has become a USA Basketball regular with the older junior teams, working the U18 training camp in 2022 and leading the U18 team to the FIBA U18 AmeriCup gold medal last summer.
Lloyd said the high school coaches running USA Basketball’s 16-17 age group teams don’t have much overlap with college coaches who handle the U18 and U19 teams. But there’s still a bond between them, as Jones and Lloyd found out during a Nike event recently.
“We bumped into each other at Nike at the Final Four,” Jones said. “I’m talking to the USA people, and he’s talking to the USA people, so I got introduced to him. But obviously, I know all about him from his days at Gonzaga and what he’s building at Arizona.”
Working with USA Basketball and all its elite young players — who have gone on to UA, other high-level college programs and the NBA — is one reason Jones isn’t your everyday rookie head coach in college.
A former Old Dominion standout player, Jones returned to his alma mater this season after winning 81.1% of his games over 19 seasons at DeMatha, spending the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons at Virginia Tech and working last season as an assistant at Maryland.
He knows the high school game, the college game, and the international game. He’s seen differing speeds, differing rules, and differing shot clocks — which can range from 35 seconds (many high schools) to 30 (college) and 24 (FIBA).
“A lot of people don’t really look at the nuances of that,” Jones said. “Being a head coach of both of those has done a tremendous job in preparing me. Some of the situations, especially in FIBA basketball, are way more close to what college basketball is, the speed of it and things like that.”
But despite all that help, Jones has had to adjust quickly during the Monarchs’ early schedule. ODU opened with a home matchup against Buffalo as part of the Sun Belt-MAC Challenge, overcoming a 12-point second-half deficit only to watch Buffalo’s Tyson Dunn hit a 3-pointer from the left corner with 1.3 seconds left to give the Bulls an 83-82 win.
“First game — pretty much had every emotion go through you, and it was great to have,” Jones said. “Not the best result but the fact is we had so many things that we can learn from that game, and we’ll continue to work, but I like our team.”
And now, game No. 2: At the home of the nation’s 10th-ranked team.
“That isn’t necessarily the way I would draw it up, but we are looking forward to the opportunity,” Jones said.
Not surprisingly, Saturday’s matchup came about because of a USA Basketball connection, too. Arizona was scrambling to fill out some of the final spots on its 2024-25 schedule last spring and summer, while Jones said he was contacted by Chris Richards, Arizona’s manager of men’s basketball creative media.
“Literally the first year I ever worked with USA Basketball, he was one of the interns,” Jones said of Richards. “We’ve known each other for years. He reached out to say, ‘Hey, do you guys have a game left?’ and that was the genesis of it.”
