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Less than a week after Cuonzo Martin announced his departure from MSU Bears’ head basketball coach, the group commissioned by Missouri State’s Athletic Director Kyle Moats has settled on Martin’s replacement. KSMU’s Mike Donnelly reports.
Moats says despite the process happening quickly, it wasn’t a simple ordeal.
“We had a bunch of different criteria. As you can imagine, every facet of what I felt like was important to having a coach, that’s what we listed in terms of our criteria,” he said.
On Friday, former Purdue Associate Head Coach Paul Lusk was announced as the new head coach for Missouri State. Again, Kyle Moats.
“When we talked about those candidates that we felt like were viable to our job, we talked about how those people applied to those certain categories. And every category that we talked about, Coach Lusk’s name came to the top,” he said. Lusk earned his Master’s degree in education from Missouri State in 2000, and was an undergrad at Southern Illinois, where he played for MSU’s conference rival, the Saluki’s. As a basketball player, under the tutelage of coach Rick Herrin, he helped guide the Salukis to three straight NCAA tournament appearances. He also spent three seasons as an assistant coach at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, and also spent time coaching at schools in Illinois and Iowa.Lusk has verbally agreed to sign a five-year contract with MSU, although many of the details have yet to be finalized.
For KSMU News, I’m Mike Donnelly