The Moberly Area Comm. College Men’s Basketball Program has announced the hiring of Assistant Men’s Basketball Coaches for the 2019-20 school year. Joining the Greyhounds will be Richard McBride and James Hays who both bring excellent basketball backgrounds and coaching accomplishments to MACC. They will be replacing Andre Bell(accepted DI Asst. position at Tennessee Tech), Rusty Elmore(new head coach at Colby CC) and Chrys Cornelius(joined former Greyhound Coach Kyle Gerdeman at Lindenwood University).
McBride joins Moberly from NCAA Division II Minot State where he helped their program achieve their best 3 year record and set a school record for wins in 2017-18. Before that, McBride was an assistant coach at NCAA Division II University of Illinois-Springfield. He had an accomplished playing career starting with his high school days at Lanpheir High School(Springfield, Illinois) where he was named as a High School All American while finishing State Runner Up. He then enjoyed a very successful 4 year playing career at the University of Illinois and was a member of their team which finished as National Runner-Up to North Carolina. He was named as the Team’s Most Valuable player his senior season and was also named to the 2019 Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Hays just concluded a very successful 3 year stint as Head Men’s Basketball Coach at NAIA William Woods College. Originally from Sedalia, Missouri he lead William Woods to the most wins in the program history(22 wins) and also had several Top 25 national rankings. During his 3 seasons, Hays had the highest winning percentage of any coach in school history, coached his team to the highest AMC finish in the program’s history and saw his 2017 team achieve the highest team GPA in school history. During the 2013-14 season he was assistant coach at Fort Scott Comm. College where they won their first Jayhawk East Conference Championship in school history. He was a player in college at Westminister College where he graduated in 2012 and received his Masters Degree in May of 2016.
“First of all, I want to thank the coaching staff we are losing and moving on to great opportunities,” said Coach Patrick Smith, “Coach Bell was with me a total of 10 years and we will really miss his enthusiasm, knowledge and ability to recruit along with relating to our players. Just so proud of him and his rise in the coaching profession. Coach Elmore is just a very knowledgeable basketball coach who excelled for us in the area of recruiting. He’s more than ready to be a head coach and I look forward to watching the success he has at Colby CC. Coach Cornelius worked for me before and had a long tenure as a Division I Assistant. He did us a tremendous favor filling in for Coach Bell at the end of the school year and even in the short time he was with us, did a great job and aided our program. I’m so proud of these guys for these achievements and they are such a large part of the success we’ve enjoyed the past few years.”
“Hopefully success breeds success,” commented Smith, “and I am so excited to have Rich and James join our program. They both have distinguished themselves in their coaching careers and can’t wait to get to work with them as we continue to pursue championships. These two coaches are what I want in my assistants; they are good in all facets including player relationships, on floor coaching, personal improvement skill development and obviously, the recruiting that is primary to any college program’s success. We lost some very good coaches and people but truly feel we have assembled an excellent staff as we near the start of our players reporting for Fall Semester.”
