Thanks to his connections to USA Basketball, the ODU coach knows the Wildcats well

A part-time job at USA Basketball can give you just that.

The Old Dominion coach, who will take the Monarchs to the McKale Center for a non-conference game on Saturday, worked extensively with USA Basketball and won during the 19 years he led DeMatha High School in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area three gold medals as an assistant and another as head coach of the USA U16 team in 2019.

All of these experiences gave him the opportunity to coach UA guard Caleb Love at several USA Basketball junior minicamps. He watched Jaden Bradley become a finalist for the 2019 U16 team, which he took to the Americas Championships in Brazil.

Jones also met Carter Bryant, who was on the 2021 watch list for the U16 team, whose head coach Jones was named before Jones was forced to retire because he accepted a college job as Virginia Tech’s associate head coach in the offseason.

“Bradley was with me probably a month, maybe a little longer,” Jones said. “Caleb Love was always at our mini camps and working with the older group. I was with him and took part in exercises with him. … I know (Bryant) was on our list because I saw movies and all that other stuff about him.”

Jones also has some insight into UA basketball history: 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 Championship. Won the World Cup in Spain.

The next spring, they trained together again for the U.S. in the annual Hoop Summit game, a competition played each year between the U.S. and an international team of high school-aged all-stars.

“We were both younger coaches and we were both selected, and our relationship kind of developed from there,” Jones said. “We stay in touch for a short time here and there. I congratulated him on his job change and over the years he has done the same for me.”

Then there’s his USA Basketball matchup with UA’s Tommy Lloyd. While Jones helped USA Basketball develop talent at the high school level, Lloyd has become a USA Basketball regular on the senior junior teams, working the U18 training camp in 2022 and leading the U18 team to the gold medal last summer of the FIBA ​​U18 AmeriCup.

Lloyd said there is little overlap between the high school coaches who lead USA Basketball’s 16-17 age group teams and the college coaches who oversee the U18 and U19 teams. But there’s still a bond between them, as Jones and Lloyd discovered at a recent Nike event.

“We met at Nike at the Final Four,” Jones said. “I speak to the American people and he speaks to the American people, so I was introduced to him. But of course I know everything about him from his time at Gonzaga and what he is building in Arizona.”

Working with USA Basketball and all of its elite young players — who have made it to UA, other top college programs and the NBA — is one of the reasons Jones isn’t the usual rookie head coach in college.

Jones, a former Old Dominion standout, returned to his alma mater this season after winning 81.1% of his games in 19 seasons at DeMatha, spending the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons at Virginia Tech and worked as an assistant at Maryland last season.

He knows the high school game, the college game and the international game. He’s seen different speeds, different rules and different shot clocks – which can range from 35 seconds (many high schools) to 30 (college) and 24 (FIBA).

“A lot of people don’t really pay attention to the nuances,” Jones said. “As head coach of both teams, I did excellent preparation work. Some of the situations, especially in FIBA ​​basketball, are a lot more similar to what college basketball is all about, the speed and things like that.”

But even with all that help, Jones had to quickly adapt to the Monarchs’ early game plan. Opening with a home game against Buffalo in the Sun Belt-MAC Challenge, ODU overcame a 12-point deficit in the second half, then watched as Buffalo’s Tyson Dunn hit a three-pointer from the left corner with 1.3 seconds left to give the Bulls an 83-82 win.

“First game – almost every emotion went through you and it was great to be there,” Jones said. “Not the best result, but the fact is we can learn so much from this game and we will keep working, but I like our team.”

And now game No. 2: At the home stadium of the tenth-place team in the country.

“That’s not necessarily the way I would put it, but we’re excited about the opportunity,” Jones said.

Not surprisingly, Saturday’s match also came about because of a connection to US basketball. Arizona spent last spring and summer scrambling to fill some of the final spots on its 2024-25 schedule, while Jones said he was contacted by Chris Richards, Arizona’s manager of men’s basketball creative media.

“He was literally one of the interns the first year I worked with USA Basketball,” Jones said of Richards. “We have known each other for years. He reached out and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have another game left?’ and that was the genesis of it.”