Big fish, different pond: March Madness is Nova SE's time thanks to a coaching giant in Division II

The coach with the best winning percentage in college basketball history won't be anywhere near San Antonio when the Final Four rolls around next week.

By then, Jim Crutchfield might be on a pickleball court. Or maybe playing tennis, the sport that launched one of the NCAA's most colorful and successful coaching careers before it moved into basketball, where the 69-year-old coaching lifer is two wins away from his second Division II title at Nova Southeastern.

Though he operates at a different level than the Izzos, Pitinos and Caliparis who dominate headlines this time of year, Crutchfield — based in South Florida at a school with around 7,000 undergrad students — finds himself playing the same game as all those guys, just smaller, and maybe better.

It involves every-growing piles of NIL money, promises that are sometimes kept, and players coming and going.

What Crutchfield refuses to budge on is that it also involves teaching, learning and, mostly, doing things differently in a profession full of copycats who are navigating a changing industry that none have truly mastered.

“We never won a warm-up in tennis,” Crutchfield, a one-time math teacher, explains about his first big job.

It was a posting he took in the early 1990s at West Liberty University in West Virginia, mainly because nobody else would, and because it gave him a chance to work as an assistant for a not-very-good hoops team that he would eventually take over.

“They were the kind of tennis players nobody wanted to play against," he says of a team that wasn't good when he got there, but went on to win 11 league titles. "They didn't look good, but they're hard to beat. When I got over to the basketball team, I thought, ‘We need to have a little of that here, too.’”

By breaking the mold, Crutchfield found the key to winning

Crutchfield is a walking embodiment of the old Frank Sinatra classic, “My Way.”

“Everything I like to do is sort of home grown, even the drills we do,” the coach says. “But, you know, I didn’t invent the game.”

He did invent a version of the full-court press. Not the ones you see on ESPN but one that beats people down for 40 straight minutes — off misses and makes, off inbounds passes and steals. From every direction. All the time.

Teaching it, preaching it, then recruiting the kind of players who are willing to commit to it, is what has led to a 561-86 record over 20 seasons as a head coach. That's an .867 winning percentage. Of every basketball coach with 10 or more years in college, there is no better record.

“It's a rural, podunk D-2 school and he ran with it,” says Jordan Fee, now an assistant at FAU who played for Crutchfield at West Liberty and coached on his staff there and at Nova. "Part of the beauty is, he said ‘We’re gonna play this way.' Everybody else would say ‘You can’t do that. You can't sustain that for 40 minutes.' And his thing is 'Why not?' There's a naivete to him that is, like, so beautiful.”

Crutchfield's quintessential drill speaks as much to his time as a coach as a math teacher: He deduced that it's possible for a player trapping in the backcourt with his back turned at the baseline to pivot and sprint to halfcourt in 2.5 seconds. It takes another second to get to the opposite free throw line.

By not hesitating, or taking time to assess and catch their breath, most players can cover those 75 feet in 3.5 seconds. If they do that, Crutchfield knows more times than not, there will be no easy layups on the other end even if the offense breaks the press.

It took about five minutes Tuesday night for Nova's first Elite Eight opponent, Assumption, to buckle. Nova had built a 10-point lead early, stretched it to as many as 25 and coasted in to a 102-93 victory. Next is a semifinal Thursday against Washburn.

“It's part of that brainwashing process," Crutchfield says, only half-kidding. "I'm just trying to convince the guys that if we're going to play this game, because we're all spread out and the basket's unprotected, then we're going to have to do some things differently. Play harder."

The rules for Crutchfield's teams

Fee tells a story about his dad, a veteran high school coach in Pennsylvania, bringing some buddies to a coaching clinic Crutchfield was part of. Their hopes were to find a new drill, a new method, a new way of thinking they could install in their own programs.

They sat there for hours watching “Coach Crutch” with notebooks in hand. When the session was over, Fee's dad had scribbled down maybe three lines.

“If something's not working, Coach Crutch is a ‘play harder’ guy," Fee says. "Everybody wants there to be some secret, special sauce, but it's not really there. They don't want an answer like this.”

One way to know it's working: Fee estimates there are 5-10 other D-2 programs across the country using some version of his approach, from Chaminade in Hawaii to Gannon in Pennsylvania to Coker (South Carolina) to Bluefield State (West Virginia) and West Liberty, which lost Tuesday in the national quarterfinals.

Others try to learn from it.

Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra is known to drive up I-95 for an occasional visit with Crutchfield, hoping for some insight about getting 15 different people with different agendas on the same page. Miami's former coach, Jim Larrañaga, was a frequent visitor. When Michigan's Dusty May was at FAU, just a short drive away, he'd set up scrimmages against the Sharks.

“I said, ‘If nothing else, we’ll learn what the hardest-playing team in the country looks like,'” May says.

May says he and Crutchfield went to a coaching clinic that featured several of the game's biggest names — Matt Painter, Billy Donovan, and so on.

“I don't think he knew who 90% of those coaches were,” May says. “I think he knows, like, who Jerry Tarkanian is, and Bobby Knight."

And Rick Pitino.

Though he mostly made things up on his own, Crutchfield said something clicked when he saw Pitino's 1987 Providence team, led by Donovan, make a Cinderella run to the Final Four on the strength of a full-court press and the then-innovative use of the newly drawn 3-point line.

“I have no idea what Pitino had in mind, but the pressure was more random,” Crutchfield said. “There was a lot more running from behind. I thought, I like the randomness of that. People are really uncomfortable when you're running with them or behind them as opposed to to a 2-2-1 or a diamond-and-1 press. So I thought, if I ever do get a chance to coach college basketball, that's probably the route I'm going to go,.'"

A coach who likes to build things

In 13 seasons at West Liberty, Crutchfield took a program that had won four games the season before he took over and compiled a record of 359–61 with six trips to the Elite Eight.

A sucker for reclamation projects, he moved to Nova Southeastern, which was coming off a six-win season in 2017. By Crutchfield's second year there, the Sharks were in the Elite Eight. This week, they are going for their third trip to the final and second national title in three years.

Not bad for a program that lost four players to bigger programs offering better name, image and likeness compensation deals after the Sharks went undefeated in 2023. In Division II, schools can offer some scholarship help and some NIL money. They can't compete with what's happening at the next level up.

Crutchfield wonders how much longer he'll be able to keep rebuilding in today's atmosphere. He's not ready to stop trying.

“I'm kind of old school,” he said. "I like to develop players into a system. I think that's the way to win.”

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The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Erik Spoelstra's first name.