Inside Travis Steele's First 100 Days

Photo by: Jake Norz

7/14/2022 11:06:00 AM | Men's Basketball

Every spring is going to be busy for Travis Steele.

It's the time of year when college basketball coaches figure out exactly who will be on their roster for the upcoming season, especially in the era of the transfer portal.

But it's safe to say that the spring of 2022 will go down as the busiest spring of Steele's Miami coaching career.

Steele, who was introduced as the RedHawks' head coach on April 1, has been working diligently to not only build a team, but also hire a coaching staff, put a system in place, design a schedule, and implement a culture…and he knows the clock is ticking toward his first game on the sidelines this November.

With his first 100 days on the job now in the rearview mirror, Steele gave MiamiRedHawks.com an update on some of his biggest projects and priorities over the past few months.

THE PLAYERS
"For the first 100 days, it's about building relationships," Steele said. "The players that were returning from last year's team – they obviously didn't sign up to play for me, and they didn't know me from a can of paint. I told them, 'Let's get to know each other. Let's see if it's a fit. If it's not, no hard feelings.' At the end of the day, I want people that want to be at Miami. I want people that want to wear the jersey…

"I got to know a lot of those guys really well during the spring. I spent a lot of time with them off the court, and obviously on the court through workouts as well. That was my number one objective, and then number two was recruiting."

The RedHawks' current 2022-23 roster includes seven student-athletes who have already competed for the Red and White: Mekhi Lairy, Kamari Williams, Curtis Harrison IV, Javin Etzler, Wil Stevens, Jackson Kenyon and Bryson Tatum. Steele will add seven newcomers to that group: four incoming freshmen and three transfers. Previous signees Mitchell Rylee and Billy Smith are joined by 'instant impact guys' Ryan Mabrey and Jaquel Morris, and Steele emphasized that the RedHawks' main source of recruiting will always be from the high school ranks. However, he is also excited about his additions via the transfer portal: Anderson Mirambeaux from Cleveland State, Julian Lewis from William & Mary, and Morgan Safford from Wofford.

"Those guys are all winners, and they bring a competitive nature that I thought we really needed to get our culture in place from a competitive standpoint this year," Steele explained.

THE COACHES
While Steele was trying to round out his roster, he was also trying to finalize a coaching staff.

"The most important thing you can do is you've got to be able to hire great people around you," Steele said. "I have no ego. It takes a village to run this thing."

Steele admitted the process took longer than he had hoped, mostly because several of the coaches he ended up hiring were in the running for Division I head coach jobs this spring. He is thrilled with the group he assembled, however.

"We hit home runs," Steele said. "At the end of the day, I got the staff that I wanted to get."

Associate head coach Rob Summers, a Columbus-area native who played on a Sweet-16 team at West Virginia, will work with the RedHawks' post players.

"He's a really good developer of talent along that front line," said Steele of the 6-foot-11 Summers, who served as an assistant at Cleveland State for the past three seasons and helped lead the Vikings to the 2021 NCAA Tournament.

Jonathan Holmes, most recently an Elon assistant, will help coach the Miami guards. He played point guard at North Carolina and was part of the Tar Heels' 2000 Final Four team. Khristian Smith, an assistant at Ball State last year, scored over 1,100 points in his college career at Indiana State as a wing player and will be tasked with helping the RedHawks' wings.

"From an Xs and Os standpoint, Coach Holmes and Coach Summers will have more of an offensive eye. Coach Smith will have more of a defensive voice," Steele added.

Steele rounded out his staff by adding Carl Richburg '09 as director of men's basketball operations, bringing Richburg in from Marquette. "Carl cares deeply about this place. He knows what it takes to win at this place," said Steele. Richburg was part of Miami's last NCAA Tournament team in 2007.

While Steele's staff brings a variety of backgrounds and specialties to their new roles, they also encompass a wide range of Midwestern geography. Steele is laser-focused on dominating the area within a five-hour radius of Oxford from a recruiting perspective, and assistants who have previous experience with recruiting Columbus, Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, and other regional talent hotbeds will prove invaluable to that cause. "We'll really hit this Midwest footprint very heavily, which we need in order to be successful here," said Steele.

THE SYSTEM
Steele knows how he wants his RedHawks to play on the court, and he plans to recruit specifically around that philosophy. "We want to play up-tempo and we want to be able to really, really pass the ball," he said. "We want to have incredible player movement and ball movement. We want to share the ball. I want to get our guys used to playing together. I don't want to be a heavy set-play team. I want to be able to teach our guys concepts, and then teach them how to play.

"On the defensive end, we're going to be a man-to-man defensive team…that won't change year to year. That's going to be who we are."

According to Steele, he's evaluating future RedHawks according to three criteria: 1. Do they value education? 2. Do they fit the program's core values? 3. Do they fit the program's style of play?

"If they check all those boxes, then that's when we get real serious in the recruiting process," Steele said.

One of the things Steele said he's noticed in his first few months on the job is how well each on-campus recruiting visit has gone. "Everybody's blown away," he said. "They come on campus, especially when school is in session, and the feeling you get when you walk around is, 'This is incredible. This is what you envision college being like.'"

The academic draw of an institution like Miami has stood out to potential prospects as well. "This degree is powerful: It's a separator for us," Steele said. "When you look at all the other schools in the Midwest, we're a little different from an academics perspective. We have to use that niche we have."

THE SCHEDULE
While Miami hasn't yet finalized its non-conference basketball schedule for the 2022-23 season, Steele did give some overarching principles on what the RedHawks' coaches are looking to accomplish as they build that slate. "You schedule your non-conference to help prepare yourself for MAC play," he said simply. In other words, Miami's November and December will certainly include opponents that play a wide variety of styles, which should help the RedHawks when it comes to this winter's conference games. Steele has been studying plenty of film from each program in the conference to learn how the league's other 11 teams play, and is tailoring the schedule accordingly.

He also wants a balance of home, road, and neutral-site games, so expect to see Miami play a regular-season game at a neutral venue for the first time since 2019. "You need a little bit of them all: I think that's important," Steele said. "You always want to play with the end in mind. We want to compete for a MAC championship, and we're going to have to give us a schedule in the non-conference to help us prepare for that."

THE CULTURE
Each of the categories listed above –the people, the schedule, the style– ultimately ties into what the essence of Miami Basketball under Travis Steele will be all about. And unsurprisingly, creating an identity for his program has been one of Steele's biggest priorities from the get-go. Steele wants a team that's competitive, tight-knit, confident, and not easily satisfied, and he's demanding nothing less from his RedHawks.

"I want to get the culture exactly right," he said. "And I'm not budging. I can do this in year one. I want to get our core values really established, and not just some words on the wall.

"A lot of people just throw words on the wall and they mean nothing. You have to live it out. Every. Single. Day.

"It shouldn't take a year to establish it," Steele continued. "When you watch Miami Basketball, I have no idea how good we're going to be this year, but you should be able to tell who we are, that we stand for certain things.

"I think that's really, really important to me."

And while there will undoubtedly be ups and downs through the process, the early signs are encouraging. 'Today's workout was better than yesterday's!", Steele laughed. "We're just constantly building it up every single day. I want our guys to create a competitive environment and create a culture of work.

"Every school in the country is doing the same thing we are right now…If everybody's doing the same thing, how are you going to expect a different result? Who's doing the extra stuff that's not required?

"Our guys are really catching on: The competition part of it, the work part of it, and then the togetherness. We've got a lot of new guys…new players, and a whole new staff. So we're just trying to get guys to break down barriers, understand who each other are, care about each other, and create the family environment that I think we really need."

It's been a good first 100 days, but there's more work to do.

And November is just over 100 days away.

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