Note from the Head Coach

I want to thank you for your interest in Ouachita Tiger Basketball and take a few moments to share with you a little about myself and vision for our program. The picture to the left is of my wife Kara and I. We are super excited about our move to OBU and Arkadelphia. I have been privileged to coach at 5 different schools in my career. They have included NCAA division I and II as well as the NAIA level. There are two common threads among my different coaching stops. The first is that we have won championships and the second is that we have won them by primarily recruiting high school prospects that are committed in the classroom and determined to become a great teammate! I accepted the position here at Ouachita, because it is an institution with outstanding academic reputation and winning athletic tradition that can be a perfect fit for the student-athlete that I want to coach! I have been blessed to work in programs for head coaches that been convicted to build “basketball programs” over the course of several years and not just assemble “basketball teams” every season. We will remain on that course here at Ouachita and will have young men in our program that are of the highest character and work ethic.

A very small amount of scholarship players were returning when I accepted the head coaching job here about one month ago. I view this as a challenging, but very positive circumstance as we will immediately have the opportunity to select the “right” players for our program. Fortunately, the few returning players are certainly cut from the cloth of players that I would select. The first key addition to our program was the hiring of assistant coach Sean Rutigliano. Coach Rutigliano, a Westchester, New York native, was a timely fit on our staff. Like myself, Coach R has worked at highly regarded academic institutions like Ouachita and has a rooted understanding of what we are looking to build!

One final thought for now: as a young coach in the late 1990s I attended a clinic of then Butler University head coach Barry Collier. During his career as a head coach at Butler and University of Nebraska, Coach Collier was regarded as one of the finest defensive coaches in college basketball. He began his clinic with these thoughts which are applicable to all players at every level:

There are 4 types of players:

1. Willing and Able
2. Willing and Unable
3. Unwilling and Able
4. Unwilling and Unable

At Ouachita, all of our players will fall into categories 1 and 2.

God Bless,

Coach Price