Chris Beard shares key to making Ole Miss a contender

It’s been five years since Ole Miss last made the NCAA Tournament in basketball, and changing that simple fact will be one of the biggest goals for new coach Chris Beard and his staff.

Beard takes over after a recent stint at Texas, looking to revamp an Ole Miss program that had been trending the wrong direction under former coach Kermit Davis.

The former Texas coach sees one way to do it.

“Just build it the right way, don’t skip steps,” Chris Beard said on the College Hoops Today podcast with Jon Rothstein. “Work really hard each day, not only with an urgency to win today, but also with vision for what the future should look like here.”

Ole Miss certainly has some history of basketball success, though it falls a little short of many of its basketball peers.

The Rebels have made nine NCAA Tournament appearances, with five of them coming since the turn of the millennium. Ole Miss’ deepest run in the NCAA Tournament was a Sweet 16 run in 2001.

In five years as Ole Miss’ head coach, Davis went 74-79 overall and 32-55 in the conference. He had two winning seasons in five, going 20-13 in his first year, then 16-12 in his third year.

Topping that should be doable for Beard, once the foundation is in place.

“Got a great campus, great town, elite facilities, do have some NBA tradition and players, the coaches that came before me, most recently with Kermit and (Andy Kennedy),” Chris Beard said. “This thing was built and it was built to last. We’re excited to be here and the caretakers of the program right now.”

Having said that, Beard has some particular ideas in mind for how to build and grow the program sustainably going forward.

The easiest way, as he sees it, is incorporating the people that had a major hand in success in the past. That could be players, staffers, administrators, even select groups of fans if the circumstance calls for it.

Whatever it takes to get Ole Miss back to competing at a very high level.

“I think kind of uniting everything that’s happened in the past here,” said Chris Beard, asked about his approach. “The tradition, the coaches, the players from different eras, that’s going to be a real part of our identity moving forward. We’re in the early stages of uniting everything, but we’re off to a great start.”