Who is to thank for getting Dalton Knecht to Tennessee? Start with assistant coach Rod Clark

Rod Clark sat on the bench at Colonial Life Arena last week watching Tennessee go through pregame warmups before facing South Carolina with an SEC regular-season championship on the line. Then he shot up, walked a few feet onto the floor and motioned for Dalton Knecht. 

The third-year Tennessee assistant coach got in the ear of the superstar transfer wing to deliver one last message. 

Clark was warning Knecht about how physical South Carolina was going to be with him to start the game. The Gamecocks were going to push him off his spots, bump him off screens and try to pull him out of his game.

“And early in the game,” Clark told Knecht, “you’re going to let them, because you’re just going to be thinking about going and scoring the ball. Get the ball and score it. And there’s going to be a time in the game when you’re going to have to push somebody, hit somebody. 

“You’re going to have to send a message a little bit in order for you to keep going and make plays.”

Sure enough, in the second half, it happened.  

“A South Carolina player was over there grabbing him, holding him, pushing him,” Clark said, “and he just popped him and he ran off the screen and he got a shot off.”

Knecht got a lot of shots off, scoring 26 points on 9-for-23 shooting, including 5-for-11 at the 3-point line, to lead Tennessee to a 66-59 win for the program’s first outright SEC regular-season championship since 2008.

Knecht got pushed, shoved, bumped and pulled. But he didn’t flinch.

“Sometimes I think it’s a coach’s job to lay things in front of guys before they see it,” Clark said. “Like I always say with Coach Barnes, he exposes our guys to hard before they meet hard. So then when hard slaps them in the face, they don’t flinch, they just get through it.

“So for me it was like letting him know what’s going to happen before it happens. So that when it happens, we’ve already talked about it, and he gets through it.”

Clark and Knecht being in lock step goes back so much further than last week, though. It dates back to last April when Knecht’s recruitment began, when a cold call from Clark sparked an immediate bond and helped Knecht go from unknown to unforgettable.

JUCO Products

Dalton Knecht remembers the exact moment his phone blew up last spring. He left it in the locker room during a morning workout and came back to find insanity on the screen.

“I was lifting and shooting,” Knecht told Volquest, “came back like hour and a half later and I had over 500 missed calls with over a thousand text messages.”

Knecht had gone from junior college to Northern Colorado, from averaging 8.9 points per game in 2021-22 to averaging 20.2 points per game last season, to trying to figure out how to handle a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing after his name showed up in the NCAA Transfer Portal. 

“I mean, I had no clue,” Knecht said, “because a couple coaches from each school were calling me and I had no clue whose numbers were whose, so I had to call them back.”

Knecht just started matching names and schools with phone numbers. But when the Vols called, there was no game of phone tag.

He remembers it just as vividly. He was watching basketball with his dad, Corey, when assistant coach Rod Clark called from the University of Tennessee. He answered, took the call in his room and talked with Clark for a half hour.

“He was a JUCO guy,” Knecht said, “so we kind of had a good bond right away.”

Clark played college basketball at Neosho Community College in Kansas, Redlands Community College in Oklahoma and at the NAIA level at Lindsey Wilson College in Kentucky,

“He kind of knew like what a JUCO guy was,” Knecht said.

Clark knew all too well. To hear him explain it makes it sound like he wishes he didn’t. 

“It’s like a fraternity, honestly,” Clark said. “It’s like everybody knows junior college is a grind. How you have to eat, how you have to prepare your body, the lack of resources, the recovery that’s basically non-existent. The long bus rides, riding in vans wearing terrible uniforms, just that entire grind you live. Your living spaces suck. Like junior college is a grind. It’s different, you know?”

But it’s a lifeline for an athlete in need of just that. And it was common ground between Clark and Knecht that could not have been more relatable or, in the end, more valuable. 

“Nothing has been handed to us JUCO guys,” Knecht said. “You really find yourself there. So a lot of people don’t know really too much about JUCO. You kind of get a special bond there with your teammates and stuff, like your brothers, they’re my brothers. I still talk to every single one of them back home.

“So I mean, he kind of knew exactly how you have to grind to get out of JUCO. And especially if you want make it out to a (Division I school), so he knew exactly like what it takes.”

Not only did Clark’s basketball path to Tennessee start at the junior college level, he also had friends that had played Knecht’s JUCO, Northeastern Junior College in Colorado.

The pieces were starting to fall into place.

“He just told me why it was going to be a good fit,” Knecht said. “And we had one more phone call before I told him I’d like to come on a visit to Tennessee.”

No one-trick ponies 

Clark’s recruitment of Knecht didn’t start right away. Before picking up the phone to make that first call, he watched Knecht’s tape for two weeks. 

“Which usually isn’t very good for the portal,” Clark admitted, “especially for a guy that was getting recruited like he was.”

But Clark describes himself as “really, really, really picky” with mid-major targets in the portal. Mid-major players have limited opportunities against high-major competition, so every move on every possession has to be scrutinized. 

“For him, I was dissecting his game left and right,” Clark said. “I thought the shooting was impressive. I thought the size, I thought the athleticism was impressive. But more than anything, his pick-and-roll ball-handling and his scoring in the pick and roll was the thing that translated the most to me. That was what made me say he can play at this level.”

Size and shooting was a great place to start. But what happens when opponents start running you off the 3-point line? What happens defenses start closing out hard?

“And I think that’s the thing with me and mid-major guys,” Clark said. “When they come up to a high-major, they can’t be one-trick ponies. They’ve got to add something else to their game. And I felt like he had something that was going translate at the highest level.”

When Clark got Knecht on the phone, he said he could tell he was guarded. He had taken enough phone calls at this point in his portal recruitment to know what to listen for. What Clark sold him on was doing more at Tennessee than what was dangled in front of him by other programs.

“He wanted to see kind of what angle I was coming from,” Clark said, “what I thought of him. He told me afterwards there were certain guys that called him and talked to him about coming to be a shooter and sitting in the corner making threes because they felt like that’s how he gets to the NBA. 

“That first conversation, I talked about him being more than a shooter and I know that kept him engaged. He liked that.”

Knecht could tell Clark had watched the tape. 

Tennessee scrambled to get an official visit set up as soon as Knecht said he wanted to see the Vols up close. In just a few days, he had gone from a cold call to a flight to Knoxville. 

“I just felt very welcomed here on my visit from the players,” Knecht said, “obviously the coaching staff and even the fanbase. I went to the football spring game. They had 60,000 people there, it was really cool. They knew exactly who I was, all the fans, and it was just like something special.”

Special enough for Tennessee to not only get Knecht’s commitment, but to fend off Kansas after the Jayhawks begged to get him on campus for a visit when he left Knoxville. And Oregon and Indiana, the two other finalists. And Kentucky, too, after the Wildcats tried to make a late run at him. 

“What I like to say to people,” Knecht said, “is Tennessee is special.”

Once in a lifetime 

Rod Clark hopes he’s wrong. The 31-year-old assistant coach, in just his fifth season in Division I basketball and his third on a high-major coaching staff, hopes he didn’t land the biggest commitment of his career in Dalton Knecht. 

But Knecht has been so special, the marriage has been so perfect, that it makes Clark wonder.

“I don’t think it’ll ever happen again,” Clark said. “I mean, all the pieces of the puzzle just fit. They really fit. He’s perfect for Coach (Barnes), I’ll say that. He’s perfect for Coach and I think Coach is perfect for him.”

Tennessee has long needed an elite scorer in the Barnes era to supplement its suffocating defense. In Knecht, the Vols went out and found the best scorer in college basketball, the three-level threat Clark envisioned and so much more.

He just finished the regular season averaging 21.4 points per game. He averaged 25.5 per game in SEC play and 24.8 per game in true road games. He shot 47.4% from the field and 40.5% from the 3-point line, scoring 40 points against Kentucky on Saturday after scoring 39 three times this season, 35 or more five times, 30 or more seven times and 25 or more 10 times.

Knecht starred in his debut in the exhibition win at Michigan State in October, scoring 28 points and getting college basketball’s attention with a high-flying one-hand dunk over Malik Hall. 

The dunk was inspired by Clark, who told Knecht he needed to find a moment to announce his presence with authority, proving he wasn’t some no-name portal prospect from Colorado. 

But the perfect marriage didn’t start in the Breslin Center in East Lansing. Knecht said he could feel it from Day 1 back in April.

“I felt like it was the right decision right when I committed,” Knecht said. “I didn’t have no worries or anything.”

That right decision has been proven every step of the way. The same player that scored 29 points against Western Nebraska Community College in 2020 scored 24 in his first Division I road game at Wisconsin, a wire-to-wire win in the first week of Tennessee’s season. 

The same player that scored 38 against Eastern Wyoming College in 2021 scored 37 against North Carolina in Chapel Hill on November 29, tying the Dean Smith Center scoring record for an opposing player. 

The same player that was Second Team All-Big Sky last season on Monday was named the SEC’s Player of the Year and First Team All-SEC.

“He came in here and has been one of the hardest workers on the team,” Clark said, “if not the hardest worker, which is perfect for us in this program. He came in jumping at the idea of being a part of something special.”

‘He will forever help me’

The relationship between Knecht and Clark grows day in and day out. The two get in daily workouts. They spend time talking after each practice. They get on the phone on off days. 

“He has been real,” Knecht said.

The process has been just as rewarding for Clark. He doesn’t have an NBA background to pitch when he’s recruiting. He didn’t make it to Division I as a player. But he prides himself on being a dogged evaluator, a skill that has improved working alongside assistant coach Gregg Polinsky as part of what Clark describes as elite coaching staff led by Rick Barnes.

Being on Tennessee’s staff has helped Clark improve in both coaching and evaluating. Barnes has given him both the trust to do his job and the added freedom to trust his eyes in the process.

Identifying five-star prospects is easy. Finding the diamonds in the rough is a different story. 

That approach led Clark to helping former Tennessee assistant coach Mike Schwartz recruit Zakai Zeigler, an unknown three-star point guard out of New York. And Tobe Awaka, another under-the-radar three-star New Yorker. 

It led to recruiting Tennessee freshman wing Cam Carr when his only offer was George Mason. It led to offering JP Estrella when Harvard and Syracuse were the only programs after him, telling Estrella his recruitment was about to blow up, then staying on him when Duke came calling. 

“With Dalton, it was no different than those,” Clark said. “It was just sitting there and watching and evaluating. And I’ve always taken pride in that.”

It’s the biggest win of his coaching career to date, to identify and land a 6-foot-6 wing from Northern Colorado that quickly became a Tennessee basketball legend.

But he’s just getting started.

“I know I’m only going to get better,” Clark said. “I know I’m only going continue to be smarter and wiser with this whole experience. 

“And guys like Dalton give me the affirmation I need to understand like, okay, I’m getting pretty good at this. So I’m only going to keep growing, getting wiser and guys like him is what helps me. And he will forever help me.”