Assistant Coach Chat: Evansville’s Brandon Crone

For today’s edition of Assistant Coach Chat, we spoke with Evansville assistant coach Brandon Crone. Coach Crone is entering his second season with the Purple Aces after spending the last six years working at his alma mater, Butler. Some highlights from our chat below:

On why he got into coaching…

I think the first thing that interested in me in coaching was that I always had great coaches growing up. I learned so much from them and how they ran programs that I knew I wanted to do that someday. I have always been a people person, so the relationships and the impact you can have as a coach always resonated with me.

On Evansville and Coach Todd Lickliter…

I love it down here in Evansville. It is a college basketball town. We have great fans, a great venue to play our games, great facilities for practice and player development and a great university. It has been great working under Coach Lickliter, what drew me to Butler as a player to play for him is what is great working for him now. It is a family atmosphere, the staff has great chemistry and our players are starting to buy into the culture we are trying to create.

On working at Butler…

Working at a place you cherish so much was a great opportunity for me. I felt very lucky to be able to walk into Hinkle everyday and work. Butler is a special place with a lot of special people. They care about the overall success of everyone. I was fortunate to work under two great coaches in Chris Holtmann and LaVall Jordan along with many great assistant coaches. The impact of watching and learning from them will stay with me my whole career.

On the chaos and uncertainty of the last year and a half…

The resiliency of our players and staff. I think I realized just how strong the human spirit is. Our players were asked to do a lot of hard things to play a game and they did them without complaint. The ability to adapt and change in an instance was on full display.

On the Evansville staff’s focus for this year…

I think a lot of our focus entering our second year has been how to continue to instill our vision and system for the program. We did not get a lot of time last year to focus on that. Having summer workouts this year and now fall workouts has been great to help with this process. We have also focused a lot on our team defense as that was a glaring weakness for us last year.

On what Purple Aces fans should be most excited about…

We are really excited to return to a little more normalcy this season. Our schedule is tough, but one that I think will help us prepare for an extremely strong MVC. We are going to keep working towards being better every day and play one possession at a time! We have a great group of returners matched with some really good newcomers. We are excited to have the chance to keep growing as a team.

Special thanks to Coach Brandon Crone and the Evansville Purple Aces program. If you are interesting in hearing from for more D-I assistant coaches, check out our other Assistant Coach Chats.