It’s pitch black as Ben McCollum pushes off the front step of the bus, steps into the piercing January air in Maryville, Missouri, and searches for answers. Nobody knows it while McCollum sports a brave face after Northwest Missouri State’s 73-58 loss to Truman State, but he’s hit his breaking point.
McCollum was in his second season as Northwest Missouri State’s head coach and was already at an inflection point. His team finished its first season with a 12-16 record and looked to be heading toward a similar fate in year two. This Jan. 3 loss to Truman State was Northwest Missouri State’s sixth in the last eight games and made it 4-8 on the season.
All these years later, McCollum is coming off of an Elite 8 run at Iowa in his first year as a Power Five head coach and is considered one of college basketball’s best coaches. That sentence was nearly unfathomable to him at that stage, though. The school’s group of basketball alumni that pushed for McCollum to get the job as a 27-year old first-time head coach was starting to wonder if they’d jumped the gun and–if McCollum was being fully honest–he was too.
“I was done coaching at that point,” McCollum told Basket Under Review. “There was definitely a [rock bottom] point. It got pretty difficult.”
The thought of getting out of coaching in the middle of the 2010-11 season wasn’t one that McCollum considered, but he couldn’t keep from thinking about life after March and how it may not involve basketball.
