Travis Steele Xavier Basketball (Photo by Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
After four years in charge of the musketeer program, Travis Steele was fired by Xavier. A native of Indiana and former butler alum, Steele has spent much of his coaching career with the Musketeers, and it was Xavier Basketball who gave him his first head coaching position in 2018.
After graduating from college, Steele was a high school assistant before joining Thad Matta’s staff at Ohio State as a graduate assistant. He later worked on Kelvin Sampson’s Indiana staff, and soon became a full-time assistant after Sampson’s fire in 2008. It was a few weeks later that he was hired to join the Xavier staff, and he will continue for the next fourteen years. the musketeers remain. Seasons.
Steele served as director of basketball operations for one season under Sean Miller, and when Miller left for Arizona he was promoted to a full-time assistant position. Steele served on Chris Mack’s staff for the next nine seasons, helping Xavier to a whole host of successes in the process, including while transitioning from the A-10 to the Big East. When Mack accepted the Louisville job in 2018, Steele was promoted to head coach.
The last four years have not been exactly as planned with Steele as coach. Xavier remains one of the competing programs in a very tough Big East, but they have not fought as much as expected. In his four seasons, Steele never led the program to the NCAA Tournament and was never over .500 in the Big East game. A third-place conference finish in its first season was met with an NIT offer, and this year the team was only able to return to the NIT. Settlement for less than the NCAA Tournament is not acceptable with a program like Xavier.
These are not the Musketeers, which was one of the best programs in the A-10, this is a program that has shown that they can compete in the Far East, even if the last few years have not exactly shown it. For the first time in decades, the Musketeers are choosing a new head coach on their own terms, not watching one of them do a higher profile job.
This Big East job is very attractive and we have reduced it to a number of potential candidates. We will now go through these volunteers alphabetically, and look for some very interesting names.
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