New and experienced basketball coach seems to be the center of an athletic rebuild
New Masters basketball coach Joey Kuhl is beginning to spark change in the program.
December 16, 2022
Year after year during the winter athletics season, the boy’s basketball team continues to pack the stands of the F.C. gymnasium. In fact, the team has built up quite a trophy case by winning the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Class C Championship in 2008, 2013, and 2018.
However, recently the former D1 NCAA athlete and basketball coach Keydren Clark, one of the critical coaches that helped athletics get through COVID, parted ways with Masters to pursue a coaching job at his alma mater, St. Peter’s University.
Introducing Joey Kuhl. Kuhl is a Dobbs Ferry local and Texas native and is quite familiar with coaching against high-level competition. Reflecting on his start in basketball, Kuhl said, “My cousin was a high school basketball player when I was a kid. So I was in the gym since I was three or four years old. I grew up a massive Texas basketball fan with the San Antonio Spurs basketball fan.” Although he loved playing, Kuhl said “I wanted to focus on my degree, and I went to the University of Texas. While I was there, I wanted to be a student manager for the basketball team.”
When he began to work with the coaching staff at the University of Texas, he was given an opportunity to do an internship with the NBA G League team for his local Spurs affiliated team, the Austin Toros (now known as the Austin Spurs). Furthermore, Kuhl said, “When I graduated, I became the Toros’ video coordinator and system coach and I spent five years in total in the Toros’ organization.”
However, Kuhl’s goal after graduation was to “become a high school teacher. I wanted to teach social studies and coach the high school basketball team.” He found a middle group when he went to the Air Force Academy and was an assistant coach for two years. Although he was happy with this job, he still wanted to reach for higher education.
By luck of the draw, “An opportunity came up to join Chris Beard and the coaching staff at Texas Tech and also get my master’s degree for free. So I took advantage of that and got my Master’s in a year I learned a ton from Coach Beard.” He joined Texas Tech as a graduate assistant coach, meaning that he was a grad student assigned to be a defensive specialty coach, where he learned from Coach Mark Adams, who’s the current head coach at Texas Tech.
According to Kuhl, Adams is his biggest inspiration, and hopes to spread his teachings here at Masters. “Coach Adams is the guy whose voice is in my head every day in terms of how we teach his style of defense, that West Texas level of toughness. Chris Beard is someone that changed my life, really gave me an opportunity, and a guy that really values relationships and that’s what we hope to do here at Masters.” His last stop on his way to Masters was “to join Rick Pitino and his staff here in Westchester at Iona College, so I did that for the last two and a half years.
When he first met the team, he told them “I don’t have any expectations when it comes to wins and losses. What we’ve talked a lot about is how we define cultures, our habits, our expectations, and our beliefs. So I’m sharing my expectations for what I expect out of them on a day-to-day basis and practice, how hard to compete, how hard to play, how you treat each other as teammates, what our attitude looks like, and how do we respond to failure. I have expectations that direction, the wins and losses I mean, that’ll come over time.”
This seems to be getting the team off to a great start, as the team visited Rye Country Day School on December 8th, and picked up their first FAA league win in 3 years. In the words of Logan Condon, the director of athletics, “Hopefully his [Kuhl’s] coaching methodologies are the first of many transitions to a new athletics program.”
“Hopefully his [Kuhl’s] coaching methodologies are the first of many transitions to a new athletics program.”
