Dan Fleser
Rick Barnes had himself a day last Wednesday, one that was quite full even by today’s hectic college basketball standards. How it played out ought to give Tennessee fans a refreshed sense of gratitude for Barnes being the Vols coach.
It began with UT getting a player to help refortify its depleted roster, a guard with a track record for double-figure scoring and 3-point shooting. But not just any guard. Clarence Massamba is from Paris . . . Paris, France, not Paris, Tennessee. The 6-foot-4, 185-pounder is a product of the AS Monaco Basket organization, a professional operation that the athletic department’s press release described as being “prestigious.”
Massamba has been playing primarily for Monaco’s U21 team but also made three appearances for Monaco’s elite-level team as a young man playing against grown-ups.
Since Tennessee wasn’t blindsided by its roster attrition, the coaching staff presumably had been laying groundwork for acquiring new players. But signing a player from France involved an ocean as well. An international recruit wasn’t the sort of news I was expecting. Were you?
“Once we identified Clarence as a player of interest we immediately became excited about his impressive upside,” said Barnes, who apparently has looked closely enough at the new Vol to detect “a chip on his shoulder” regarding Massamba’s competitiveness. If so, tres bien! Such an attitude won’t need translation.
In the same time frame, news broke that assistant coach Rod Clark was leaving to join the staff of new coach Darian DeVries at Indiana. In his five years at Tennessee, Clark had been an impressive recruiter. He was the primary recruiter for transfer stars Dalton Knecht and Chaz Lanier. Transfer guard Amaree Abram indicated that Clark was a big factor in why he signed with the Vols last Tuesday.
This sort of coaching movement, while common in Spring, can be unsettling, especially when involving an assistant like Clark. However, Barnes didn’t seem fazed. At last Wednesday night’s Big Orange Caravan stop in Nashville, he said: “Rod was great but you know what? We feel we’ve got that covered.”
On Friday, the program announced the hiring of Amorrow Morgan, a Memphis native who had spent the past two seasons as an assistant at Cal. He had joined Florida State’s staff in early April.
“As soon as we knew we had a decision to make, it was immediately clear Amorrow would be our first choice,” said Barnes, who previewed the new assistant as a “young, energetic coach with a sharp basketball mind.”
Cal’s website described Morgan as a “relentless recruiter.”
“Everything we do at Tennessee is not a one-man (recruitment). We have never done that,” Barnes said in Nashville. “We have recruited as a staff. We believe in that because we just feel like situations like this (happen.)”
Given some of the holes in his postseason resume, Barnes always will have his detractors. But that view of him, especially in the context of Tennessee’s basketball history, is too narrow. It has been eclipsed by now by a lot of days like last Wednesday, enough to carry the day.
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Dan Fleser is a 1980 graduate of the University of Missouri, who has covered University of Tennessee athletics since 1988. He is a member of the Tennessee Sportswriters, U.S Basketball Writers and Greater Knoxville Sports Halls of Fame. He can be reached at danfleser3@gmail.com.