One day after the Washington men’s basketball team announced that it had added an assistant coach, another assistant tweeted a statement Thursday that he is leaving.
Dave Rice, part of UW coach Mike Hopkins’ staff since the start of his Husky tenure in 2017, joins Cameron Dollar as assistants who have left following a 5-21 season, the second straight losing season for the Huskies. Six players have entered the transfer portal.
On Wednesday, the Huskies announced the hiring of assistant coach Wyking Jones, the former head coach at California.
Rice was the head coach at UNLV for four-plus seasons (2011-16) before being fired midway through his fifth season.
Rice was an assistant at Nevada the next season, then Hopkins hired Rice in the spring of 2017. The Huskies went 21-13 and 27-9 during the coaches’ first two seasons at UW.
The Huskies were 10-2 in 2019-20 before faltering badly, finishing 15-17 and in last place in the Pac-12. Things got even worse this past season.
Said Rice, in part, in his statement on Twitter: “We won lots of games the first 2.5 years and beyond that we built a camaraderie for life as we played with a swag our opponents felt. The results of the last 1.5 years weren’t what we strived for but we played until the end. We always remembered to take time to laugh and sometimes to cry but always together.”
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