Rick Croy Leaves CBU as a Legend and the Future Looks Bright

Rick Croy has accepted the associate head coaching position at Arizona State University, ending a thirteen-year tenure at California Baptist University that transformed the Lancers from a transitional Division II program into a Division I tournament participant.

Croy's departure reunites him with Randy Bennett, the mentor under whom he served at Saint Mary's before taking the CBU job in 2013, and puts him on the sideline alongside his son, JRob, who flipped his Saint Mary's commitment to follow Bennett to Tempe. This is dream job material, he will be missed, but the move makes a lot of sense.

He leaves having just delivered the best season in CBU Division I history. The Lancers went 25-9, won the program's first WAC Tournament championship, and made their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament, falling to Kansas 68-60 in the Round of 64. Lancer Nation traveled to San Diego for that game. It was the ending a thirteen-year story deserved.

I watched several of those seasons from two rows back, baseline, between the corner and the basket. Close enough to hear the coaching. Close enough to see the faces. I watched JRob warm up with the team. He went from a skinny kid warming up his dad's team, to a 6'5" combo guard with a great outside shot and the unique poise only seen in coaches kids. It will be amazing to watch them work together in Tempe on TV next season.

Rick Croy is a great coach. The thirteen-year record, the transition from Division II to Division I, the WAC title, the tournament appearance are the credentials. But great coaches are defined by the intangibles. His toughness was respected, never cold. It was the toughness of a man who believed in what his players could become and refused to let them settle for less. From two rows back you could see: it was never about him. It was always about them.

Over the years I watched Dejon Davis, Milan Acquah, Tre and Taran Armstrong and others who became part of what CBU basketball meant to this city. The ones who stayed understood what Croy was offering. And in an era when staying is a choice, a remarkable number of them stayed.

Taran Armstrong is the most vivid illustration of what that relationship produced. He arrived as the No. 2 prospect in Australia, won WAC Freshman of the Year, and left after two seasons for the Australian NBL and eventually a two-way contract with the Golden State Warriors, becoming the first Tasmanian to sign in the NBA. When it happened, Croy got a text from Taran's father in Tasmania. "Incredible joy," Croy told NBC Sports Bay Area. "Watching the ability to learn about somebody accomplishing a dream — there's nothing better." That is not the language of a tactician. That is the language of someone who understood his job was about people first.

In his farewell letter to Lancer Nation, Croy wrote that his high school coach Frank Allocco Sr. used to tell him: "Don't forget to say hello before it is time to say goodbye." For thirteen years, he showed up with gratitude. Riverside felt it.

College basketball in 2026 is arguably the most tumultuous landscape in American sports. The transfer portal has made roster continuity a relic. NIL has reordered recruiting logic entirely. The G League and international professional contracts pull prospects before they ever set foot on a college campus. In this environment, building anything durable requires something beyond strategy. It requires trust.

What made Croy genuinely unusual was that he mastered both sides of the new landscape simultaneously. He retained his own stars while using the portal to add experienced fifth-year contributors who fit rather than disrupted. Dominique Daniels Jr., the WAC Player of the Year and one of the top scorers in Division I this season at 23.2 points per game, is the most visible product of that approach. Croy did both, on a mid-major budget, for thirteen years.

None of it happened in a vacuum. Croy was an integral part of an institutional commitment, a deliberate bet that Riverside deserved a program built to compete and built to last. The Fowler Center is the physical expression of that bet. A premier venue planted just off the 91 freeway, in the middle of a city that has too often been an afterthought in the regional conversation. This past season CBU averaged more than 4,800 fans per home game, the highest attendance of any Division I program in California without a football team. CBU said something with that building. Croy spent thirteen years giving it something to say. As he wrote on his way out the door: "If you build it... they will come. And we did."

CBU did not flinch. Kyle Getter arrives as the program's thirteenth head coach with a resume that commands immediate respect. He was on the bench at VCU in 2011 when Shaka Smart's Rams became the first team to reach the Final Four after starting in the First Four. He spent five seasons under Tony Bennett at Virginia, including the 2019 national championship. Most recently he served three seasons as associate head coach at Notre Dame. He has spent nearly a quarter century learning from some of the best, and now gets his first head coaching opportunity.

The portal will test him immediately. It would be naive to suggest the roster survives intact. When coaches leave, players explore options. That is the reality of the game as it is played today. But a coach with Getter's credentials sends a message to portal-curious players that the program's ambitions have not diminished.

What Getter inherits is a program with an identity, a world-class facility, and a fanbase that averaged nearly 5,000 fans a night. He also inherits a rivalry. CBU enters the Big West Conference next season, putting the Lancers in the same league as the UC Riverside Highlanders for the first time. Two universities in the same city, representing different traditions and different communities, competing on the same floor with conference stakes attached. Riverside has not had that before. It is the kind of thing that builds programs, fills arenas, and gives a city something to argue about on a Tuesday night in February.

Rick Croy built the foundation for all of it. He earned his exit. Now Kyle Getter gets to find out what he can do with what was left behind.