After a rocky 2023-2024 season, William and Mary men’s basketball turned to the Ivy League for a change in coaching.
Men’s basketball head coach Brian Earl arrived on campus in spring 2024. An Ivy League lifer, Earl starred for Princeton in the ’90s, winning the conference’s Player of the Year award in 1999 and parlaying his college success into a brief professional basketball career in England and Germany. After a stint in the banking world, Earl returned to the court in 2007, when his alma mater hired him as an assistant coach. In 2016, he was named head coach at Cornell, where he remained for eight years, winning a conference Coach of the Year award in 2022 and leading the Big Red to a 54-30 record during his final three seasons in Ithaca, N.Y.
In March, Earl decided to leave the Ivy League for the first time in his college basketball career. His destination? A William and Mary program that hasn’t recorded a winning season since 2020, hasn’t won a conference championship since 2015 and hasn’t appeared in an NCAA Tournament in its 119-year history. Money was a potential factor in the move — including bonuses, the College is paying Earl an annual base salary of $450,000 — but his departure from the strong foundation he built at Cornell nevertheless prompted surprise from many national basketball analysts.
The coach is aware of the skepticism. He has faced questions about his decision from the moment he stepped foot in Williamsburg, Va., starting at his introductory press conference. But Earl has remained steadfast in his message: William and Mary is a place where he can apply the lessons he learned in the Ivy League to a program that is brimming with potential.
“I understand, at this point, having been a player in that league and having coached guys in that league, that William and Mary has always been an institution that is basically Ivy League,” Earl said at the Coastal Athletic Association Media Day. “You recruit the same type of character kids. You recruit kids that are self-motivated on the court and in the classroom.”
William and Mary was a natural fit for Earl.
“It wasn’t a big step away from my background, and it checks a lot of the same boxes that Princeton, Cornell and the Ivy League schools check,” he said. “So, it felt comfortable, and it was just the right move for me and my family at the time.”
At the time of his hiring, Earl said he was “enthusiastic about the prospects” at William and Mary.
“There are so many things here I was wowed by,” Earl said. “I lost my poker face when I walked into Kaplan.”
Perhaps the opportunity that most excites Earl is that of the scholarship. Schools in the Ivy League are allowed to offer financial aid only if it is need-based — that is to say, not based on athletic or academic merit. While at Princeton and Cornell, Earl would often be put at recruiting disadvantages against rival schools that could cover the entire cost of players’ tuition. He faces no such hurdle at William and Mary, as the men’s basketball team is allowed to offer up to 13 full scholarships per season, the norm for most Division 1 programs.
Earl has already put his newfound resources to use, bringing in nine new players over the offseason. Freshmen guards Isaiah Mbeng, Luke Kinkade, Colin Ndaw and Ryan Jackson, Jr. make up the incoming first-year class, which consists of members from as close as Maryland and as far as Senegal.
The rest of the Tribe’s newcomers are transfers drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds. Junior guard Kyle Frazier and junior guard Kyle Pulliam hail from Division II Belmont Abbey and Division II St. Thomas Aquinas, respectively. Junior forward Finn Lally, formerly of Trinidad State, is the first junior college transfer to sign with the men’s basketball team in nearly 20 years. Graduate student forward Malachi Ndur comes from Brown, while graduate student forward Keller Boothby transferred from Cornell after spending four seasons under Earl.
“I’ve always had a good relationship with Coach Earl,” Boothby said. “He’s always had his players’ best interests in mind.”
Boothby said his decision to continue his basketball career at William and Mary stemmed from this strong relationship and Earl’s “basketball philosophies.”
Earl said Boothby possesses a “vast knowledge” of his fast-paced, up-tempo system, the implementation of which will usher in a new era in William and Mary’s stylistic history.
Under former head coach Dane Fischer, the Tribe was known for slowing down the game and extending possessions. According to basketball analytics website kenpom.com, the Green and Gold ranked among the nation’s 70 slowest teams in both 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, the final two seasons of Fischer’s tenure in Williamsburg.
In contrast, Earl is a proponent of a high-octane offense predicated on three-pointers and layups. Last season, his Cornell team took 48.6% of its shots from behind the three-point line while shooting 67.4% at the rim. Both numbers ranked among the nation’s top 10. According to kenpom.com, each of Earl’s final three Big Red teams ranked top 25 nationally in tempo, emphasizing off-ball movement and transition offense while running a press defense at one of the country’s highest rates. Although most of the Tribe’s roster is unfamiliar with Earl’s style of play, the veteran Boothby has shortened the team’s learning curve.
“I kind of view myself as the player-coach, kind of like the intermediary between the coaching staff and the players,” Boothby said. “I’m the go-between because I’m familiar with the system. So, Coach will come to me and be like, ‘What are the guys seeing? How do they feel about what we’re doing?’”
Along with Boothby, much of the task of installing the new system will be placed on the returning upperclassmen: senior forward Caleb Dorsey, junior guard Chase Lowe, senior guard Matteus Case, senior forward Noah Collier, junior forward Nick Evans, senior guard/forward Gabe Dorsey (a preseason All-CAA first-team selection) and junior guard Miles Hicks. Recruited by Earl during his high school basketball career, Lowe received a preseason All-CAA honorable mention. Gabe Dorsey also earned a spot on the All-CAA Preseason First Team.
Both Earl and his players believe the transition is going smoothly.
“I feel like we played at a much slower pace last year, so the biggest adaptation for me has just been being able to play fast,” Caleb Dorsey said. “It’s a simple transition, but I think a major one, and I think that [we’ll] be pretty fun to watch this year just with that change.”
As he does every year, Earl plans to tweak his system to align with the skills of his roster. Over the summer, Earl described the Tribe’s defense — the team’s Achilles’ heel last season — as a “work in progress.” Most importantly, the new-look squad must prove it has squashed the memory of the 2023-2024 campaign, the third-losingest season in program history.
Nevertheless, Earl leads the Tribe into a new era with optimism, armed with a talented returning core, a promising group of newcomers and an exciting style of basketball. He’s at William and Mary for a reason — that much he has made clear.