Mattox brings versatility to Racer coaching staff
MBB: Mattox is entering his second-season on Murray State's staff
Let’s rewind to March 5, 2022.
Matt McMahon’s Murray State Racers had just punctuated one of the greatest seasons in program history with a 71-67 win over Morehead State in the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament championship game. While Murray State players stormed the floor in celebration, and while McMahon stood on a chair and gave his patented “Woooo!” to the Racer Nation, Morehead State Assistant Coach Jonathan Mattox walked disappointingly back to the locker room — not knowing how much his life was about to change.
“Walking out that night in the OVC championship in 2022, I’m not thinking I’ll be working at Murray State in a month,” Mattox said. “But at the same time, when the opportunity arose, I thought it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up.”
Mattox’s journey to joining Steve Prohm’s coaching staff actually started before his playing career ended in 2011. After playing at Anderson College in South Carolina, Mattox transferred to Emmanuel College where he formed a bond with his head coach TJ Rosene.
“TJ and I were ten years apart and actually graduated from the same high school,” Mattox said. “I say all the time, sometimes you need other people to see stuff in you that you don’t see in yourself. So, after senior night, I was talking to my parents, and he kind of came up, and said, ‘Hey, I think Jonathan would be a really good coach. He doesn’t have to make any decisions now.’ We still had our conference tournament and, potentially, the national tournament to play in. ‘If he wants to join my staff next year, I’d love to have him.’ That was really a lightbulb moment for me. For him to see that in me, that kind of spearheaded things into, ‘Man, he sees it in me. I’ve thought about it a little bit. This may be something I can really pursue.’”
Like a lot of coaches getting into the profession, the early years were all about gaining experience, but earning little to no money. Emmanuel College, at the time, was an NAIA school and Rosene was able to offer Mattox a part-time assistant coaching position. After helping lead the Lions to a 49-21 record in his two seasons, Mattox knew he wanted to move up to the Division I level. While on the road recruiting, he met Morehead State Assistant Coach BJ Ellis. That relationship led to Mattox earning his first Division I break. For the 2013-14 season, Mattox was Morehead State’s new, unpaid, Graduate Assistant.
“I had saved up some money working at Emmanuel for two years,” Mattox said. “Obviously, I had the support of my parents. I had actually done a lot of research on it. (Former Butler and Boston Celtics Head Coach) Brad Stevens, his first year at Butler, he was unpaid working as a waiter. I read about two or three guys, and I was like, ‘Let me take a chance, this may be my only opportunity to get into the Division I level. Let me take a chance and see what it’s like.’ Luckily, I had that support system there from my family where I could just go in and put my head down and work as hard as I could to ultimately earn a salaried position.”
Living the starving artist’s life only lasted a year. The next season, Morehead State Head Coach Sean Woods promoted Mattox to a Graduate Assistant position with a salary. All of his hard work paid off with multiple promotions at Morehead State in the next several years. In 2015, Mattox moved up to Director of Basketball Operations. He stayed in that position until December 15, 2016. When Woods resigned, and Preston Spradlin moved from Assistant Coach to Interim Head Coach, Mattox got bumped up to Assistant Coach. He stayed in that position until the start of his final season at Morehead, when Spradlin promoted Mattox to Associate Head Coach. When you look at the resumes of many young coaches, they don’t usually stay at a school for more than a year or two before moving on to the next greener pasture. Despite having opportunities to leave, Mattox stayed at Morehead State for nine seasons.
“Morehead’s a good place, good people,” Mattox said. “For whatever reason, I passed on some opportunities. A lot of them were just gut feelings. I was able to see the process through because it wasn’t like we were always really, really good. I worked for Sean Woods my first couple years and then Preston took over. We struggled at first. We won eight games (during Spradlin’s) first year as head coach. But again, when you’re around good people, working with good people, that kind of makes those tough times when you’re losing, it makes them a little bit easier.”
Morehead State may have struggled early in Spradlin’s tenure as head coach, but that didn’t last. In 2021, the Eagles made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in ten years. In 2022, they came up just shy of making it back-to-back trips. Mattox’s role in helping rebuild Morehead wasn’t going unnoticed.
“When I’m on the road, even as an assistant, I would pay attention to different guys,” Amir Abdur-Rahim said. Abdur-Rahim was an assistant coach at Murray State from 2006-11. After other stops at Georgia Tech, Charleston, Texas A&M and Georgia, Abdur-Rahim earned his first head coaching job at Kennesaw State in 2019. He took the Owls to the NCAA Tournament back in March, and is now the head coach at South Florida. “I wanted to see who worked, how they worked, what made them good. As I felt like I was getting closer to becoming a head coach, I would watch guys a little more intently, and just who I wanted to hire. Jonny was one of those guys that when you see him, he asked really good questions. When you watched him, when he was at games, he was always evaluating. People don’t realize there’s such a big difference between recruiting and evaluating. Anybody can try their hand at recruiting, but being able to evaluate is a totally different thing. When I would watch him, I was always impressed with him. Over the years, we just started talking, and I found myself learning from him. I would always keep in the back of my pocket, ‘Man, he’s good.’ Then you have other coaches say, ‘Hey, who’s good out there, who’s really good?’ I like having names to help other guys. That’s kind of how our relationship started. It was just me observing him and him always being a good dude, ultimately.’”
Let’s fast forward to March 28, 2022.
With Matt McMahon off to LSU, Murray State introduced Steve Prohm, for a second time, as their new head coach. Needing to essentially create an entirely new roster, Prohm needed to hire a coaching staff ASAP.
“I wanted to build the best staff I could,” Prohm said. “There’s a couple of people in the business that I trust and confide in. They both had mutual relationships with Jonny, and they said he’s a guy that you want to look at. Also, you want to see what program he’s at and how’s that program doing. Morehead has really been a very good program over the last several years. When Donnie (Tyndall) was there, they had some really good teams we competed against. Preston, in these last several years, they’ve had a great run. Jonny was influential in helping spearhead that. He’s a guy that’s been around winning. He understands winning.”
Two of those coaches Prohm trusts are Abdur-Rahim and James Kane. Kane worked under Prohm while Prohm was a head coach at both Murray State and Iowa State. They were also two guys that Mattox had built relationships with.
“James was probably a little bit easier to know because of playing against him for so long,” Mattox said. “He had been here and he’d worked for Steve and he’d worked for Matt. We probably first got to know each other through scouting. I’d call him or he’d call me, ‘Hey, what’d you see, how do we beat Belmont or whoever else was in the league at the time?’ Obviously, we’d see each other out on the road recruiting and stuff like that. You kind of gain a mutual respect. Amir has been really beneficial for me probably just through the recruiting scene. He’s a guy that really carries himself the right way. He’s really good relationally. He was a young head coach when I met him. Me, being an aspiring head coach, really wanted to pick his brain. ‘Hey, what are some of the things you did as an assistant to prepare you to be a head coach? How are you running your program now? How are you taking your team from one win to improving every year?’ He obviously had a great year in the ASUN and he got the South Florida job. Just trying to pick brains of guys that have been here before and have done it.”
While Kane and Abdur-Rahim had been gone from Murray for years, their guy had just returned as Murray State’s head coach, and they were going to try to help him however they could.
“James Kane called me the day Steve got named head coach,” Mattox remembered. “He proposed at first, ‘Would you be interested in going with Steve?’ I was like, ‘You know what, I would.’ Part of my thinking at the time was I knew Steve Prohm’s track record. I also knew Murray State was going to the Missouri Valley. I was like, ‘Man, that would probably be a pretty good opportunity.’”
“Steve calls me, and he’s like, ‘Man, who’s good out there?’” Abdur-Rahim said. “I was like, ‘Man, Jonny Mattox at Morehead does a hell of a job. Not just recruiting, but, Steve, he’s a really good evaluator.’”
“I feel asleep on the couch that night at 12 or 1:00am, and I had a text from Amir Abdur-Rahim,” Mattox said. “He’s like, ‘Sorry for the late text. Call me in the morning. There’s something I want to run by you.’ I call him the next morning, and he said, ‘I talked to Steve Prohm last night. He asked me about you. I raved about you. Is that something you’d be interested in?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘I’m going to call him right now and we’ll go from there.’ Sure enough, Amir calls Steve, and two hours later I got a text from Steve. We talked a little bit that day. It was a Saturday. I was actually hosting an official visit at Morehead. There was a little window where I could talk to Steve for about 30 minutes. I finished up the visit Sunday and I texted with Steve again. Monday, Steve and I talked probably two or three times and that was really it. It was a really quick process. Having people who believe in you, whether that’s James Kane or Amir Abdur-Rahim, those guys really helped me get here.”
“If anybody else was at Murray right now, when I got this (South Florida) job, (Mattox) would have been my first call,” Abdur-Rahim chuckled. “I don’t want to jam Steve up and take away from his staff, not after year one. Steve, I haven’t told him this yet, but whether it’s here or somewhere else, if God blesses me to keep doing this, I’m going to call Jonny at some point.”
The rivalry between Murray State and Morehead State has ebbed and flowed over the years, but it was certainly at a peak in the years prior to Mattox making the move to Murray. So, was it weird for Mattox to switch from one MSU to another, or was it just part of the profession?
“A little bit of both,” Mattox admitted. “The biggest adjustment for me was I’d call recruits and say, ‘Hey, this is Coach Mattox from Morehead State’ for so long, I really had to catch myself. We get the job, we had so much turnover from a roster standpoint, you just hit the ground running from a recruiting standpoint. You’re calling recruits all day. ‘This is Coach Mattox from …’ I almost had to catch myself and say Murray State and not Morehead. That was the biggest thing.”
Now more than a decade into his coaching journey, Mattox has earned the respect of many of his peers, and his boss.
“He’s been around good defensive teams,” Prohm said. “We’ve got to have that swagger and defensive chip on our shoulder here, and I thought he could help us with that. He’s well-versed. He’s very versatile. He can do a lot of different things on and off the floor. He’s been a big asset for where we are right now and where we want to go. He’s got a really bright future in this business.”
The versatility Prohm mentioned is something Mattox takes great pride in.
“This is something I’ve learned from guys like Amir and James. I think in order to be a really good coach, you have to be well-rounded,” Mattox said. “I think in order to be a really good player, you have to be well-rounded. Sure, you can be a specialist and just be a shooter, or a defensive stopper. Same thing in coaching. Sure, you could be a specialist and just be a recruiter or a really good ball coach. I think over the years I’ve learned I need to be really good at recruiting. That’s the lifeblood of most programs. But I also need to be really good on the court, from an X’s and O’s standpoint, from a schematical standpoint. I also need to be really good relationally with the players and figure out what’s going on with them. Obviously, in college athletics you have academics. I think over the years, my biggest strength is being well-rounded.”
As he enters his second season at Murray State, Mattox says his expectations of making the move to Murray, Kentucky have been exceeded.
“I think from the outside looking in, you just see the basketball,” Mattox said. “(When coaching at Morehead State) I’m just at the game and then I’m gone. Living here, this town eats it, sleeps it, and drinks it. This is a big-time setup. It’s a big-time deal. It matters here.”