Third time is the charm for Foust
Third time is the charm for Foust
WBB: After a year away, Wyatt Foust returns to Rechelle Turner's staff
Wyatt Foust just can’t quit Murray, Kentucky.
“Anybody that’s come here from anywhere, whether it’s in-state or out-of-state, it just gets in your blood,” Foust said this morning, just hours into his first day on the job as a new assistant coach for Murray State’s women’s basketball program. We talked in his office that, aside from a Ted Lasso “Believe” coffee mug on his desk, was mostly barren. While he hadn’t had time to hang mementos on the wall just yet, sitting in his chair wearing a gold Murray State t-shirt, Foust looked like he was home.
“I kept some of my gear from last time, and I never do that,” Foust admitted. “It always felt like God might end up bringing me back to Murray State. It was a heck of a lot quicker than I’d ever imagined. I’m super excited to be back.”
Foust’s return to Murray is his third different job in town in the last six years. He replaced his current boss, Rechelle Turner, at Murray High in 2017. In two seasons with the Lady Tigers, Foust led Murray to a 60-7 record, which included two Region 1 championships and a 2018 All “A” Classic state title. In 2019, he moved on to Butler High School for two seasons where the Bearettes went 41-8 overall. In April of 2021, Foust returned to Murray, this time to Murray State, where he joined Turner as the Racers’ Director of Women’s Basketball Operations for one season. Last year, he took an assistant coaching position at Buffalo with first-year head coach Becky Burke. Today, Foust has officially returned to Murray.
“We’ve continued to talk while he’s been gone,” Turner said. “Our relationship has been strong ever since he was at Murray High. It was just kind of an unspoken thing, I think, if something opened up. The circumstances in which he left before, I didn’t have an assistant spot. (Buffalo) did, a lot of money, a good program. I didn’t really have a choice at the time. It was a God thing, really. Things didn’t maybe go as he planned at Buffalo. We had an opening, and it just kind of came together.”
Turner’s relationship with Foust immediately blossomed in 2017 when Foust took the Murray High coaching vacancy. Foust said sometimes when you replace someone in a job, that person may wish you success, but not THAT much success. He says that was never the case with Turner.
“Once I got the job, she was extremely helpful, inviting, open, warm,” Foust remembered. “There was never an ounce of me that thought anything other than she wanted us, and me, to be super successful. She went above and beyond. She told (her former players), ‘Hey, this guy, he’s great. He’ll take care of you.’ When I came into Murray High, those seniors, Macey (Turley), Lex (Mayes), (Alexis) Burpo, those guys had won a heck of a lot more basketball than I had. They had hardware that I didn’t have, and had successes that I didn’t even have. It would have been easy to look at me like, ‘Well, who are you? What do you know? We’ve had success.’ I never, ever had any sense of that, and I always attributed that to who (Turner) was as a person. Everything since then has validated what I thought about her in the early years. I always knew I’d like to work for her some day.”
“His energy is contagious,” Turner said. “He’s real energetic. He’s upbeat. He’s a tireless worker. I saw a lot of similar qualities in him and myself, especially when I was younger. The thing that probably matters the most is his moral compass and the way relationships matter to him. I will forever say that is the #1 part of our program. Any program that I’m in charge of, the relationship part will always be at the forefront.”
Despite his overwhelming success at the high school level, Foust has always wanted to be a college coach. As a student assistant at Kentucky Wesleyan, the coaching bug bit him hard. “The travel, the high level of competition, the conference layouts, everything about college basketball just attracted me and I wanted to do that.”
Getting his first taste of the college game in 2021-22 as Murray State’s Director of Operations was exciting for Foust, but the position has limitations. For instance you can’t recruit off-campus or talk to recruits or their coaches. Ultimately, it left Foust wanting more.
“Recruiting is as much about (the job) as coaching is,” Foust said. “I wanted to do that. I was loving the coaching part. I was able to do more than most Director of Ops would, and I appreciated getting to do that. I loved that sense of it, but I yearned to be able to recruit and go out and be on the phones and all those things.”
His summers of coaching AAU teams proved to be motivation for him. “When you’re coaching and you’re at these events and you see the college coaches lined up on the sidelines, that was always one of those driving things for me that kept me going,” Foust said. “I knew I wanted to coach college, but I was a high school and AAU coach for eight, nine years. It got to the point where I didn’t know if it was ever going to happen. Every summer I was doing that and reminding yourself, ‘That’s the goal.’ Then you finally get to college, but you don’t get to go recruit. It was like, ‘Dang.’ It was still incredible. Working for Coach Turner made it that much more special.”
Now Foust gets to work for Turner again, this time as an assistant that can do all the recruiting his heart desires. After a year in Buffalo where he was able to expand his recruiting base into the northeast and Canada, Turner is ready for Foust to make an immediate impact.
“We have just needed more help in recruiting,” Turner said. “Coach (Amber) Guffey has been outstanding and works her tail off and has brought so many great players here. We need some help. I feel like everybody up and down this hall has certain qualities that a coaching staff has to have. They have things they excel at. This is just going to help take us to the next level, and it’s going to open up some people up and down this hall to be able to even do their job better. It’s a great fit culture-wise. It’s a great fit personality-wise.”
Foust’s arrival also comes without the need for a learning curve. He knows everybody on staff, not to mention the expectations, and that took all of the “new employee” anxiety off the table.
“It does not feel like a first day,” Foust chuckled. “I don’t feel like I need to tread water. I don’t feel like I need to walk on eggshells. I can come in confidently and bring in what I think I can bring. The working relationships are already laid out. The dynamics are already laid out. We can really hit the ground running, especially in this recruiting time. We can mix what they were doing and what I was doing and come up with some great plans to keep building this thing up. The awesome thing is the program has taken a step forward every single year under Coach Turner and I think that’s going to continue to happen.”
As excited as he is to start a new job, Foust’s nomadic life the last couple of years isn’t all that unusual for young coaches trying to work their way up the ranks. As a young husband and father of soon-to-be three, the coaching life can be a chaotic and unsettled one. Foust can point to one person for the peace he feels as he returns to Murray.
“That’s 100% attributed to my wife,” Foust said. “She has just always said, ‘Pray about it, and what you think, we’ll go. If we need to go to Alaska, we’ll go.’ She has kind of put this life in the forefront. She’s sacrificed more than anybody in my life has sacrificed. She’s incredible. Her support on the home front and from a personal standpoint as my best friend and wife. I would not have gone anywhere without her blessing. This is not like, ‘We’re going here and you’re coming with me.’ Us having that dialogue and understanding has been everything. I wouldn’t be mad at all if that résumé stayed at the bottom of the shelf for a long while.”