Former Wichita State assistant Steve Forbes tries new Vegas tournament as postseason basketball trip

In his years coaching junior colleges, former Wichita State basketball assistant Steve Forbes learned that “shared suffering” can help players bond quickly.

Running stairs. Intense weight-lifting. Bend-your-knees defensive drills.

Forbes’ East Tennessee State team, with 10 new players and a new coaching staff, will take its suffering dividends to Las Vegas for Monday’s game against Louisiana Tech in the Vegas 16, a new postseason tournament played at Mandalay Bay Events Center.

“I think there’s a lot of established Division I head coaches probably wouldn’t want that much turnover,” Forbes said. “Because I had 11 years of juco experience, it didn’t faze me much. We had to spend a lot of time off the court together to get to know each other.”

Sometimes, the coach should share his pain. So when Forbes locked the locker room door for a team-building session, he instructed everyone to share something nobody in the room knew.

“You find out a lot about guys,” Forbes said. “Everybody has hurdles to get over. There’s some crying, three or four of them opened up and told some things about their families or their personal experiences that you wouldn’t have known.”

Forbes started the session.

He told the players about Tennessee firing him in 2011, part of the fallout from an NCAA investigation into a recruiting violation for a cookout held at the home of former Volunteers coach Bruce Pearl.

“After 23 years of being a coach, I got fired,” Forbes said. “As a coach you always tell people, ‘When you get knocked down, you’ve got to get back up.’ Now, was I going to practice what I preach? My kids were looking at me ‘How is dad going to handle this?’

A month later, Northwest Florida State College hired him. He went 61-6 in two seasons, finishing as NJCAA national runnerup in 2012 and 2013.

“I didn’t lay down and cry about it,” he said. “I was making $200,000 and went to making $60,000. If you’re not prepared for that, it’s a tough hit.”

Forbes, who also coached at Barton County Community College from 1995-98, spent two seasons at Northwest Florida State before Wichita State coach Gregg Marshall hired him as an assistant in 2013.

East Tennessee State, mixing of four Division I transfers and four juco transfers, defeated Wisconsin-Green Bay and Georgia Tech in November. A 76-67 loss at Tennessee in December told Forbes his team moved in the right direction. It won eight of the next nine games to start Southern Conference play and finished second in the regular season. The Buccaneers (23-11) lost to top-seeded Chattanooga 73-67 in the tournament title game.

In February, Forbes decided pressing suited his team and he used his experiences from Tennessee and Wichita State to shape that style. Deuce Bello, a 6-foot-4 transfer from Missouri, took over as the point man on the 1-2-1-1 press. Ge’lawn Guyn, a transfer guard from Cincinnati, averages 18.2 points.

“We became really hard to beat,” Forbes said. “(Bello) was so athletic and so long that he caused a lot of problems.”

Former Shocker Tevin Glass, who played 2014-15 at WSU, is redshirting at East Tennessee State.

Before the conference tournament, Forbes decided that he liked Vegas as a destination if the Bucs didn’t land in the NCAA or NIT. Organizers are promoting the Vegas 16 as an alternative to the College Basketball Invitational or CollegeInsider.com Tournaments. Those tournaments feature road and home games and schools can lose money by hosting. Forbes preferred one site and thinks the Vegas 16, limited to eight teams this season, will grow in stature.

The Vegas 16 requires teams to pay $50,000 for hotel and airfare.

The field also includes Oakland, Northern Illinois, Tennessee Tech, Cal Santa Barbara, Old Dominion and Towson. All games are televised on CBS Sports Network, with the semifinals on Tuesday and the championship Wednesday.

“I thought the destination would be a good reward for our players,” he said. “We were very close to getting in the NIT, with a (No. 84) RPI. You look at the RPIs of our tournament vs. the other tournaments, and it’s the better tournament.”

Forbes credits Marshall and former Shocker assistant Chris Jans with getting him back in Division I coaching. Forbes spent Selection Sunday at WSU’s practice on his way to the NJCAA Tournament in Hutchinson.

“I was glad I chance to see them one more time before the seniors were gone,” he said. “I miss those guys. We had a lot of fun. We had good chemistry.”

Early starts comeback in NBA D League – Former Shocker Cleanthony Early highlighted his comeback from a gunshot wound with 20 points and 11 rebounds for the Westchester Knicks of the NBA Development League on Thursday.

It was Early’s second game in the D League since the injury. Last week, he joined the New York Knicks active roster for one game, but did not play.

“He’s had to go through the mental trauma of the situation,” Knicks coach Kurt Rambis told the New York Daily News. “And anytime you go through an injury there’s the physical recovery but then there’s also the mental recovery where you learn to trust whatever was injured before so you don’t think when you’re out there playing.”

A robber shot Early in Queens on Dec. 30 after leaving a strip club. The injury did not require surgery.　

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 5:11 PM with the headline "Former Wichita State assistant Steve Forbes tries new Vegas tournament as postseason basketball trip."