Rick Stansbury’s tenure as Western Kentucky’s men’s basketball coach has come to an end.
WKU announced Stansbury’s resignation Saturday after seven seasons of leading the Hilltoppers. Stansbury’s last game coaching the Tops came Thursday, a 75-51 loss to top-seeded Florida Atlantic in the Conference USA tournament quarterfinals at The Star in Frisco, Texas.
“After giving this much thought, I have made the decision that I need to step away as head coach at Western Kentucky,” Stansbury said in a news release. “This past season has been a challenging one, and I need some time to step away from things and focus on my health and my family. This is a very difficult decision but the right one.
“... While we did not reach our highest goals, I feel very good about what was achieved over the last seven years. We had many meaningful wins that brought national attention to our program and brought excitement back to Diddle Arena.”
The Hilltoppers fell far short of expectations this season. Picked second in the C-USA preseason coaches’ poll with four returning starters off a 19-13 squad, the Tops instead finished a disappointing eighth in the C-USA regular-season standings while compiling a 17-16 overall record and an 8-12 mark in conference play this season.
Thursday’s lopsided loss marked the end of a difficult season personally for Stansbury, who missed the first nine C-USA games due to an undisclosed health issue as associate coach Phil Cunningham led the program in his absence.
Stansbury couldn’t right the ship when he returned, as WKU went just 6-7 the rest of the season culminating in the loss to FAU.
“There were such high hopes throughout the offseason,” Western Kentucky Director of Athletics Todd Stewart said. “Really, everybody from Rick on down throughout our program thought this had a chance to be a really special team. And obviously it just didn’t turn out that way, and we had some tough losses along the way. But I certainly never stopped believing in our coaches and our players, and my hope was that eventually things would click, that eventually we’d get on a role, we’d hit a winning streak and then all of a sudden it would turn into what we all thought it would be.”
Stewart termed it a “bittersweet day for WKU basketball,” with the women’s team set to play in the C-USA tournament championship just hours after the announcement that Stansbury would no longer coach the men’s team.
“It was a resignation – he’s just stepping away is the term that he used,” Stewart said. “Rick and I have a really good relationship and we talk all the time and we meet on a regular basis. And I know that he just kind of felt based on this past year, both personally and professionally, it was a hard year for him as everybody knows. I just thought at this time stepping away was what was best for him, so therefore he submitted his resignation and we accepted it.”
Over the seven seasons, Stansbury led the Hilltoppers to a 139-89 (.610) record, an NIT Final Four run, three Conference USA Championship title games and the 2021 C-USA East Division Championship. The stint included four 20-win seasons and an All-American product and NBA second round draft choice in Charles Bassey.
Since 2017-18, Stansbury coached the Hilltoppers to 11 wins over Power Five teams – Stewart pointed out that WKU had just one such win in the previous six years before Stansbury’s arrival. Between the 2017-18 and 2021-22 seasons, Western Kentucky won more Division I games and more conference games than any other member of Conference USA.
That never translated into NCAA tournament success, as Stansbury failed to reach the sport’s biggest stage in seven seasons. The Hilltoppers reached the C-USA tournament championship three straight times in 2018, 2019 and 2021 (the 2019-20 season tournament was canceled due to COVID-19) and lost each time to miss out on an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
Stansbury, the program’s 15th head coach, became the first to never reach the NCAA tournament. WKU last made the NCAA field in 2013 under Ray Harper, who Stansbury replaced in 2016.
A tremendous recruiter for WKU, Stansbury brought in highly-sought prospects like Bassey, Josh Anderson and Taveion Hollingsworth during his tenure at WKU. But the Tops also suffered from some instability under his watch with risky recruiting decisions – the Mitchell Robinson pursuit, when the talented big man committed and joined the team, only to leave a few days later, then repeated that once more before opting to skip college and prepare for the NBA.
Robinson was the biggest swing and miss, but there were others whose eligibility issues hamstrung Stansbury’s rosters over the years. Last season, Cincinnati transfer Keith Williams was ruled ineligible by the NCAA and never played a game and incoming freshman guard Zion Harmon never played because of personal reasons.
In addition to Williams, Lipscomb transfer Kenny Cooper was denied a waiver midway through the 2019-20 season.
This season, another eligibility issue arose when newcomer Dontaie Allen was forced to sit out seven games for an infraction that came during his time at Kentucky and was only discovered by that school after his transfer to WKU.
“Obviously this past season was a disappointment for everyone in our program and not what any of us had hoped it would be,” Stewart said. “But from the moment he landed in Bowling Green on March 27th, 2016, Rick gave everything he had to this program. He was a tireless recruiter and a terrific ambassador for our program. And while we didn’t reach our highest goals, there were a lot of – many – notable accomplishments during his tenure.”
Stansbury, who was entering the final year of his contract this season, in October received a four-year extension to June 30, 2026. Stansbury’s salary remained the same at $650,000, but the buyout was reduced for both parties to $500,000 from $1 million in equal payments over a 12-month period if either terminates the contract without cause prior to June 30, 2025.
Stewart said there is no timetable on hiring a new coach, but anticipates it won’t take long to fill the job.
“I don’t really want to put like a time period on it in terms of days or weeks or anything like that – I don’t think it will be weeks, plural, but it will be more than a day,” Stewart said. “So we’ll get on that and start identifying and talking to people, and try to get it as soon as possible. But like I said, the most important thing is to get it right.”{&end}
