Like so many other pairs of roommates across the United States, Dan Geriot and Mike Magpayo sat on the couch in Geriot’s Buies Creek, North Carolina home in 2015 watching the Houston Rockets on TV.
But unlike most of those pairs, Geriot and Magpayo worked in basketball as assistant coaches for the Campbell University men’s basketball team under head coach Kevin McGeehan. All of the sudden, Geriot had an epiphany.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome to be walking into the Toyota Center as opposed to going to Farmville, Virginia to play Longwood?” Geriot asked Magpayo.
That was the first time that Geriot had ever mentioned to Magpayo that he wanted to work in the NBA, but a few months later, it became a reality.
Magpayo only knew one person in the NBA, Koby Altman, who was working in the Cleveland Cavaliers front office. The two worked together at Columbia for two seasons under Kyle Smith before Altman took the job in Cleveland. As soon as Geriot made that comment, Magpayo sent Altman a text, and the wheels were in motion. Now, Geriot returns to college from the NBA to be the head coach of the Iona Gaels.
A decade prior, when Richmond head coach Chris Mooney recruited Geriot to the Spiders, he knew that he was recruiting somebody who had a future as a coach.
“I always thought he had a great mind for the game,” Mooney told _Mid-Major Madness._ “Not just for how he could get better, but how teams played, styles of play, and subtleties. He had more of an understanding of style of play, how certain things could combat teams with superior talent.”
Mooney’s system, a version of the Princeton offense that he played under Pete Carril in the Ivy League, and then coached under Joe Scott at Air Force, requires players like that. In fact, many believe that the very fact that the Princeton offense originated at a high-academic school like Princeton isn’t an accident.
For four seasons across five years, Geriot took advantage of mismatches, stretched the floor, and brought key passing acumen to the table for the Spiders. He helped lead Richmond all the way to the Sweet 16 in 2011.
Just a few months after the Spiders fell to Kansas inside the Alamodome, Geriot was injured playing overseas, and came back to Richmond, where he connected with Mooney once again. Mooney put him in contact with his alma mater, coached by Mitch Henderson, the new protege of the Princeton system entering his first season at the historic program.
Despite being just a volunteer assistant at Princeton at the start, he transcended the job description. He travelled for recruiting and dove into it with everything he had, looking to climb the coaching ladder and help Princeton win.
“I don’t think that many of the Ivy League schools had a volunteer assistant attack it the same way Dan did,” Mooney said. “I think he saw an area where he could be really effective, and I think that recruiting was going to be a big part of that.”
He then followed McGeehan, one of Mooney’s assistant coaches when Geriot played at Richmond, to Campbell in 2013. A year later, Geriot met Magpayo.
“I had no leverage in the business,” Magpayo, who had just left the corporate world four years earlier to move across the country and chase the dream of coaching college basketball, told _Mid-Major Madness._
And Geriot welcomed him with open arms to the family.
“I was making so little,” Magpayo said. “He let me live with him, basically for free, and I’ll always owe him for that.”
The conversations between the two were all about basketball, all the time.
When Magpayo was on Smith’s staff at Columbia, he was in charge of keeping track of hustle stats and analytics. However, McGeehan wasn’t quite bought in on the analytics wave yet. Despite this, Geriot was curious.
“He just wanted to learn it,” Magpayo said. “It’s very labor intensive. We have to re-watch practice and stat 50 different thing, but we would do it at night together just because he wanted to learn what it was.”
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Despite Geriot’s deep ties within the Princeton system, it’s his curiosity about the sport as a whole that allowed him to succeed once he got to the NBA after that on-a-whim comment to Magpayo.
“He was just so open to all types of basketball,” Magpayo said.
Altman told Magpayo to have Geriot call him at the end of the season, and he got a job as a video coordinator for the Cavs. That eventually turned into a spot on the bench as an assistant coach.
Even though Magpayo and Geriot joked about the long hours and low pay that entry-level NBA positions provided, Geriot took on the challenge. After all, it was no different from the late nights that the two put in together in Buies Creek.
Despite his success in the NBA, which included a recent switch from Cleveland to the New Orleans Pelicans this past offseason, when Iona gave Geriot the chance to be a head coach, he jumped at it.
“I think he always had the interest (in going back to college),” Mooney said. “I always knew that he was a leader, and I think that the opportunity to be a head coach and cal your shots and do those things is just extremely appealing.”
Iona’s controversial dismissal of Tobin Anderson drew the ire of many around college basketball, but Geriot is ready to take on the challenge. His players in the NBA certainly think he’s the man for the job.
LeBron James, Kevin Love, and many more took to social media to congratulate Geriot on landing the position, speaking to his reputation around the sport.
“He’s confident in who he is,” Magpayo said. “The reason why those Cleveland guys loved him because he was great player development wise, but he’s also an outside-the-box thinker.”
Geriot isn’t coming alone to the New York metropolitan area. Magpayo has remained a close friend even as their coaching careers split in different directions. While serving as the head coach at UC Riverside, Magpayo drove down to La Jolla, California, to officiate Geriot’s wedding just a few years ago. Now, Magpayo is moving across the country to be the head coach at Fordham.
Additionally, Kevin Hovde, who was Geriot’s roommate at Richmond and one of his closest friends to this day, is leaving Todd Golden’s staff at Florida to be the head coach at Columbia once the Gators’ season ends.
It’s fun to speculate on potential matchups around New York City between the three, especially if the programs are successful, as Magpayo insists Geriot will be.
But one matchup that will not be returning to Hynes? Richmond.
“No chance,” Mooney said of the possibility.
In Geriot’s final season with the Spiders, he scored 14 points in a double-overtime loss to the Gaels in New Rochelle.
It hasn’t stopped bothering Mooney.
“There was a play, two plays late in the game where we were fouling on purpose and it wasn’t called, so they were able to make a basket instead of going to the line,” he said. “I regret the outcome of that game to this day.”
But he’s confident Iona won’t regret hiring Geriot.
“He has a great basketball mind and he connects with players,” Mooney said. “He’s confident and has a has a really good idea of how he’s gonna wanna play and how Iona is gonna be successful.”