FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Erik Spoelstra is always seeking out original thinkers. Four years ago, the NBA’s fourth-winningest active coach found one a 45-minute drive north of the Miami Heat’s facilities. Since then, Spoelstra has visited Nova Southeastern University regularly for an up-close look at the unique stylings of Jim Crutchfield, the Division II school’s 69-year-old basketball coach.
Nova Southeastern plays faster than anyone in college basketball — the Sharks’ 85.8 possessions per game this season are nearly 10 more than the fastest-playing Division I team — applies a full-court press constantly and plays every possession like it’s game point, while the man calling the shots is as quiet as a librarian on the sideline. Crutchfield, a former math teacher who never played college basketball and coached tennis before getting his big D-II break at West Liberty University, sees the game like a math problem and has created his own calculations.
“He’s not swayed by conventional wisdom,” Spoelstra said. “He’s just a really unique, innovative thinker. He can get to a conclusion in such a more simple way than the majority of us would.”
Crutchfield has won 86.4 percent of his games, the highest winning percentage of any coach with at least 10 seasons of experience at any level in NCAA history. He has turned two programs with no winning history into juggernauts. Spoelstra hoped Crutchfield could take him through his blueprints from those builds. But when Crutchfield makes as much as a practice plan — usually on graphing paper — he crumples it up and throws it in the trash after it’s used. Every belief he has about coaching and style of play lives only in his head. It’s what he considers basketball common sense.
“He just cuts to the obvious,” Spoelstra said. “Always just questioning, like, why? Why would people do it this way? And then when he explains it and says it, you’re like, yeah, why didn’t I think of that?”
Crutchfield doesn’t understand why big-name basketball folks — from Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla and GM Brad Stevens to recently-retired Miami coach Jim Larranaga and Michigan coach Dusty May — have met with him to hear about his methods. Whenever Spoelstra visits, Crutchfield asks him, “Why don’t we just go golf or play pickleball? I can teach you how to play pickleball. Pick my brain about that.”
But the results suggest Crutchfield has cracked a higher-stakes code.
In the last four seasons, Nova Southeastern is 112-4. The Sharks went undefeated and won the national championship in 2023.
With five new starters in 2024, they went 32-3 and lost on a buzzer beater in the title game. West Liberty had two 20-win seasons in its entire history, which began in 1924, before Crutchfield introduced his system. The Hilltoppers have averaged 27.3 wins per year since.
In a sport full of copycats, it’s hard to find anything that looks completely different. If you spend time in Fort Lauderdale, as most of those basketball luminaries have, you start to see how a coach most fans have never heard of is winning at historic levels.
“I’ve had the opportunity to coach against the best coaches in the country,” said Chaminade coach Eric Bovaird, who was Crutchfield’s first assistant at West Liberty. “We played Gonzaga three times. We played North Carolina. We have played against just about everybody. I’ve been around these guys. I’ve seen their practices. I’ve prepared for them. And, deep down, I’m thinking the best coach in the country is Jim Crutchfield from Nova Southeastern.”
Crutchfield’s Sharks are No. 1 in Division II and off to a 13-0 start. (Courtesy of Nova Southeastern Athletics)
The world of an average college basketball coach is foreign to Crutchfield. He barely watches any other basketball, and when he does, he caps out at about five minutes. He’s currently binge-watching “The West Wing”. His favorite show is “Dateline”.
Monday night in January: Big Monday on ESPN or “Dateline”?
“‘Dateline’. By far. Not even close.”
That approach can lead to some gaps in basketball cultural literacy. A few years ago Mazzulla and Stevens invited Crutchfield to a coaches retreat. When Crutchfield got back to Fort Lauderdale, lead assistant Jordan Fee asked him who had been there. Crutchfield went down the list of the attendees he knew and then mentioned there was one guy the group kept asking about defense. He described his appearance.
“It sounds like he’s some kind of defensive guru,” Crutchfield said.
“Coach, it’s Tom Thibodeau,” Fee responded.
Years earlier, Fee recalled, Crutchfield relayed that some “random guy” with the Spurs kept emailing him about trying to get Rudy Gay time in the Nova Southeastern gym: “He doesn’t have an email signature. It’s so strange. He doesn’t even put his full name. He just puts his initials.”
It was R.C. Buford, the architect of the Spurs dynasty and a five-time NBA champion.
“He loves basketball,” Fee said. ”But he’s not a basketball guy. He’s not trying to network. He doesn’t necessarily care to meet people. He just doesn’t care about that.”
GO DEEPER
Meet the 30-year-old play caller behind college basketball’s No. 1 offense
When he graduated from West Virginia in 1978, Crutchfield wanted to be a high school basketball coach. A year later, he had given up, returning to his alma mater to go to law school. “Too big a dream,” he thought. He passed the LSAT and rented an apartment in Morgantown. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offering him the boys basketball coaching position at a small school in the state’s northern panhandle. He’s not even sure who recommended him. Crutchfield sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apartment and moved to Cameron, W.V.
Sometime during his 10 years as a high school coach, he went to a clinic in Wheeling where legendary DeMatha High coach Morgan Wooten was presenting. Wooten placed one player with the ball at half court near the sideline and another under the basket. When Wooten blew the whistle, the ballhandler was to go shoot a layup as fast as he could, and the other player was to take off sprinting the length of the floor and catch the ball when it went through the net without allowing it to hit the ground. Crutchfield thought there could be no way, but the sprinting player got there. He ran the same drill with his players, and they all caught the ball, too.
Crutchfield had no idea the point Wooten was trying to make, but it completely changed how he viewed the game. How much of the floor could his team cover if no one ever loped back on defense and gave the other team space to breathe? He wanted no emotion, just hustle.
As a high school coach, Crutchfield employed a zone press, with specific rules on where to send the ball and trap. Then he watched the 1987 NCAA Tournament. Rick Pitino’s Providence Friars made a run to the Final Four using a different kind of press, more helter skelter. Random. They forced teams to play at a different pace, and they racked up steals chasing ball handlers from behind.
Crutchfield tried it for himself playing pickup games at the high school. He told his teammates to play a box zone, waited for the offense to pass half court and then pounced, chasing the ball like a game of tag.
His experiment played out as he expected. He blocked some shots from behind. He got some steals that led to layups because he could leak out as soon as he tapped the ball to one of his teammates. But most importantly, his opponents were constantly looking behind themselves on offense.
“People are uncomfortable with people chasing them,” he said.
Two years later, Crutchfield landed a spot as an assistant coach at West Liberty, and he wanted to try out his helter skelter press. Problem was, he didn’t have the pull. The Hilltoppers were mediocre, and outside-the-box ideas were ignored. “Let’s try to lose by less than 10 and be happy,” is his description of the mentality.
After three seasons on staff, the head coach was fired. Crutchfield wanted the job, but the other assistant got it. He wasn’t going to press, either. So Crutchfield stepped down and kept his full-time job at the school, teaching racket sports and coaching the men’s and women’s tennis teams. He won 11 league titles over 15 seasons, but he was always thinking about basketball, even workshopping his system with his tennis team’s pickup squad, which made the intramural championship game.
In 2004, West Liberty’s basketball team won four games and fired its coach again. Crutchfield had rejoined the staff two years prior when the coach asked for his help, but the Hilltoppers still weren’t pressing. Crutchfield wanted the job, but…
Who elevates the coach who worked for the guy who just got fired?
“I wouldn’t have hired me either,” he said.
Crutchfield wasn’t even asked to share his vision with the administration. He was just the next warm body. His first order of business was driving to South Carolina to recruit Bovaird to be his assistant coach. Bovaird had played at West Liberty in the years when Crutchfield was just coaching tennis.
“He just totally believed in his style and his system, and he just knew that it was going to work,” Bovaird said. “He just knew it. And he transferred that belief to the players.”
West Liberty didn’t return one starter and was picked to finish last in its league. The Hilltoppers went 21-10. At first, Crutchfield would press the teams he thought had inferior talent and only sprinkle it in against better opponents. In his seventh season, convinced he had the personnel perfect for his system, he went all-in, pressing every single possession. West Liberty went undefeated in the regular season and made the Final Four. That started a streak of seven straight NCAA Tournament appearances.
At the height of that run, Crutchfield told his agent to start looking for a new job for him. This is when most look to move upward. Crutchfield wanted to go to a place that had never won before.
“I thought, was it a fluke?” he recalled. “Was I lucky? Were the stars all aligned? And I kept telling my wife, before I retire, I want to try to do it again.”
Nova Southeastern went 6-20 the year before Crutchfield was hired. He went 17-10 in his first year — the worst record of his career — and then 29-4 the next season.
“He knows how to build a program,” Spoelstra said. “He knows how to get people rallying around his vision that’s not documented and only he can explain it. But he’s like the pied piper. You just seem drawn to it. And then ultimately, he’s able to get that program to win. And he does it over and over and over.”
Crutchfield’s D-II success has not earned him many calls from higher levels, but Nova Southeastern itself may one day be a candidate for promotion. (Courtesy of Nova Southeastern Athletics)
Long before Mazzulla was an NBA champion, he was a young assistant at Fairmont State, studying West Liberty because Crutchfield was dominating the league. Mazzulla had read Dean Oliver’s book “Basketball on Paper” that highlights the four factors to success — effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage and free throw rate — and realized Crutchfield had mastered every single one. He was light-years ahead of the modern analytics curve. “He thinks the game differently,” Mazzulla said. “He doesn’t get caught up in all the fluff.”
One of Crutchfield’s former players used to compare their style of play to breaking a horse. At some point in the game, his player would come over and say he could feel it; the opponent was about to break.
On the first Sunday in October, before they got off to a 13-0 start to this season, Crutchfield’s team played a scrimmage against Florida Southwestern. The game was tied at 25 with 7:22 left in the first half, but Florida Southwestern was clearly annoyed by the constant pressure. The Sharks even pressed after missed shots, trapping the defensive rebounder. The first sign of fatigue was Florida Southwestern’s point guard’s calf cramping. The Buccaneers started complaining to the officials about fouls.
With a minute left in the second half, Nova Southeastern led 100-60. And was still pressing.
Crutchfield watched quietly from the sideline. Occasionally he pointed to where he wanted someone to move in the press, but in a 40-minute game, he shouted out instructions twice. “He knows you’ve got to coach with a revolver and not an uzi,” Fee said. “He’s only got so many bullets in his chamber.”
Crutchfield also knows the numbers will eventually work in his favor. Before games, he typically writes two goals on the board: plus-10 on the boards and plus-10 in turnover margin. Every year the Sharks dominate in both. Last season, they got back 38.5 percent of their misses and turned opponents over on 26.8 percent of possessions. That led to 14.6 more shots per game than their opponent.
Film sessions are when Crutchfield gets his players to see what he sees; habits are formed. And there was one moment in particular he wanted to pinpoint the afternoon after the scrimmage.
Early in the first half, forward Tyler Eberhart trapped the ball in the far corner of the floor with his hands above his head. Weeks earlier Eberhart had been clocked to see how fast he could spin out of a trap from that exact spot, sprint to the middle of half court between two cones and proceed to the opposite free throw line. Every player does this drill twice, recorded by two stopwatches at each station, and the times are averaged together. Eberhart’s time, from trapping to half court, was 2.44 seconds. Crutchfield had clocked Eberhart on film that morning getting to mid-court in 3.41 seconds. Nearly a second slower.
“One second is 28 feet on the other end,” Crutchfield told Eberhart, which he already knew; it’s written on the white board in the back of the room.
“You could have gone all the way down here,” the coach continued, pointing at the paint.
A half-second pause could be the difference between blocking a layup at the rim and watching at the free-throw line as your opponent scores an uncontested layup.
“That wasn’t just a message to him; that’s a message to the whole team,” Crutchfield said. “‘(Coach) notices that stuff, and if I don’t run, he’s charting that and timing us.’ I’m not timing every guy, but I want the players to think I’m timing every detail.”
The white board at the front of the film room depicts what Crutchfield wants from his players.
“We call it the brainwashing process of trying to get guys closer and closer to what they’re capable of,” Crutchfield said. “You say things as a coach like, ‘Play harder.’ Everybody hears it, but I don’t know if it affects them. And I thought I need to prove it to them and come up with math.”
(C.J. Moore for The Athletic)
During the pandemic, Fee was asked to do a Zoom with a group of coaches who operate like Grinnell, the Division III team that gained notoriety when guard Jack Taylor scored 138 points in a game in 2012. Grinnell’s approach, like Crutchfield’s, is called “the system,” and the coaches assumed there’d be similarities.
“I feel like the biggest jerk in the world,” Fee remembered telling his audience. “But I’ve got to be honest with you, we’re nothing alike. Everything that you’re saying that you guys are doing is the antithesis of what we’re about.”
“There’s times when they’re giving up layups and they’re putting a time clock up offensively,” Fee explained. “They want to shoot X number of 3s. They’re so analytically driven, whereas we’re not as analytically driven and more about a mentality. We don’t care if it takes the entire shot clock as long as we get a good shot with guys in rebounding position.”
At a Nova Southeastern practice, you’ll see drills you won’t see anywhere else. One has a defender deny in the press with a coach inbounding. After five seconds, the coach tosses the ball toward half court. The denier must go retrieve it, score a layup, then deny again. This goes on for about 35 seconds, and it’s so exhausting that when Crutchfield put a Florida manager through it a few years ago at Larry Shyatt’s annual coaches clinic in Gainesville, the manager collapsed to the ground.
“Shyatt called it the transfer drill,” Crutchfield said, laughing. “Want a kid to transfer? Make him do that drill.”
Crutchfield’s secret is not simply “brainwashing”; he picks the right players who can endure what he asks of them.
“C’mon! We gotta be maniacs!” sophomore Eli Allen yelled at his teammates following a water break. “I need to hear you!”
“If you don’t play that way,” said David Dennis, who played for Crutchfield at both West Liberty and Nova Southeastern, “your teammates are going to look at you like, ‘What are you doing? Do you see how many games we win every year? Why are you going to be the one guy that comes in here and doesn’t play this hard?’”
Crutchfield is constantly evaluating how he can get the most out of his group. Every day he writes out his players’ names, ranks them and calculates out how many minutes each would get if they played that day. The data that helps inform his decisions initially comes from preseason open gyms.
The rules of those pickup games are simple. If it’s 7-on-7 — meaning two subs — the teams play to 140. If it’s 6-on-6, they play to 120; if 5-on-5, to 100. The players are divided differently every day, but one side is always pressing, the teams taking turns throughout. A chart with every player’s win-loss record and plus-minus from the pickup games hangs in the Nova Southeastern locker room. Dallas Graziani, a 5-foot-8 point guard who had just one other scholarship offer out of high school, was at the top of the chart with an 11-3 record and plus-147. He’s averaging 34.8 minutes this season, the only player on the roster playing more than 30 minutes per game.
By the time practice starts, the Sharks are the best-conditioned team in the country.
Why the system works is more psychological than anything else.
“People live by habits and basketball players live by habits,” Crutchfield said. “And there’s a certain amount of time you relax your mind during the course of a game, whether it’s walking the ball down the court to play against a zone or the other team’s not pushing it.”
As one coach told him years ago, “You wear people down mentally more than physically. You don’t let people relax their minds enough. And these kids, eventually it wears their minds down.”
GO DEEPER
Drake brought D-II stars to D-I, then started winning. Can it last?
Now for the obvious question: Would this system work at a higher level?
Crutchfield hasn’t had a ton of interest but says he was a finalist for a Division I job 12 years ago. He had one request: Instead of hiring three assistants, like every other D-I program in the country, Crutchfield wanted only two, with the salary of the third assistant spot to be split between those two.
That killed his chances.
“They said that showed them I didn’t understand the landscape of Division I basketball,” Crutchfield said. “Now keep in mind in 2011, we were 33-0 when we lost the national semifinals and averaging 112 points a game and no Division I would play us. (That school) was awful. We would have beat them by 30 points, and I’m in a rural, Division II school with one assistant coach.”
Crutchfield knows he’s a little unconventional. He wakes up most mornings and goes to the gym to get in a short lift and a swim, then sundries outside. He has an office at Nova Southeastern, but he never visits it. Instead, he works out of his townhouse across the street.
Breaks for pickleball and tennis — he estimates he plays five days a week — are a necessity. “The Japanese proved that when they started playing games and exercising in the middle of a workday, saying it refreshes your mind and body,” he said.
Spoelstra tells him he should never leave this place. He gets to play pickleball — soon, on courts he’s helping design on campus — and people love his program. It keeps him young.
Crutchfield doesn’t have any plans of stopping soon, but the window for taking over a D-I program may have passed. One possible wrinkle: Nova Southeastern moving to Division I and joining the Atlantic Sun has been discussed. Those in Crutchfield’s tree think Fee might be the one to test “the system” at the D-I ranks. He took over at Gannon after Nova’s 2023 title and led a team that won three games the previous season to a 32-3 record and the D-II Elite Eight, the largest year-to-year turnaround in NCAA history. Fee joined Florida Atlantic’s staff as an assistant this spring.
Crutchfield is content with finishing his career where he is, but what’s left? What still drives him?
It’s not winning championships. The only thing he ever wanted to prove was that his system worked. The thrill of this job, he explained, is seeing everything come together — when his guys are playing hard, sharing the ball offensively and exuding great chemistry and taking joy in each other’s success.
“It’s that capable line up there (on the board) that I’m never going to get to, because no one gets to that line,” he said. “It’s just how close you can get to it.”
(Top illustration: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic; Photo: Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire)