Why you should care about Dalonte Hill

Mark Turgeon is slowly but surely starting to build his staff at Maryland.

It started with Mark Turgeon's decision to keep Bino Ranson around. Ranson, who helped get Nick Faust's initial commitment to Maryland, has ties all over Baltimore, a city that is producing as much basketball talent as anywhere in the country. The next step appears to be Scott Spinelli. Spinelli was the associate head coach at Texas A&M under Turgeon, and with Sunday's announcement that Billy Kennedy would be taking over for Turgeon, most believe Spinelli will take over the same role at Maryland.

And now, it appears that Turgeon is going after Dalonte Hill, an assistant coach on Frank Martin's staff at Kansas State.

The universal reaction over the weekend was that Turgeon getting Hill to join his staff would be huge.

But why?

What makes an assistant coach at a school that hasn't finished better than 11-5 in the Big 12 during his five year tenure such an important piece for a program located just outside DC?


Hill is a DC native. After his playing career at Charlotte and Bowie State fizzled out, Hill became a head coach for the DC Assault AAU program, one of the best teams in the country. He worked for DC Assault for two seasons before becoming an assistant coach at Charlotte. There, Hill had secured a commitment from Michael Beasley, a DC Assault product, until Bob Huggins swooped in and hired Hill at Kansas State.

Beasley followed Hill to Manhattan, KS, a move that quite obviously turned around the Kansas State basketball program. Huggins and Beasley left after one season, but Hill remained at Kansas State, becoming the nation's highest paid assistant coach at over $420,000 a year to remain on Frank Martin's staff.

Beasley wasn't the only player that Hill was able to lure to Kansas State. Dominique Sutton and Rodney McGruder were both highly sought after DC Assault alums. The biggest coup, however, was Wally Judge, a McDonald's all-american that wound up at Kansas State.

DC Assault is not the only AAU program that Hill has close connections with. Team Takeover, which is the DC area's second biggest AAU program, is run by Keith Stevens. According to Josh Barr of the Washington Post, Stevens was an assistant on Hill's high school team. Hill also managed to land Jordan Henriquez-Roberts and Shane Southwell from the NY Gauchos AAU program and played a role in bringing Bill Walker and Jacob Pullen to Kansas State.

Hill was able to do all of that while recruiting these players to the middle of nowhere to play for a head coach that is, frankly, a lunatic. He drove three other players (Sutton, Judge, Freddy Asprilla) to transfer in the past two years and screams enough that it scared the University of Miami away from hiring a hometown legend.

Imagine what Hill can do recruiting these kids to a place that is close enough for them to drive to their parents house for dinner after practice?

Throw in the decision to keep Ranson on the staff, and if Turgeon can lure Hill away from Kansas State, the opportunity is there for Maryland to develop a pipeline for the talent that is coming out of the DC/Baltimore region.

If there is a hangup, it will be money. Hill is making over $420,000 a year (and upwards of $500,000 based on bonuses) at Kansas State and will have to take a pay cut -- and pay a $50,000 buy out -- if he is to leave before he finishes the final four years on his contract.

Hill is so important because of the talent that he can bring into a program.

Turgeon has the reputation of being a guy that can coach up his players. Imagine what he can accomplish by tapping into talent on the DC/Baltimore corridor?
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Dalonte Hill is College Basketball's Highest Paid Assistant Coach

If I were to ask you what school had the highest paid assistant coach in the country, where would Kansas State be on that list? I'm guessing not first. Bob McClennan over at Rivals did some investigating, and found that Kansas State's Dalonte Hill is probably the highest paid assistant coach in the country.

By A LOT.

Hill will make $420,000 next year in salary and "extra benefits", which is $150,000 more than the next highest paid assistant that McClennan looked at (he only examined the 10 public universities in the top 15 of the 2007-08 post season poll, as well as Ohio State, Florida, and Kentucky; private universities aren't required to release this information).

I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that Dalonte Hill was Michael Beasley's AAU coach in DC, and that Beasley looked on him as an older brother. I'm also sure you won't be surprised to find out that Hill was coaching at Charlotte during Beasley's last high school season (where Beasley was all set to go) until Bob Huggins swooped in and offered Hill the huge contract. And I was complaining about Billy Gillespie paying a recruit's father a couple grand?

Seriously though, take a look at this chart:


Those are the salaries for the assistants of the four teams that reached the Final Four last year, and four of the best and most consistent programs in the country. And Hill makes more than everyone one of them. He makes more than the entire staffs (three assistants per school) of Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Washington State.

I don't want to criticize a guy for getting his, but I really hope this guy is actually a decent coach (which he probably is - this will be his sixth season as a D-1 assistant, three of which were with Charlotte), because eventually he won't be able to eat off of his relationship with Michael Beasley. Continue reading...