‘He’s a blue-collar guy’: QU turns to JWCC’s Hoyt to guide men’s basketball program

QUINCY — Jake Hoyt owns the upper hand.

As new Quincy University men’s basketball coach Brad Hoyt sees it, that won’t be the case for long.

Last winter, during his freshman season at Illinois College, the coach’s son helped the Blueboys win an NCAA Division III national tournament game. His dad, who spent the past 13 seasons coaching at John Wood Community College, has never won an NCAA tournament game at any level.

Advantage son.

“Jake’s going to tell me he’s going to try to put distance between us,” Hoyt said Tuesday after being formally introduced as the Hawks’ coach during a press conference in the QU Hall of Fame Room. “And I’m going to tell him he better play for five or six years.

“He’s got me on that one right now, but I’m coming.”

The non-negotiable faith that Hoyt can create a consistent winning program at the NCAA Division II school is one of the key reasons QU athletic director Josh Rabe tabbed the hometown product as the next coach.

Over the course of the last 13 seasons at JWCC, Hoyt compiled a 269-156 record with six Mid-West Athletic Conference championships and four Region 24 crowns. He’s taken four teams to the NJCAA Division II national tournament, finishing second in 2015 and sixth in 2019.

Hoyt, who talks often about creating championship moments for his players, had the Trail Blazers playing in the Region 24 championship game 10 times, including this past season when they reached the title game as the third seed and finished with a 19-13 record.

“He’s a blue-collar guy,” Rabe said. “He’s used to working for everything that you get. … It makes Brad the best fit at this time.”

Hoyt replaces Steve Hawkins, who resigned eight days ago to become an assistant coach at Southern Illinois University. In two seasons in his second stint as QU coach, Hawkins went 25-32 and saw the Hawks go 11-17 last winter while going 6-14 in the Great Lakes Valley Conference.

Since the season ended, four QU players have entered the NCAA transfer portal — sophomore point guard Isaiah Foster, sophomore guard Orlando Thomas, senior guard Zion Richardson and senior guard Nate Shockey. Richardson and Shockey will be grad transfers with one year of eligibility remaining, and neither was expected to return to QU.

The Hawks had received commitments from four players — JWCC forward Logan Robbins, Quincy High School swingman Camden Brown, Australian forward Tiernan Stynes and Greenwood Christian Academy (Ind.) guard Max Booher. Brown has already decommitted, while Robbins and Booher have confirmed their intentions to stay with QU.

Still, there is plenty of work to be done to reinvent the roster and put QU on a trajectory, which is why Hoyt said there are already boots on the ground.

“Time is of essence, but time doesn’t create a rush,” he said. “You have to be real careful in this business to feel your up against a clock. That’s when you make some poor decisions. It’s about patience, but it’s about urgency. It’s about having the right conversations.”

That can be said of the way this announcement came to be.

Rabe and the QU administration wanted to react quickly to Hawkins’ departure, but they were determined to find the right fit and not the quick fix. It just so happened Hoyt was interested from the moment the job opened, and the right fit became a quick fix as well.

“It resonated early,” Hoyt said. “As we sat down and dug into a little bit and I started to evaluate the landscape of college basketball and the landscape of what I’m doing and where my family is at, it became more and more clear that the timing was right to make a move.”

Having spent the past 13 years as JWCC’s athletic director and this school year as the interim dean of students, a position he was going to transition to full-time moving forward, Hoyt no longer will have to embrace the challenge of performing multiple tasks on a daily basis.

He gets to coach, which is his true passion. 

“The day to day is different, but with that comes responsibility,” Hoyt said. “I would never trade those years of lining a soccer field or getting ready for a volleyball game or whatever it may be. That has taught me so many lessons. I am willing to serve and I am willing to help.

“I’m going to be that kind of employee at Quincy University. That’s what I am. That’s what I know. But to be able to dig into my craft as a coach, to be able to dig into these guys as players and really develop relationships without a bunch of other things going on, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty excited about it.”