Chants’ Ellis proud of his path to 700

The calls and text messages came pouring in for Cliff Ellis after his Coastal Carolina basketball team rolled past Winthrop last Saturday for his 700th win as a Division I head coach.

His old pal Bobby Cremins, the former Georgia Tech and College of Charleston coach, reached out to him. So did former Kentucky and current Texas Tech head coach Tubby Smith.

“I hate to start naming names. [There’s] too many, former players, coaching colleagues, friends,” Ellis says. “I spent a lot of time texting on Sunday, a lot of time. But it was good to hear from them and I basically told them the same thing I [said Saturday]. With the [opposing] coaches I told them, ‘If it weren’t for you, I’d have a few more of these.’ With the players, I made sure that they understood this represented them and former coaches that coached with me.”

Ellis doesn’t have to namedrop any further because the NCAA record book will do that for him.

Along with his 700 wins at the Division I level – in 38 seasons spent between South Alabama, Clemson, Auburn and now Coastal Carolina – the official NCAA records also count his 78 wins at Cumberland College in Tennessee, which was a junior college at the time and now competes as a four-year school in the NAIA.

So with 778 wins, he actually ranks third behind Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and tied with West Virginia’s Bob Huggins among active Division I head coaches. All-time among coaches across any NCAA level, he and Huggins are tied for 19th and likely to move up a few more spots before this season is complete.

It’s elite company by any measure, and yet Ellis isn’t being interviewed on SportsCenter for his latest milestone or getting the national attention of some of the other names on that list.

That’s mostly because he’s at Coastal Carolina, of course, and he says he’s fine with that reality. The national spotlight flickered over the Chants and their accomplished head coach a bit in March the last two years with the program’s back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances, but mostly Ellis’ continued climb up the all-time wins list is happening under the radar.

Sitting in his office Monday, he’s asked if he feels a little under-recognized nationally, and he responds by sliding a Big South trophy on the nearby end table to the side to clear room for the towering 1999 National Coach of the Year trophy sitting behind it.

“That one right there. Your peers recognize it,” he said. “… My peers and players recognize it. That’s all that matters.”

Taking some time before practice Monday and a break from preparations for the Chants’ game Wednesday night at home against Liberty, Ellis is reluctant to talk about his legacy.

He says he doesn’t think of it in those terms, insists he doesn’t look at the numbers, the wins list, the prominent names he’s passed or is on track to pass.

That’s not what he is most proud of when reflecting on these mounting milestones.

“I don’t know about the word legacy, I don’t ever think of that,” he says. “I know that somewhere in time with the way the game is today … it is a hard number to achieve. If I [was talking to] a young coach, I’d say, ‘It’s been a fun ride for me, but it’s not easy.’ I guess the thing that I’m proud of, what I’ve just enjoyed doing is building. I’ve never taken the job that has been the traditional school, never really aspired to do that for whatever reason, never had an aspiration for coaching in the NBA. I love building. It started at Cumberland.”

Ellis has had plenty of opportunities or prompts for reflection in recent years. He also reached the 600-win mark as a Division I head coach during his now nine seasons at Coastal Carolina. He reached a significant feat by leading his fourth program to the NCAA tournament when the Chants ended their 21-year wait two seasons ago. And he later became the first coach to win 150 games at four different Division I schools.

This week is just the latest opportunity to delve into a career that has now spanned parts of five decades – back to the days of bell-bottoms and leisure suits in the early 1970s as a 26-year-old coach at Cumberland, as he fondly recalls.

And yet, Ellis hasn’t run out of fresh stories to tell.

He will be most remembered for his time as the head coach at Clemson and then Auburn, but as he shared Monday, he almost never took the Clemson job in the first place.

After moving on from Cumberland to his first Division I job at South Alabama, he was told by university officials they were going to give the program a few years before possibly moving down a level. By his fourth year there, he got the Jaguars into the then-40-team NCAA tournament field and had the program rolling. He wasn’t inclined to leave and start over someplace else, and so when Clemson offered him its job a handful of years later he initially said, “No.”

“I had told Clemson that I was really happy where I was, and I had gotten a commitment from [future NBA player] Vernon Maxwell,” he says, telling the story. “There was no fall signing, it was spring signing and I took a plane from Mobile, [Ala.], to Gainesville, [Fla.]. I walked in Vernon’s house, he was sitting with his mom and his mom looked at me and said, ‘Coach Ellis, you have done such a great job recruiting my son, but my son has always wanted to go to the University of Florida and they offered him.’

“My heart was just … At South Alabama when you’re building a program and you’ve worked and worked, I said, ‘My gosh, that wouldn’t have happened at Clemson.’ I walked straight to the airport and put a quarter in the payphone. … By that weekend I had taken the [Clemson] job all because of Vernon Maxwell and never looked back.”

Clemson was in the midst of a lull at that point and had not historically been a contender in the stacked ACC, which had only eight teams at the time.

“I had so many coaches tell me not to take that job,” Ellis says. “In ’84, back then it wasn’t 12 teams in the league – it was North Carolina, Duke, North Carolina State, Wake Forest, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia Tech [and Clemson]. So who are you going to beat?”

Ellis went on to become Clemson’s all-time winningest coach while leading the Tigers to their only ACC regular-season championship, in the 1989-90 season.

At Auburn, he would lead his 1998-99 team to a school-record 29-4 mark while earning several national coach of the year awards, including the big trophy that sits in his office.

The hard part at each of those stops, he says, was managing expectations after reaching those kind of heights.

“People get spoiled and they want it all the time,” he says. “We’re a very spoiled society. The tough part about it is when you’re at Clemson and win the ACC, they want you to win it again and again. And when you’re at Auburn and win the SEC, they want you to win it again and again. And what they find out is, ‘OK, we’ve got to part ways,’ [then] they find out in time it doesn’t happen. You better understand how difficult this thing is. That’s the thing I’m most proud of is the 700 have been in not traditional situations.”

None more so than these last nine years at Coastal Carolina, which had just one winning season in the 13 years before Ellis arrived.

It took him two seasons to get the program off the ground, but since then he’s delivered five winning seasons in the last six years along with those back-to-back NCAA tournament berths ... while continuing to push himself further and further up that all-time wins list in the process.

After Coastal Carolina closed out a dominant 82-63 win over Winthrop on Saturday to secure this latest milestone, Eagles coach Pat Kelsey offered his appreciation for Ellis’ accomplishment and his place in the game while adding one more thought.

“Seven hundred is a heck of an accomplishment,” Kelsey said. “I don’t know how old Cliff is, but I can imagine him doing this for a whole lot more years. He has such a youthful energy about him and his kids enjoy playing for him, he loves the rigors of the business, recruiting, he does such a good job with it and I’m sure he’s got a couple hundred more under his belt.”

Maybe not that many, but at 70 years old, Ellis too feels there is still a final chapter left to be written – one more building job to complete.

With Coastal Carolina moving up to the Sun Belt Conference next year, he has maintained that he is committed to leading the program through the transition to make sure his job is truly done before he steps away.

“I want to see [the program] through the rebuilding process because I’m going to take some hits, losses and such, but I think we need each other to get through this transition,” he says. “I’m afraid the program might get set back [otherwise]. I know the Sun Belt and I think it’s going to take three years, I really do.

“We’ve brought titles from the Big South, and I’ve love to get one, I’d love to go back and get something in the Sun Belt.”

All the while furthering that legacy he isn’t quite ready to think about.

This story was originally published January 5, 2016 at 8:45 PM with the headline "Chants’ Ellis proud of his path to 700."