Monday ushered in the beginning of a new era for the San Diego men’s basketball team nearly a month after the program fired coach Steve Lavin after four seasons at the helm. The Toreros are hiring Iowa State assistant coach JR Blount as the program’s next coach, sources told Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney.
Blount, a three-year captain for Loyola Chicago and twice the team’s most valuable player during his four-year playing career from 2005 to ’09, has steadily risen up the coaching ranks and is considered a top head coaching candidate largely due to his work with the Cyclones.
Alongside head coach T.J. Otzelberger, Blount helped the Cyclones complete a stunning turnaround, going from two wins in 2020–21 to 22 victories and an NCAA tournament berth the following year. In Blount’s four years on the Iowa State staff, the Cyclones have gone 95–45 and in 2025–26 are currently considered one of the favorites to win a title on the strength of one of the best defenses in the country. Blount has a reputation for being one of the nation’s sharpest talent evaluators and recruiters, and has also been critical in building Iowa State into one of the top defensive teams in the sport.
Prior to joining Iowa State, Blount spent three seasons at Colorado State under current Minnesota head coach Niko Medved, where he was named one of the Mountain West Conference’s top five assistant coaches.
He’ll look to turn around a San Diego program that has fallen on hard times in the last two years under Lavin, going 18–48 (7–29 in conference play). Despite the lack of recent success, San Diego was a heavily coveted job, with multiple sitting head coaches and other high-level assistants pursuing the position. The job is expected to have a strong revenue-sharing pool in the upper half of the WCC, giving Blount the resources to engineer a quicker turnaround in a league that will no longer have Gonzaga as a mainstay at the top of the standings. San Diego also opened a new $35 million basketball performance center earlier this year.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as San Diego to Hire Iowa State’s JR Blount As Next Men’s Basketball Coach.
