John Moore, who went out on top at Westmont College as the 2020 NAIA National Men’s Basketball Coach of the Year, has been lured back onto the court by his brother-in-law.
Steve Lavin, the new head coach at the University of San Diego, announced that he has hired Moore as one of his assistant coaches.
“When you’re building a staff, you give consideration to harmony and chemistry,” he said.
Moore is married to Lavin’s sister, Rachel, who served for many years as the director of her family’s Lavin Basketball Camps.
Also joining Lavin’s staff will be Tyus Edney, Ryan Devlin, Pat Sandle and Jack Doran.
Moore served as Westmont’s head basketball coach for 27 years until his 2020 retirement. He handed the reins to his assistant, Landon Boucher, after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the 2019-2020 season to an abrupt end.
He continued to work at Westmont as an associate athletic director and associate professor of kinesiology.
Moore set the school record for coaching victories with 558 and, combined with five seasons at Fresno Pacific, posted an overall win-loss record of 637-352.
His Warriors were 26-5 and ranked No. 7 in the NAIA Coaches’ Poll when the 2019-2020 season was halted just before the start of the national tournament. Westmont, the Golden State Athletic Conference regular-season champion, had been seeded No. 2 in the NAIA Tournament’s Liston Bracket — its highest placement ever under the event’s current format.
Moore’s teams qualified for the NAIA National Tournament 14 times. That included the last six in a row — a program-record streak that began in 2015. Westmont finished as the national runner-up that season. The Warriors were also national semifinalists in 1999.
He became only the second NAIA coach to be appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, serving alongside such luminaries as Kentucky’s John Calipari, Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Kansas’ Bill Self.
Moore, a past president of the NAIA Men’s Basketball Coaches Association, has also served as the West Regional instructor at the inaugural NCAA College Basketball Academy.
He came to Westmont in 1976 as a transfer from Cypress College. He played point guard for the Warriors’ NAIA Tournament team of 1977-1978 and finished with 422 career assists — fourth all-time at Westmont even though he played just two seasons.
Lavin has been out of coaching since 2015. He’s spent the last seven years as a national college basketball broadcaster for Fox Sports and CBS Sports. He previously worked with ESPN, ABC and the Pac-12 Network.
He posted a coaching record of 145-78 during seven seasons at UCLA (1996-2003). He took the Bruins to the NCAA Elite Eight in 1997 and to the Sweet 16 four other times.
Lavin also went 81-53 during five seasons at St. John’s (2010-2015) in Queens, New York, breaking an eight-year NCAA Tournament drought for the Red Storm during his first season. His teams at St. John’s qualified for the NCAA Tournament twice and for the National Invitation Tournament twice.
— Noozhawk sports correspondent Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.