Report: Sac State set to hire new men’s basketball coach
Sacramento State is closing in on hiring its next men’s basketball coach in Oklahoma Sooner associate head coach David Patrick, per multiple reports and first reported by national college basketball analyst Jeff Goodman of the website Stadium.
Sac State as of Saturday afternoon did not comment. This comes a week after false reports circulated nationally that one-time Kings star guard Mike Bibby had been formally interviewed for the Hornets opening with the next step being a campus visit.
Unlike Bibby, Patrick has a resume that makes his coaching hires over the years make sense. Raised in Australia before enjoying a standout senior season of high school basketball in Louisiana in 1995, Patrick was an assistant coach at a six colleges and the head coach at UC Riverside from 2018-20, where in his second season, the Highlanders went 17-15.
Patrick’s other stops as an assistant: Nicholls State (2005-06), Saint Mary’s of Moraga in the Bay Area (2006-10), LSU (2012-16), TCU (2016-18), Arkansas (2020-21) and Oklahoma.
From 2010-12, Patrick was a scout for the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
While at Saint Mary’s, Patrick worked with Mark Orr, then with the Gaels’ athletic department administration and now Sac State’s fifth-year athletic director, who told The Bee last week about this hiring process, “We have a search committee, and we’re working diligently to identify that coach, the right coach for us.” He added, “We’ll get it right.”
Sac State is coming off an 11-18 season in which the Hornets under interim coach Brandon Laird surged late and then went 1-1 in the Big Sky Conference Tournament. Laird for 10 seasons worked under Brian Katz, the winningest coach in program history who stepped down on the eve of the season due to health concerns.