DaytonDailyNews.com

MINNEAPOLIS — The Cincinnati Bearcats had just knocked his Michigan State basketball team out of the NCAA tournament.

Brian Gregory was standing in the visitors tunnel at UD Arena, and while the scoreboard above him still burned brightly with the Bearcats' 77-65 victory, he was seeing some of the light in his own coaching future growing quite dim.

Back in March of 1992, Gregory was a second-year graduate assistant on Jud Heathcote's Spartan staff and was living a life somewhere between bona fide coach and glorified student.

"I was making 4,000 bucks a year and living with two football GAs in a house where we paid $300 rent — total," he said with a laugh. "I never had a key to the place the whole year I lived there. As a single unmarried man, it was one of my best years ever."

And it was about to come to an end.

"At that point you could only stay two years as a GA, and I didn't have any kind of coaching job lined up," he said. "I was getting my master's degree and I had stuff in for law school, so standing there in the tunnel, I wondered if I'd ever coach college basketball again."

Dayton memories

For two dozen years — from the time he was an Illinois teenager right up to now as he prepares his Dayton Flyers to meet West Virginia in the first round of the NCAA tournament Friday, March, 20, at the Metrodome — the bridge between the UD head coach and this heralded hoops tournament usually had something to do with Dayton.

Four of the most memorable NCAA tournament moments in Gregory's life have had some kind of link to the Flyers. The first one was March 15, 1985, when Gregory was a senior at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Ill.

"I was being recruited by Navy, and they were playing LSU in the NCAA tournament that day," he said. "I remember slipping out of school that afternoon and going home to watch the game on TV. It was at UD Arena, and I took in everything about it."

The David Robinson-led Midshipmen swamped LSU 78-55, and Gregory ended up going to Navy.

"It's kind of interesting that for so many of the big things that have happened to me in college basketball, the backdrop has been the University of Dayton," he said.

That's just how it was with that watershed moment in that UD visitors tunnel seven years after the Navy game when — as a GA about to lose his job — he contemplated life without basketball.

"Luckily, three months later (Spartans assistant) Jim Boylen took a job with the Houston Rockets as their video guy, and Coach Heathcote, on the recommendation of Tom Izzo (then a Spartans assistant, as well) moved me up."

And from that day on, Gregory's future — as a basketball benchmeister rather than a barrister — was set.

After 11 years as an assistant, most of them at Michigan State, Gregory finally got a head coaching job when he was hired to take over at UD after Oliver Purnell — who had just guided the Flyers to a 24-6 record and a berth in the NCAA tournament — jumped to Clemson.

While three key players — including top scorer Brooks Hall — had graduated, Gregory did inherit a team that featured four of Purnell's remaining stalwarts.

And right off the novice head coach proved his mettle by showing he could handle a tricky situation.

"The gratifying thing was that in eight months time those guys (Keith Waleskowski, Sean Finn, Ramod Marshall and Frank Iguodala) all bought in quickly," Gregory said. "They could have fought it, but they didn't. They were great. They really raised their level of play for us, and we had a good year."

The Flyers won 24 games and the Atlantic 10 and made the NCAA tournament, losing a gruelling first-round game in Buffalo to DePaul in two overtimes.

Path, process working

Now comes Gregory's second NCAA tournament venture as a head coach, and he said he feels "a different kind of gratification" than six seasons ago.

His team was a perfect 18-0 at home and has won 26 games overall, the most in one season by a Flyers team in 57 years.

"This means a lot because it's just the second year with all guys we brought into the program," he said. "To have the two years we've had and to win 49 games makes a statement. It says the path and process we're on is working.

"I wanted this program to be something that not only the university, but the whole town is proud of, and I think we're making strides in that direction. And I think it's just going to keep getting better."

And that brings us back to that 1992 day in the UD Arena tunnel, when he feared his coaching might be coming to an abrupt end.

"Sure, I think I would have been a good lawyer if I stuck with that," he said with a chuckle Wednesday night while taking a break from watching game film at his downtown Minneapolis hotel. "But in my heart I knew I wanted to stay into coaching. And I was willing to do anything to stay in the game. And after a couple of months, I did have one other option. I was going to take an unpaid coaching position at Weber State. The plan was, I'd work at the local bank in the morning and then coach in the afternoon."

That's when he started to laugh: "Now I don't know how I would have been as a banker."