IUPUC athletics director Zach McClellan speaks at a press conference Wednesday announcing the addition of men’s and women’s basketball.
Ted Schultz | The Republic
Over the past year-and-a-half, IUPUC has built an athletics program to include men’s and women’s cross-country, baseball, softball, volleyball and men’s and women’s soccer.
Wednesday afternoon, Crimson Pride athletics director Zach McClellan announced that they would again be growing the program with the addition of men’s and women’s basketball in the winter of 2024-25.
“If you’re in the state of Indiana, and you don’t have a basketball team, you really don’t have a program,” McClellan said. “With us being IU-Columbus, it makes a lot of sense to roll out basketball, along with the name change.”
IUPUC is in the process of changing its name to IU-Columbus. McClellan said the program still will be known as IUPUC this school year before transitioning next summer.
McClellan said the school has been in negotiations to play games at Nexus Park, but does not yet have a formal agreement. He said the job postings for the men’s and women’s basketball coaches will be released in next month.
“We feel it’s important to get the right coaches in place now, whenever the positions are released and go through the proper interview process so that they have time to recruit their teams for the future,” McClellan said. “What that being said, we have significant challenges here in Columbus. We have sold out the annex for housing. We’ve had to find housing in different areas. One of the reasons you might want to pull back is because of challenges like that, but we have a philosophy here that pressure makes diamonds. We believe that, and we think that the more challenges we bring to Columbus, the more solutions that will come from the community. So we’re excited about that. We’re going to keep pushing the envelope.”
McClellan said he already has had coaches contact him about the jobs.
“I do have people that have reached out to me, some very high-level basketball people, that are expressing interest,” McClellan said. “Now, once we explain how challenging the job is, we’ll see who makes it through the gauntlet.”
IUPUC also will be posting the position for a competitive cheer and dance coach.
“We have pushed so hard to build this program quickly, and for some people, maybe they think it’s a little too fast,” McClellan said. “The strategy behind that is, if we can continue to grow, it helps the community, it helps enrollment. It becomes a little tougher to let it go.
“I don’t think that we are even done scratching the surface on where we can grow this,” he added. “I love the Columbus community. I think that this community is just starting to embrace what we’re doing. I don’t think they embrace the part that existence is a win. They want to win now. But it’s going to take time to build that. But I think the future of our program is so bright because No. 1, we’re an IU degree. We’re a state school; No. 2, all of the community support, resources, facilties. So I never once thought about failure.”
