Ridgeway's Jalen Crutcher navigates coaching carousel to sign with Dayton

Jalen Crutcher was between bites of bacon when he decided to let new Dayton coach Anthony Grant know the good news. After weeks of uncertainty, caught in the middle of the business of college basketball, the Ridgeway High star finally knew where he’d be continuing his career.

Not wanting to chance anything, Grant celebrated only momentarily. He then ran to his car and got the scholarship papers ready for Crutcher to sign right then and there.  

“I can’t really even explain it,” Crutcher said Monday after returning to Memphis from his campus visit at Dayton. “I just felt it in me, like this was it.”

This was also the conclusion of what he deemed a “stressful” six-week period since Chattanooga, the school Crutcher initially signed with, lost former coach Matt McCall and hired new coach Lamont Paris. But while initially it seemed the coaching carousel might delay Crutcher’s college dreams, he ended up using the system to his advantage.

It all began last month, when Paris drove to Memphis and tried to persuade Crutcher to stick with Chattanooga. But Crutcher didn’t think Paris’ style of play meshed with his skill-set. He’s a sharp-shooting point guard who likes to play uptempo, and Paris had just come off a successful seven-season run as an assistant coach at Wisconsin, which features a more methodical approach.

No pitch from Paris was going to persuade Crutcher to stay on, and he eventually was granted a release from his national letter of intent.

“If you know where you’re going and it doesn’t happen, it hurt me because I wanted to go there,” Crutcher said. “I wanted to play for Coach McCall, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”

At that point, it appeared Crutcher’s options were limited. He committed to Chattanooga in September, so other colleges had stopped recruiting him during a standout senior season. So on April 12, Crutcher announced on Twitter that he would be reclassifying and going to prep school next year.

Except it wasn’t actually how he wanted this story to end.

“It was really a second option,” Crutcher said.

His prep school announcement, in conjunction with his release from Chattanooga, is when Crutcher began to realize “maybe I can get another 2017 offer.” Friends and family were calling to remind him that this could become a good thing because playing on the grassroots basketball circuit this year might lead to more high-profile schools getting involved. He hooked on with M33M, an Adidas-sponsored team that he had never played with before.

He fit in seamlessly during an event in Dallas nine days later, showing off his left-handed shooting stroke, relentless defensive effort and facilitating the offense for what amounted to a group of strangers. Dayton offered a scholarship the next week.

“I like to play especially in AAU because there’s a lot of ranked people,” Crutcher said. “They’re real good, so I try to show them they’re not that good. So I play man-to-man 94 feet, and I guess that’s what (Dayton) liked about me.”

Dayton’s coaches attended every one of Crutcher’s games during an event in Atlanta to close college basketball’s live evaluation period. He then set up a campus visit, mingling with the team’s departing seniors on graduation weekend and getting a tour of the arena.

He soon became Grant’s first recruit at Dayton, which lost former coach Archie Miller to Indiana after making four-straight NCAA tournament appearances. And if Crutcher needed any reminder of how well this process worked out, he got it as he looked at his cellphone sitting in the Dayton airport waiting to come home.

DePaul was on the line ready to offer him a scholarship. But it was too late.

“Deep inside,” Crutcher said, “I knew that it was going to work out.”