The Two Man Game: Assistant Coaches Dorian Green and Houston Reed on Staff Continuity, Recruiting, and Building a Program

When Steve Smiley decided to take a solo fishing trip, he left the podcast studio in the hands of his two assistant coaches—Dorian Green and Houston Reed. What followed was a rare, unguarded conversation about what it actually takes to sustain a mid-major program in an era of constant roster churn, and why a coaching staff that has stayed together for seven or eight years is almost unheard of in modern college basketball.

The Value of Staff Continuity in an Unstable Era

Both Green and Reed have been at Northern Colorado since the tail end of the Jeff Linder era, and both stayed when Smiley took over. That kind of longevity is increasingly rare. "I think if you would ask us when we started, like, hey, seven, eight years down the road you're all gonna be working together, I don't think any of us would have guessed that," Green said. The reason they've stayed comes down to something more durable than loyalty: genuine trust. Reed described it as a foxhole mentality. "We can depend on each other, we can trust each other, we don't have to worry about alternative motives—which I think exist more than people probably realize in athletics."