The first line of Lamont Evans' bio on the Oklahoma State men's basketball coaching staff page begins, "One of the nation’s most respected recruiters . . ."
Evans is now the nation's most disrespected recruiter after he was one four college basketball assistant coaches arrested for their role in a corruption and bribery scandal.
Before Evans was charged with accepting at least $22,000 in bribe money to push amateur athletes toward financial advisers, he was indeed a highly respected recruiter and coach.
A native of the Bahamas, he played basketball at both Seminole Junior College in Florida and St. Catharine College in Kentucky before transferring to Drake in 1999. Evans was an all-conference guard, averaging 8.5 points and 7.3 assists while shooting 48 percent as a senior in 2000-01. He played professionally in the USBL and several international leagues in Slovenia, Germany, Finland and elsewhere.
Evans jumped into coaching in 2008 as a student assistant at Kansas State under first-year head coach Frank Martin. He became an assistant coach in 2011 and followed Martin to South Carolina a year later, where he began developing his recruiting reputation. Evans recruited several players from the Gamecocks' 2017 Final Four team, including McDonald's All-American P.J. Dozier and Sindarius Thornwell.
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Evans, however, was not around for the Final Four run. He left in April 2016 to join first-year Oklahoma State head coach Brad Underwood's staff in Stillwater, where he remained even after Underwood's abrupt departure for Illinois last March.
"I couldn’t be happier that Lamont Evans is staying a Cowboy,” new head coach Mike Boynton said of his associate head coach and recruiting coordinator. “Lamont is an unbelievably hard worker. That's key. He's tremendously loyal, smart, knows basketball, and for us it's all about relationships. To have the opportunity, at my first head coaching position, to have someone who I'm so in line with philosophically gives me great comfort and I cannot thank him enough."
Turns out — if the allegations are true — Boynton would've been happier having Evans far away from his program after Evans was arrested on Tuesday, less than six weeks before the start of the regular season.
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