For a month this spring, Musselman and much of his men’s basketball staff holed up in Manhattan Beach to tirelessly recruit 11 players for a new-look roster
Eric Musselman smiles during a press conference to introduce him as USC new men’s basketball coach Friday, April 5, 2024, at the Galen Center. LOS ANGELES — None of them dared to sleep until Eric Musselman’s eyes grew weary, tethered to their phones until he’d give the unofficial OK to clock out for the night.
This is how the Muss Era of USC basketball was built, with 30 days in a rental home 50 yards from The Strand, a working-man’s Animal House for a group of coaches trying to piece together a team from scratch that could compete in the Big Ten Conference. With families still working on moving to Southern California, they’d obtained the lease not long after Musselman was hired at USC, the former Arkansas head coach collecting most of his staff under one roof to centralize a recruiting frenzy.
Longtime head coach Andy Enfield’s departure sent virtually USC’s entire roster scurrying, and Musselman entered Southern California in early April playing from behind, with just Harrison Hornery and walk-on JD Plough returning and the portal already having been open for weeks. And the hardest part of the process, Musselman reflected Thursday, was securing the initial wave.
On one day this spring, Conroy remembered, the staff was sitting on their porch in Manhattan Beach when Musselman’s phone rang. It was Xavier transfer Desmond Claude, whom USC was pursuing hard in dire need of a point guard.“People, like, was in their houses looking at, where’s this noise coming from?” Conroy said.
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