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Texas Tech basketball: Chris Beard to be featured in CBS documentary

By Matthew Conner

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - APRIL 04: Head coach Chris Beard of the Texas Tech Red Raiders poses with Barry Bedlan, Deputy Director of AP Sports Products at The Associated Press, after Beard was named the AP Men's Basketball Coach of the Year ahead of the Men's Final Four at U.S. Bank Stadium on April 04, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Maxx Wolfson/Getty Images)
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - APRIL 04: Head coach Chris Beard of the Texas Tech Red Raiders poses with Barry Bedlan, Deputy Director of AP Sports Products at The Associated Press, after Beard was named the AP Men's Basketball Coach of the Year ahead of the Men's Final Four at U.S. Bank Stadium on April 04, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Maxx Wolfson/Getty Images) /
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This week, Texas Tech basketball fans will get an opportunity to check out a documentary about head coach Chris Beard.

As if we didn’t already know that Texas Tech basketball head coach Chris Beard is one of the nation’s fastest-rising coaches in American, we got further confirmation of that reality this week when it was revealed that the Red Raider head man will be the feature of a CBS documentary.

Airing Thursday, January 2nd at 9:30 pm CST, on the CBS Sports Network, the documentary “NCAA Men of March” will give us an in-depth look at Beard’s rise.  And it truly has been a career made for Hollywood.

He began his coaching journey as a lowly student assistant at Texas under Tom Penders.  Next, he spent time as a graduate assistant at both Incarnate Word and Abilene Christian before becoming an assistant coach at North Texas from 1997–1999.  No wonder he’s placed so much value in the grad assistants he’s brought to Lubbock such as Darryl Dora and Ronald Ross.

In 1999, he was hired as head coach at Fort Scott Community College and in 2000, he took the same job at Seminole State College. In his one-year there he went 25–6 and finished ranked 14th in the country.

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He parlayed that success into an opportunity to join Bob Knight’s staff at Texas Tech in 2001.  During his time at Texas Tech, the Red Raiders made four NCAA Tournament appearances along with a trip to the NIT Final Four. Chris Beard spent 10 years in Lubbock under Bob and Pat Knight, and since, he’s become the most successful of Knight’s students this side of Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski.

But when Billy Gillespie replaced Pat Knight in 2011, Beard set off on a coaching Odyssey that would make Odysseus proud.  Over the next four years, he would have five different head coaching jobs in four different states before coming home to Lubbock.

In 2011-12, he spent one year as head coach for the South Carolina Warriors of the American Basketball Association, where he led the team to a 29–2 record while living out of his car.  In 2012, he was hired as head coach at McMurry University in Abilene, where he spent one season. In March 2013, he was hired as the sixth head coach at Angelo State, leading that program to two-straight winning seasons.

It was in 2015 that his career started its truly meteoric rise when he was hired as head coach at Arkansas-Little Rock.  In his one season at UALR, his team went 30–5 and won the Sun Belt title He then took his No. 12 seeded Trojans to the NCAA Tournament and knocked off fifth-seeded Purdue 85–83 in double overtime to advance to the Second Round before falling to Iowa State

That led to a stint as the head coach at UNLV, where he was in charge for less than a month in the spring of 2016.  That’s when Kirby Hocutt made the best decision in the history of Texas Tech basketball.  Shucking convention and not afraid to hurt the feelings of those in Las Vegas, he stole the Rebels’ head coach away before the ink was even dry on his contract.

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The rest is the type of history that can only be found on the silver screen.  But this week, it will be beamed right into our living rooms.  In the same week that Tech opens Big 12 play, we will all get a chance to sit back and appreciate the journey Chris Beard took before coming home to Tech, where he has taken us on our own remarkable adventure.

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