Drexel’s Zach Spiker embraces the challenge of building from the bottom: ‘Find ways to reinvent yourself’

For three consecutive nights last August, in the throes of another hot summer, Drexel men’s basketball coach Zach Spiker set up a tent in a corner of his Delaware County yard and tried to sleep.

Spiker, 47, has been a basketball coach for 24 years and a head coach for the last 15. Over that time he has tried to pull elements from every resource he possibly can. Among his recent inspirations are a pair of books. The first is Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, a book with a pretty self-explanatory goal in the title. The other is from author and advisor Ryan Hawk and basketball coach Brook Cupps, who co-authored The Score That Matters: Growing Excellence in Yourself and Those You Lead, which tries to teach the reader about how the internal score — your values and purpose — is all that matters, and not athletic scoreboards, business metrics, and social media likes and shares.

Seven seasons into his stint here in Philadelphia, Spiker was experiencing challenges. The game was changing around him rapidly. A guy who had built a program based on culture and togetherness was facing the new climate of navigating name, image, and likeness and the transfer portal at a place that at the time had no NIL collective. Drexel had earlier in the month lost a former basketball player to suicide. There was a crisis of comfort. So for three nights, Spiker slept outside to live in the discomfort. This year, wanting another challenge, Spiker sought out discomfort by starting his mornings early in the pool at Drexel’s Daskalakis Athletic Center, where he trained for the triathlon he completed earlier this month in Cape May.

“You got to find ways to reinvent yourself,” Spiker said last week.

It is an important time for reinvention in Spiker’s field and at Spiker’s school. The Dragons are coming off four straight winning seasons and last year won 20 games for the first time since 2012. Drexel finished second in the Coastal Athletic Association after going 13-5 in league play. The school’s NIL collective didn’t even launch until after the Dragons beat Villanova at the Big 5 Classic in early December, meaning Drexel outpaced several schools in its conference that had at least some NIL commitments entering the 2023-24 season.

But the season came to an abrupt end in the quarterfinals of the CAA tournament. And with little NIL support, it was impossible for Spiker to keep his two best players — three-time CAA defensive player of the year Amari Williams (Kentucky) and point guard Justin Moore (Loyola-Chicago) — on campus. And it was difficult to compete in the transfer portal market. So Drexel went the junior college route, which has produced three commitments during this offseason, to combine with an incoming freshmen class that Spiker is excited about.

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The separation between the haves and the have-nots has always been part of the gig in Division I basketball. With NIL the gap is growing.

Spiker has for years specialized in finding under-the-radar talent. Even before the NIL and transfer portal hoopla, Spiker had seen players come to Drexel and then go off to places like Penn State (Camren Wynter), Boston College (T.J. Bickerstaff), Wichita State (Xavier Bell), and elsewhere. Last year’s group seemed like the culmination of building a program and finding the right mix. Williams was a lightly recruited player out of the United Kingdom. Moore was a talented Catholic League guard, but wasn’t being pursued by any high-majors. Luke House, who scored a career-high 28 points in the quarterfinal loss, was another Catholic League player, but he’d started his college career playing Division II basketball in western Pennsylvania.

All five starters from that quarterfinal loss to Stony Brook are gone. So is backup point guard Jamie Bergens, who is off to Fairfield University, and key role player Lamar Oden Jr. (Charleston Southern). What’s left are five scholarship returnees, including big man Garfield Turner, once a junior college transfer himself, the three new juco recruits, and the three-player 2024 recruiting class. The Dragons are still finalizing their roster, but Spiker seems undeterred about the possibility of returning to the top of the CAA.

“You got to go at it in different angles and different ways,” Spiker said. “Am I comfortable right now? No. Am I confident we’ll figure it out? Very much so.”

Why?

“I’ve had to adapt and reinvent at other times,” he said.

Spiker’s basketball career has been about those things at every stop. He worked for little or no pay under Gregg Marshall at Winthrop, back home in West Virginia under John Beilein, and then under now-Penn coach Steve Donahue when he was the head coach at Cornell.

“Your health insurance is ‘work out every day,’” Spiker said.

At Cornell, he learned how to recruit non-scholarship athletes to the Ivy League school that wasn’t Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, but a place in Ithaca, N.Y., where he’d played Division III ball at Ithaca College. When he became the head coach at Army, as a 33-year-old in 2009, there was more adapting. He went from recruiting non-scholarship players to recruiting players to a service academy, a place for more than just basketball and education. Spiker had a map in his office of military bases around the U.S. Despite being in New York, he knew the AAU programs in San Antonio better than he did in Philadelphia.

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For his part, the adapting worked. He became the third Army coach to win 65 games in his first five seasons. The other two names on the list at the time were Bob Knight and Mike Krzyzewski. Spiker was the first coach at Army to win at last 15 games in four straight seasons.

In some ways, maintaining a winning culture at low-to-mid-major college basketball right now is sort of like trying to recruit at Army and Cornell. There’s no bidding wars. Instead of tens of thousands of dollars, Spiker is mostly promising a place where a basketball player will be treated right at a good school in a major U.S. city where the basketball team continues to improve its year-over-year win total. It’s certainly not nothing.

“It’s a hard challenge, but is it a bigger challenge than recruiting non-scholarship guys at Cornell?” Spiker asked. “Is it a bigger challenge than trying to win at Army, which hadn’t ever won?

“This might be the perfect spot.”

It might be. But even when coming to that conclusion, Spiker was still haunted by how last season ended.

“But then do I look and say I underachieved with last year’s team?” he continued.

It bothers him. The first 20-win season in over a decade was marred by a disastrous final eight minutes in a game that Williams was injured in. There was a lot of sadness on Spiker’s face and in his voice that night in March.

What he wasn’t thinking about, he said, was that Moore and Williams would be gone, and how that group might be the last that slowly builds together on campus.

He knows things are different now, though. That’s why he’s continuing to build his network. Spiker, this past season’s Big 5 coach of the year, spent some time earlier this year in Jacksonville watching the Jaguars go through a portion of their NFL offseason. He spent some time last week talking to Kyle Taylor, now an assistant coach at Coastal Carolina, about how Taylor found so much success in five seasons leading the program at Salt Lake Community College. Why? Spiker’s world is about coaching the core of a team for one or two seasons now. It’s also about free agency like the NFL.

“We’re all doing the same thing. We’re all speed dating,” he said. “We’re all in the world of free agency. Whether you’re bringing a dude in Jacksonville, Golden State, Villanova, Drexel, we’re all doing the same thing. So I’m trying to learn from people who have been doing it longer.”

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Spiker jokingly (or maybe not) called Drexel “the Drexel Zagons … we zag while everyone else zigs, and we’re going to continue to do it.”

He was referring to playing the portal game a little bit differently than others who might have more money to play with.

“You can spend money the wrong way,” Spiker said. “You cannot skip the step of building a cohesive team just because you have a big payroll.”

Spiker is committed to relationships, he said. He is still in contact via a group chat with some of his Army players and one of them, Larry Toomey, recently celebrated a birthday. Spiker logged onto the basketball database Synergy and cut up a highlight tape of some of Toomey’s best basketball moments at Army, which featured a dunk on current NBA player Mike Muscala, and sent it to the group chat. He even narrated a few sequences.

Earlier this spring, Spiker was on a family vacation. Turner, who will be Drexel’s starting center this year, experienced a death in his family and was with loved ones in West Virginia, not far from where Spiker was staying. So Spiker got in his car and drove 45 minutes to give Turner a hug.

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“I don’t think people think that way now,” Spiker said. “They’re too caught up in what they can buy and what they can get. No, man, the relationship matters. That’s my guy forever. I love GT.”

There’s a Maya Angelou quote that Spiker paraphrased: “It’s not what you do, it’s not what you say, it’s how you make people feel,” he said. “I think the relationship part is more important than it’s ever been.”

Maybe that’s what he’s learned most over the last few years as the game he’s spent his whole professional life in changes around him. He’s read books and leaned on mentors, new and old. He slept in a tent outside in his Delaware County yard to feel the summer heat and then trained and competed in a triathlon for the first time. He’s learned to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, and doubling down on human connection doesn’t seem like a path that leads to failure.

“The reality is we’re entering a bit more of a transactional space than ever before,” Spiker said. “Guess what? I’m going to die on the hill of culture. I don’t want to go the other way.”