WILLIAMSBURG, VA (WTKR)- Brian Earl said his plan while touring William & Mary was to keep a poker face, but that plan went out the window once he and his wife walked into Kaplan Arena.
Earl was introduced as the next head men's basketball coach of the Tribe on Wednesday afternoon in front of a crowd of players, administrators, donors and fans in the Zable Stadium suites. He wasted no time impressing those on hand, receiving two standing ovations, as the next chapter of the program gets underway.
"I think it checked almost every box," he said of William & Mary. "I have experience at similar institutions and there's an opportunity here to grow the program and try to win some games, so it checked almost every box, I would say all of them."
"I told the student-athletes 'he's been in your chair at a high academic institution, trying to compete at the highest level,'" added Tribe Director of Athletics Brian Mann. "That was one of the things that initially drew me to him."
Earl studied and played college basketball at Princeton. He's spent the last seven seasons as the head coach at Cornell, leading the Big Red to their first ever NIT berth in 2024. The new leader of the Tribe brings a fast-paced game plan with him to Williamsburg. Cornell ranked 16th in the country this past season with 82.1 points per game.
"Play hard is probably the most important thing," he noted. "You play hard by going fast and having fun running down on offense, but you're going to be asked to play hard on defense as well. Effort's a big thing on the defensive side in basketball."
"I don't know that one system is the answer to winning at William & Mary," Mann pointed out. "I think it's a coach like him who will continue to evaluate what we do, how we do it, with whom we're doing it and he'll be able to find answers that will help us be competitive against everybody in the conference and year after year."
William & Mary holds a distinction of which it would like to rid itself. The program is one of three original Division I teams nationwide that has never qualified for the NCAA Tournament. Earl told the crowd Wednesday that he wants his team to work hard every minute to be the most successful program it can be.
"It's that thing out there that I think a lot of people are striving for and so there's no guarantees, but we're going to fight hard to try and get to the NCAA Tournament," he said. "We're going to bring in guys who represent the school in the best way possible every day and we're going to try to win every game that we can and hopefully that leads to that path."
The Tribe is coming off a 10-23 season, 4-14 in the CAA, and is in search of its first winning campaign since 2019-2020.
