After former assistant coach Luke Murray announced that he was leaving for the head coach job at Boston College in late March, Dan Hurley and the rest of the staff did their due diligence and finally found a replacement in Mike Pegues, according to multiple reports.
Pegues has been a high major assistant every season since 2012-13, accumulating stops at Xavier from 2012-18, Louisville from 2018-22, and Butler from 2022 until last season. Pegues actually coached alongside Murray as fellow assistants with the Musketeers and Cardinals from 2015-21, both following Chris Mack from one stop to the other.
Pegues was born in Washington, D.C. and played college basketball at Delaware from 1996-2000, winning America East Player of the Year in 1999. After going undrafted, he played five years of professional basketball including a brief stint in Hartford with the Connecticut Pride of the defunct-CBA.
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Replacing Murray is no easy task, but Pegues brings valuable experience and recruiting ties to the DMV area, a region that UConn has found a bunch of talent in over the past few years with the likes of Solo Ball, Jordan Hawkins, Jayden Ross and others. He is also regarded as a great big-man coach, presumably replacing the role Murray had working with the frontcourt players in practice.
Pegues also has some head coaching experience as well in interim fashion, serving as the head man for the first six and final 12 games of Louisville’s 2021-22 season in place of Mack. Pegues went 7-11 while serving as interim head coach for the Cardinals.
The coaching staff in Storrs is now complete, with Pegues, Kimani Young and Mike Nardi serving as assistants to Hurley. The team also announced that Justin McClelland will take over as the team’s director of strength and conditioning. McClelland, a Naugatuck, Connecticut native, previously served as Villanova’s strength and conditioning coach from 2023-26, overlapping with Nardi.
