Delaware to hire Notre Dame assistant Martin Ingelsby as coach
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After consecutive Elite Eight runs as an assistant with Notre Dame basketball, Martin Ingelsby was primed to slide into to a head coaching job.
It appears he will take one of the most challenging jobs available in the 2016 coaching cycle.
The 37-year-old Ingelsby will be the next coach at Delaware, a source with knowledge of the search confirmed to SI.com. “He’s the guy,” the source said.
It will be a homecoming of sorts for Ingelsby—he’s a native of Philadelphia, which is fewer than 50 miles from Delaware’s campus—but it will also be a potentially arduous rebuild. Nine scholarship players technically remain on the roster off a 7–23 team from 2015–16, but five of them have asked for their release to transfer, per The (Wilmington) News-Journal.
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Still, after 13 years on staff at his alma mater—including the last seven as an assistant to Irish coach Mike Brey—Ingelsby had been itching for the chance to run his own program. For the Delaware job, he had a strong advocate in his corner: His boss, Brey, coached the Blue Hens for five seasons and led them to two NCAA tournament bids (1998, 1999) before taking the Notre Dame job in 2000.
Delaware fired coach Monte Ross on March 18 after 10 seasons and waited until it hired a new athletic director before naming a new basketball coach—hence the protracted search. The school named Michigan associate athletic director Chrissi Rawak its athletic director on May 13.
