At the age of 8, Richie Riley knew he wanted to become a Division-1 head basketball coach. At age 33, Riley’s dream became a reality.

Riley became the eleventh men’s basketball coach at Nicholls State University, replacing former coach J.P. Piper after the Colonels posted an 11-23 record last season, 6-12 in the Southland Conference. In 12 seasons under Piper, the program’s overall record was 132-224.

“When you come to this campus, there’s something that grabs you,” Riley said. “There was a just a feeling that this was home, that I needed to be here.”
The eastern Kentucky native comes to Thibodaux after several assistant-coaching stints, with the last two years spent at Clemson University. Before that, Riley coached at Hawaii-Pacific University, Pikeville College, Coastal

Carolina University, Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

In his introductory press conference, Riley reminisced on one of his first coaching jobs at Pikeville College. Riley was 22, coaching guys not much younger than he. After running practices hard where he had to yell at guys, Riley was also responsible for washing their clothes and cleaning the locker room. This experience taught Riley to do less with more, which a coach at any University of Louisiana System school is forced to do with moneys allocated to athletics from the state budget ever shrinking.

“A lot of guys dream of hitting the game-winning shot in the championship, well I dreamt of drawing up the game-winning play when I was a kid,” Riley said. “This really is a dream come true.”

Perhaps Riley’s most impactful stop on his coaching path was at CCU, coaching under Cliff Ellis. It was there, under a coach that won an Atlantic Coast Conference Championship with Clemson and a Southeastern Conference championship with the University of Auburn, that Riley said he learned how to run a program the right way, to do more with less and overachieve.

“What my time there showed me was there are certain expectations of your program sometimes, we’re going to knock those walls down,” Riley said. “There are no ceilings on our program.”

At Clemson, Riley was a part of a staff that prepared weekly to play the nation’s best teams. The ACC is widely regarded by sports media outlets to be the best basketball league in the country. Clemson is not one of the blue bloods of this conference. They finished last season 17-14, 10-8 in the ACC.

“I learned a culture of work and preparation at Clemson. It’s the best basketball league in America so we had to be prepared,” Riley said.
Family was a consistent theme in Riley’s speech Tuesday inside the Harold J. Callais

Memorial Student Recreation Center, which was amplified when his two-year-old Reese joined him on stage halfway through his remarks. Riley introduced Reese as his first assistant coach hiring at Nicholls.

“As far as our program goes, it’s going to be family,” Riley said, staring directly at the members of the team in attendance, standing together. “It’s important to me, I’m going to give you my time, energy and effort every day.”

Riley doesn’t have any preconceived notions of how things are “supposed to be” in relation to basketball at Nicholls. His reputation as a recruiter precedes him, and he said it is about creating meaningful relationships.

“Meaningful in all caps,” Riley said. “We’re not striving to be competitive at Nicholls, we’re striving to compete for championships.”