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Kevin Carroll and his wife sat on the couch in the hours prior to him officially starting his tenure as Lipscomb\u2019s head coach and took in the final moments before a few months that would spread Carroll as thin as he\u2019s ever been spread.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once Carroll woke up the next morning, drove to Lipscomb, parked in a garage attached to Allen Arena and addressed his new team, his life would turn to chaos for a few weeks. The first-year Lipscomb head coach took the job on April 15, making him one of college basketball\u2019s latest-arriving head coaches.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While others put the final touches on their rosters and looked to gauge what they had, Carroll was a one-man show that needed to hire a coaching staff and find a way to complete a roster at the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were pretty behind the eight ball in terms of the portal,\u201d Carroll told Mainstreet Nashville. \u201cA lot of the type of guys that we would\u2019ve liked to have gone on had already committed elsewhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Carroll\u2019s first day on the job started with him walking into Lipscomb\u2019s locker room and addressing a group of players that he\u2019d never coached before. By the end of the day, he hoped to assure each of those players that their roles would be significant enough for it to make sense for them to stick with his program through the coaching change.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Walk anywhere around Allen Arena that day and you\u2019d probably see the first-year head coach sitting at a metal table looking out at Lipscomb\u2019s Ken Dugan Field trying to make his pitch to individual players as to why they would stay. In the end, he only lost one scholarship player. That left him with no player that scored more than five points per game in 2024-25 and just six total scholarship players on his 2025-26 roster.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fielding a competitive team that meets the Lipscomb basketball standard\u2013of being in the conversation to make the NCAA Tournament every spring\u2013that Carroll believes to be true, appeared to be all but impossible with the circumstances that he\u2019s been given.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe portal dried up a lot quicker than people would probably imagine,\u201d Carroll said. \u201cYou\u2019re kinda just left sometimes with guys who may not have produced as well that you\u2019re trying to choose from at your level.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
If Carroll relied solely on the portal to put out an acceptable product in year one of his build, he\u2019d likely be taking flyers on pieces that he didn\u2019t know if he could trust yet while thrusting them into roles that they\u2019ve never experienced previously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That would\u2019ve been excusable for someone in Carroll\u2019s situation, but he didn\u2019t allow that reality to limit him. Instead, he and his coaching staff got creative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead of taking a chance on two additional traditional transfers, Lipscomb added 22 year old Israeli freshman Or Ashkenazi and Lithuanian High Point transfer Titas Sargiunas, both of which announced their commitments late in the transfer portal process due to the troubles that international players have had with getting into through the procedures necessary to get to America.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ashkenazi has still yet to arrive in the United States and isn\u2019t expected to until the school year begins, but once he does Carroll expects him to \u201chave a chance\u201d to be Lipscomb\u2019s best defender. The first-year head coach also believes that the 6-foot-5 guard will make an \u201cimmediate impact\u201d upon his arrival.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 22-year old freshman\u2013who Carroll jokes is the oldest player in his class in the country\u2013has three years of professional experience and reportedly heard from Kentucky, Auburn, Kansas State, as well as multiple other power-five schools before ultimately landing with the Bisons. Lipscomb hasn\u2019t landed a freshman as highly thought of as Ashkenazi in recent memory and it may not have if not for the situation it was in this offseason.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe forced into it a little bit just because of the timing,\u201d Carroll said of international recruiting. \u201cThat\u2019s just the name of the game these days, but honestly I think you\u2019re gonna see a lot more of that just because it\u2019s kinda like the minor leagues where everyone has been moving up, so a lot of times you\u2019re dealing with these international kids\u2013some of which may have been playing professionally the last two or three years, or might be a little bit older and possess the skill and knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sargiunas\u2013a former All-Big South Freshman Team selection\u2013was taken by Carroll and staff as more of a true transfer than Ashkenazi was, but was available late in the process likely in part due to the issues currently surrounding international players. He\u2019s coming off of a season in which he was stuck behind a group of older guards at High Point, but has been \u201cvery impressive\u201d in his limited time on Lipscomb\u2019s campus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lipscomb has been a perennial contender under Carroll\u2019s two predecessors, but it\u2019s rarely acquired two potential starers in the way that its current head coach is doing it. Perhaps some of Carroll and his staff\u2019s discovery had to do with its circumstances, but they may as well get used to working to capitalize on their discovery.<\/p>\n
That way of doing business isn\u2019t going away anytime soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cInternational recruiting,\u201d Carroll said, \u201cIs probably the route that we\u2019re gonna really probably seek pretty hard here going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Carroll and his wife sat on the couch in the hours prior to him officially starting his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-20621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}