After the 2025 Bowers & Carroll Alumni Game at Mizzou Arena ended on Saturday, Tim Fuller found Mike Alden and his wife in the throng of fans and players on Norm Stewart Court and said hello.
Fuller, who previously served as an assistant coach for the Tigers, and Alden, the university’s former athletic director, both departed their respective former roles at Missouri in 2015. Now, a decade later, the two were reunited. It reminded Fuller what made the “Show-Me” State home to him and why he’s always wanted to come back.
“It’s the people,” Fuller said. “I tell recruits all the time when I’m in a position to talk to them that you don’t make decisions off the names on the buildings. You make decisions based off the heartbeats inside those walls in that building. And the people at Missouri, not just staff but supporters in this community, have embraced me, embraced my children, and embraced (the program) throughout me not even being here. And it continued to make me feel special about Missouri, special about my time here.”
Fuller was officially tabbed as MU’s first-ever men’s basketball general manager on June 2. He feels like he’s grown in the 10 years since his last stint with the black and gold. He’s changed his mindset from “When am I going to be a head coach?” to “How many people can I help reach their full potential?” Fuller’s hopeful that his new position will allow him to be especially serviceful in that way.
Dennis Gates and Fuller had known of each other since Gates was an assistant coach at Florida State. When Gates was hired as Mizzou’s head coach in 2023, Fuller called to congratulate him and let him know he’d be available if Gates needed any assistance in the transition — Fuller said he’d done this with every coach who’d been hired since he left the program. Fuller and Gates kept in touch, talking periodically over the phone over the past few years, oftentimes about players the Tigers were interested in who were playing in the Overtime Elite league, which Fuller worked for.
During one of their calls, Gates brought up the idea of bringing on a GM this year. After hearing the head coach describe what he’d want out of the role, Fuller told him he felt like he’d be a good fit for it and would welcome the opportunity to return to Missouri.
“Really, wearing different hats is what we discussed,” Fuller said. “From my marketing days at Nike, how to help them with their branding, how to help our players with their branding. From you know, my Overtime Elite days of building social media and understanding the impact of what a player’s brand can do over the internet and how they need to own that space and protect that space.”
Fuller’s given Gates a 100-day plan outlining what he hopes to accomplish in his first few months. The first few weeks involve getting to know everyone involved in the program and establishing relationships with them. In the next month, Fuller wants to start introducing the staff to agents he has relationships with, as well as try to expand on the connections he already has.
“We have several buckets that we’re putting these relationships in — one is an agent bucket, one is an elite high school player bucket, and then there’s an international bucket — so that we can all collaborate on the different approaches that we’re going to have,” Fuller said. “We have several coaches going to the FIBA events. While they’re at some of the FIBA events, I’ll be meeting with agents.
“Coach Gates and I will go to the NBA Summer League this summer in Las Vegas, and I’m setting up meetings now so that I can get certain agents on his calendar as well, just so we can start to understand what their expectations are moving forward in this new day of college basketball, and also share our expectations in terms of the quality and types of athletes and people that we want to be part of the program.”
Long term, Fuller just wants to do whatever he can to help Gates be successful in constructing the roster, both through the transfer portal and the high school recruiting trail. He’s excited to get to work.
When Fuller accepted the GM job, Dallas Mavericks President of Basketball Operations Nico Harrison, who mentored Fuller during their time together working for Nike, joked that he deserved part of Fuller’s first check — “We built you to be this.”
“I can honestly say my time at Nike, being a sports marketing rep on the east coast, managing relationships all the way from high school to grassroots through college to the NBA, is the job, right?” Fuller said. “Being able to identify talent at a high level, knowing the unknown and being able to motivate the unmotivated, finding those gems in the back gym. And then when an agent is telling you their player is worth three pots of gold, and you realize that he’s only worth one pot of silver, being able to find the middle ground. So that time I had at Nike under Nico Harrison and Lynn Merritt, literally now, 15 years later, is paying off because that is what college basketball has transitioned to and evolved to.”
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