College men’s basketball: Dixon bounces back
Published 6:32 pm Friday, May 16, 2025
By Mike London
Salisbury Post
ATLANTA — Life tosses curveballs at everyone, and North Rowan graduate Larry Dixon has swung and missed a few times.
But he’s always gotten back in the batter’s box.
Dixon was speaking recently at a coaching clinic in Orlando. The topic of his talk to fellow coaching lifers was what he calls the bounce-back. How do you cope with being fired in the coaching profession? Because at some point, it’s going to happen to 95 percent of that fraternity.
“I’ve gotten a lot of experience with the subject,” Dixon said with a chuckle. “I’m an expert.”
While he was in Orlando, his phone buzzed, and he smiled because bouncing back suddenly had become very personal. Morehouse College AD Harold Ellis told him he was the guy who had been chosen to lead the basketball program.
Dixon has been fired three times as an assistant coach. He knows what it takes to bounce back.
“We had a lot of success at Winthrop, went to the NCAA Tournament twice in three years, and then we got fired,” Dixon said. “At South Florida, we won more games in a five-year period than they’d won in 30 years, and then we got fired.”
And then there was N.C. State. A lot of people know about what happened in Raleigh. Dixon was an important part of Kevin Keatts’ Wolfpack staff that caught lightning in a bottle late in the 2023-24 season and made a supernatural run to the ACC Tournament championship, then carried that momentum all the way to the Final Four. But things can change quickly in college basketball. There’s a fine line between winning and losing, and the Wolfpack was not good in 2024-25, with the same coaches who had been heroes in Raleigh a season earlier.
“Less than 365 days after we were in the Final Four, we got fired,” Dixon said.
But now it’s bounce-back time.
“I actually had quite a few assistant coaching options at some big schools,” Dixon said. “But when Morehouse called me and asked me if I would be interested in the head job, well, yes, I was extremely interested. It was a chance to run my own program at a great school in a great city, and I know I’m ready for that.”
It takes connections, Dixon had some. Ellis, the Morehouse AD, had gone to high school with one of Dixon’s coaching buddies. He recommended Dixon as someone who at least should be interviewed.
Ellis played and coached in the NBA, and he coached with Michael Curry, who is a friend of Dixon’s.
“Michael Curry was a head coach in the NBA and he vouched for me,” Dixon said. “Those connections that I’ve built over the years helped me get my foot in the door, helped me get interviewed. Then it was a process that I was familiar with. I’ve done a lot of interviews over the years. Everything went well with Morehouse. I know I can work closely with the AD and with the alumni.”
Morehouse is located in Atlanta. It’s one of the nation’s most respected and honored HBCUs. Martin Luther King Jr. became a Morehouse Man in 1948. King’s father went to Morehouse. King’s oldest son went to Morehouse.
Athletically, Morehouse can claim Edwin Moses, who graduated as a Morehouse Man in 1978. He was one of the all-time hurdlers. He broke world records, won Olympic gold medals.
The Morehouse basketball team always has been coached by a Morehouse Man, but the school broke with that tradition to hire Dixon.
Dixon is a Johnson C. Smith graduate.
Dixon doesn’t see that as a problem. He respects the decades of tradition at his new school, but he sees being a bit of an outsider as an opportunity to help open a new era for Morehouse.
“I’m excited, humbled and honored to be hired,” Dixon said. “Morehouse has strong athletic tradition, and it is prestigious academically. It’s a school parents want their kids to go to.”
As he’s gotten older and wiser, Dixon’s priorities have shifted slightly. As a young coach it was all about winning. As a seasoned coach in his 50s now, it’s all about players getting degrees — and winning games while they’re doing it. That’s a philosophy that should fit well at Morehouse, where the books are always going to come before the backboards.
Dixon starred at North Rowan High (Class of 1990). He was a high-scoring post man who got a chance to play college ball at J.C. Smith mostly because of Andrew Mitchell. Dixon sat for a while until he learned the value of defense, but before he graduated, he had earned awards as the Most Improved Golden Bull and as Best Defender.
His first coaching job was with the South Rowan High jayvees. Dr. Alan King hired him. He coached at Carver in Winston-Salem and coached at Garinger in Charlotte. At Garinger, he was viewed as a miracle-worker, but he took a serious pay cut to move from the high school ranks to college ball. Rob Perron, who is now Catawba’s head coach, hired Dixon to assist him at St. Andrews College.
There were a lot stops after that — South Carolina State, East Carolina, Winthrop, Georgia Southern, South Florida and finally N.C. State.
At all of them, Dixon was an assistant, putting in countless hours to make young men better people as well as better players.
“I’ve always worked hard and I’ve always tried to treat people right,” Dixon said. “You do those two things and there’s always a job for you.”
But Morehouse will be different. Now he’s a head coach for the first time since he was coaching the Garinger Wildcats.
When his hiring was announced a few days ago, there was a flurry of support. He has a reputation as a strong recruiter, a developer of players and as a defensive strategist.
“My phone lit up like a Christmas tree when they announced me as the new coach,” Dixon said. “I had 160 text messages congratulating me. You get to know a lot of people in the coaching profession.”
Dixon already has met with the handful of returning players from a good team that was 17-13 and went 14-7 in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, a deeper South league that is a first cousin of the CIAA.
A press conference has been scheduled for Monday at Morehouse, and Dixon will meet a lot of new people.
The move will have an effect on Dixon’s family. Dixon has a son who works in Atlanta, so that works out well. He also has a daughter who is a student at North Carolina A&T.
“I’ve been spending a lot more time with my daughter, so that’s going to even out some now,” Dixon said. “It will take a month or so for me to get moved and find a place to live and get settled in. But the timing is right and the school is right. Hopefully, there’s still some magic left in me.”
You Might Like
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
