Longtime Texas Southern assistant coach focused on basketball business, not TSU interim label
Shyrone Chatman has been a masterful salesman since he entered the business of college basketball coaching.
How else do you explain his ability to lure players from urban areas in Louisiana and Texas to come play out in the middle of nowhere in the Northeast and in the cold when Chatman was an assistant coach at UMass?
“I’ve always had to sell. I’ve always had to convince,” Chatman said recently to the Defender. “I just think each experience has prepared me for the next.”
But no experience could have prepared Chatman for his biggest sales job yet, holding things down and restocking the Texas Southern men’s basketball program as the interim head coach. He has nearly completed the 2026-25 basketball schedule, added five recruits, and retained several players who were headed out the door when Johnny Jones abruptly resigned to take an assistant coaching job at LSU.
Chatman has done all of this without the assurances of being the Tigers’ interim coach next season or even tomorrow, for that matter.
“I think you’ve got to get up and keep punching the clock,” Chatman said recently as he sat in the coaches’ film room flipping through game tape while checking his buzzing phone every couple of minutes. “That’s all I know. I’m a fighter. I’ve been a fighter my whole life. I’ve overcome every hurdle and stumbling block that has been placed in my way. I just think you get up, you punch the clock.”
His first order of business was convincing players like Kehlin Farooq, Josh Farmer, Kolby Granger, and Cam Patterson to stick around. Then Chatman had to figure out how to replace 73 points per game from players who ran out of eligibility after this past season.
He jumped in the transfer portal and began replenishing by luring Jason Kimbrough, a JUCO All-American guard, JUCO standout forward Sayed Sayed, and Jacksonville State forward Bencao Vungo. Chatman anticipates bringing in a few more before the summer is over.
As an assistant coach at TSU for the last nine years, first under Mike Davis for a season and then eight seasons under Jones, Chatman is entrenched in the culture and knows the type of players the program needs to win.
“Everything is going as planned. It’s kind of business as usual,” Chatman said. “Trying to knock out the portal. First, we had to keep our deal together, making sure who we were going to be bringing back. Now you are just adding the pieces to it.”
But for a couple of weeks after Jones left on the day the transfer portal opened, Chatman sat in his office with the interim title but unsure of what latitude he had.
“It’s business, but I don’t know if it’s as usual because those guys’ days changed when Coach (Johnny) Jones left, and of course, my days changed when he left. So I wouldn’t say as usual, but it’s definitely business.”
TSU interim head coach Shyrone Chatman
The portal was open, and Chatman and the remaining staff were naturally anxious to do what assistant coaches do in the spring: Recruit. So, he started asking questions, and eventually he was given the green light to proceed with doing the business of college basketball as if the job was his – for now.
“I waited for about two weeks. I kind of felt paralyzed with my hands tied behind my back on what I could do,” said Chatman, who has been a part of five SWAC Tournament championships, five NCAA Tournament bids, and three NCAA Tournament First Four wins. “Naturally, for me, this is grind time. I’m used to hitting the ground running and recruiting. That’s something I’ve been doing for over 15 years, so to not be able to do that …
“Once I found out what I was allowed to do and what my parameters were, and I was given the okay to recruit, then I started building a roster.”
He has been able to do so even though he cannot guarantee recruits that he will be around when they arrive on campus. It seems very likely that at this stage, Chatman will keep the job as the Tigers’ interim coach through next season.
The Texas Southern athletic department is in limbo right now with Jackson still under the interim athletic director after nine months on the job and three months after it became official that former athletic director Kevin Granger had been fired.
With all of that going on in the background, the uncertainty in the athletic department leadership likely made it difficult to attract quality head coaching candidates, who tend to want to know who their boss will be.
So, it seems reasonable that Chatman will be around to play the schedule he has built, coach the players he has recruited, and convince the ones he has recruited to remain.
“I get them to commit to winning, to a culture that has been established and been successful for decades,” Chatman said. “Obviously, I’m selling them a vision. They are buying into that vision.
“It’s nothing more, nothing less. It’s being able to sell kids on a vision and style of play and a culture of winning.”
It’s going the way Jones had hoped when he made the decision to return to Baton Rouge to be an assistant coach of the program he once led. Jones retained Chatman from Mike Davis’ staff when he came aboard in 2018. Jones was an assistant coach on John Calipari’s Memphis staff when Chatman was a four-year player for the Tigers.
“My hope is that Shyrone Chatman, who was with me there for eight years, gets consideration because of the landscape and the way that it is now with the transfer portal opening today and the academics and the things that you have to go through with the kids on campus today,” Jones said to the Defender. “Hopefully, he gets the opportunity to go through the interview process and that he will have a legitimate chance of being the next head coach there.”
Long Island head basketball coach Rod Strickland, who was on the Memphis coaching staff with Chatman and remains close, believes Chatman has paid his dues and learned from the right people and deserves real consideration for the permanent job at TSU.
“I’ve been around him; he’s paid his dues. He is a basketball guy,” said Strickland, who played 17 years in the NBA, including his final season as a player with the Rockets in 2005. “He has been under Cal, he’s been under Mike Davis, he’s been under Johnny Jones. So he has the knowledge and the experience.
“I just think it’s time. He’s in a situation where he has been there, he’s done the recruiting, and those young people know him. I hope he gets that opportunity because I think he’s deserving.”
Long Island University head coach Rod Strickland
“More importantly, I know he wants it. We’ve had plenty of conversations between the two of us about getting opportunities. I just think it’s well deserved. He can coach, he can recruit, and he knows how to deal with young people.”
Chatman is shy about admitting he wants the job on a permanent basis after spending nine years helping build the winning culture that now embodies the program.
“I would be doing myself a misjustice not to,” he said. “I’ve put almost a decade into this place. I think every assistant coach, if you are doing it this long, has to have a dream of one day leading their own program.
“I wouldn’t be being honest if I didn’t say that.”
