Rising star from Alcester has won 3 national titles in 6 years. Who exactly is Craig Doty?

Matt Zimmer | Argus Leader

Craig Doty has made coaching college basketball look much easier than it is. The 32-year-old from Alcester has been a college head coach for six years, and he’s already won three national championships at two different levels.

Doty, who was born in Sioux Falls and played at Morningside after a memorable career with the Alcester-Hudson Cubs, led Rock Valley (Ill.) Community College to NJCAA titles in 2014 and 2016 (with a runner-up finish in between), then guided Graceland (Iowa) to the NAIA Division I championship this past March.

A month later he parlayed that into a promotion, landing at Division II Emporia State in Kansas, where Doty joins one of the premier conferences in Division II. If he can do with the Hornets what he did at his first two coaching stops, Doty will surely be among the most sought-after sub-Division I coaches in the country.

So who is this guy? Some of the most legendary coaches in the region have toiled in the profession for decades without taking their team to a national championship, and this guy’s done it three times already? What’s his secret?

Doty says there’s no secret, though it’s apparent he hasn’t done it with luck. He’s ambitious, adaptable, open-minded and dogged in his work ethic. The degree of difficulty will be ramped up significantly in the MIAA, but no one seems to doubt he’ll win there.

“The best way I can put it is I’ve been here 17 years and I haven’t won (a national championship),” said Doty’s college coach, Jim Sykes of Morningside. “It’s really, really tough to do what he’s done and that’s a credit to him. He’s a driven young man who wants success and wants greatness and doesn’t let anything get in his way. He puts the right people around him and they follow him. There’s a lot of power in that.”

Climbing the ladder

Doty’s coaching career began while he was still playing. In 2006, while a student-athlete at Morningside, Doty co-founded Midwest Elite Basketball, a business that started with two summer camps that year – one in Nebraska and one in Minnesota. This year Midwest Elite ran 190 camps in 17 states. Over 70 coaches around the country contribute to Midwest Elite.

“After seeing that business take off,” said Keith Doty, Craig’s older brother and childhood rival, “I was certain Craig had the communication skills, management ability and basketball knowledge necessary to be successful in the coaching profession.”

Indeed, the side gig was Doty’s entrance into the coaching world. If you’re going to be a national champion coach before you turn 30, one way to do it is to start a successful basketball business when you’re 20.

“The first time you coach, even in a camp setting, you realize you can impact and connect with student athletes, so that’s when I said I wanted to explore (coaching) as an option,” said Doty, who has a 162-50 record as a coach. “I was hiring coaches (to work for Midwest Elite) who I’d die to have their job. That allowed me to build a network of coaches, and to sharpen my drill offerings and develop my philosophy as a coach.”

Once Doty knew he wanted to coach, he started climbing the ladder quickly. There was a stop at Westfield High in Akron, Iowa, a volunteer assistant gig at Morningside, and brief stints at Central Wyoming (which included a short off-season stint as a 25-year-old interim head coach), Riverland Community College in Minnesota, and a grad assistant job at USF. He was with the Cougars for only a few months, as Rock Valley offered him their head coaching job just before the 2012-13 season.

“He was probably overqualified for that position on our staff,” remembers USF head coach Chris Johnson. “But he was looking for something and we had an opening. You knew he was a smart guy, knew that players liked him, so I thought he’d be a good coach. But I’m not going to sit here and tell you I knew he’d do what he’s done, because I’d have tried to pay him a million dollars to stay on our staff.”

'Seemed like a rising star'

So there he was, a 27-year-old first time head coach, taking over a junior college program that had lost almost twice as many games as they’d won in the previous 10 years.

Misty Opat hired Doty. She’s the athletic director and women’s basketball coach at Rock Valley C.C., and she’s had plenty of success of her own, winning four national championships this decade. Clearly she knew she had a soon-to-be national champion coach in Doty, right?

“I looked in my crystal ball and that’s what it said,” Opat joked. “No, obviously I had no idea how good he’d be, but he did seem like a rising star. A lot of what impressed me was his outgoing personality, and his willingness to share his vision of how he was going to build things.”

The Golden Eagles started 1-5, but by year’s end they were 19-16 and qualified for the junior college national tournament for just the second time in over 40 years. A year later they went 30-5 and won the national title. Doty was 28. But he was just getting started.

The Eagles went 31-4 the following season and lost in the national championship game. A year later, in 2015-16, they got back on top, going 33-3 and winning the title again.

Taunted by opposing crowds

Like most coaches, Doty’s path to the clipboard began as a player, and he was a good one. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of player you fingered for being a future coach. He wasn’t a coach’s kid, a hard-working grinder or a cerebral floor general. He was a scorer. He liked to shoot and he didn’t mind playing with a flair that often rubbed opponents the wrong way.

By the time he reached varsity age, he was among the best players in the state. He averaged 25.5 points per game as a senior for Alcester-Hudson.

Keith Doty remembers coming back from college at South Dakota State to watch Craig play, and being struck by both his talent and his style.

“I realized how good he was, but I was also reminded that he was more than aware of his own talent,” Keith said. “The opposing crowds, particularly the student sections, would relentlessly taunt him – bringing derogatory signs and yelling obscenities. It was tough for my parents to witness all this vitriol, but Craig seemed to revel in it. His confidence was both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness, but try telling that to a kid who’s averaging 25 points a game.”

Most of the area colleges showed interest in Doty, and he ended up at Morningside, the successful NAIA program in Sioux City, and a rival of USF in the GPAC at the time. Doty expected to be an impact player at the college level, but it didn’t happen.

“In high school he was a very athletic player and things came easy to him,” said Sykes, Morningside’s coach. “The college game was a little different, and the things we did didn’t necessarily fit his skill set.”

Doty left the Mustang program, transferring first to Dakota State, then to Minnesota West Community College, before eventually coming back to Morningside. He was a bench player on a Mustang team that won the GPAC title in his final season.

It was an overall underwhelming and humbling college career, and it may have been the single biggest factor in Doty’s coaching success.

“I underachieved as a college player, but that experience helped mold me into a better coach,” Doty said. “To go from being a big-time player in high school and then to be put in your place in college and realize this is another level, that was awfully humbling. It made me take a step back and look at things from a different lens.”

Those lessons came in handy at Rock Valley, without Doty even realizing it until he’d become a national champion.

“Playing basketball in South Dakota teaches you many things,” Doty says. “What I reflect on when I think about those (Rock Valley) teams was trying to stay grounded and utilize my strengths, but also the things I learned from everyone I’d been around, from Jamie Sykes to Chris Johnson. Looking back, it’s amazing what we accomplished, but we brought in some big-time athletes that bought in, and that program is still rolling today.”

Every coach credits his players for their success, and they get those players through recruiting. Doty is no different. But he’s made his mark with the dry erase board, too.

“When you hear Craig talk about basketball from an Xs and Os standpoint – he does a phenomenal job with that,” Opat says. “He outcoached a lot of coaches with a lot more experience than him with the Xs and Os and in-game adjustments. Those are things he said he’d do in his interview but he hadn’t been a head coach, so you didn’t really know. Well, he did.”

Beating Augie provides boost

After three straight trips to the national championship, Doty was ready for a new challenge. In 2016, he accepted the job at Graceland, an NAIA Division I school in Lamoni, Iowa. While NAIA’s upper division allows for more scholarships (11), the Yellow Jackets were working with only three.

“Everyone told me you can’t win there,” Doty recalls. “It’s a town of 2,300 people. You’re bringing in recruits and there’s a horse and buggy going down the road – that’s not advantageous.”

Doty brought a handful of players with him from Rock Valley, which helped Graceland compile a 20-12 record that first year.

The Jackets felt good about their chances in 2017-18, and a win over Augustana at the Elmen Center in Sioux Falls galvanized Doty and his players.

“That was the turning point in our season,” Doty said. “It proved to our guys we could play at an incredibly high level. And it was a special night for me personally. Being in front of family and friends – there were people there who remember me as the guy who waited tables at the Alcester Steakhouse, or as the cocky high school player. It was nice to be able to get back to South Dakota in a different stage in my life.”

Augustana coach Tom Billeter, who scouted Doty as a player early in his stint with the Vikings, wasn’t surprised the Yellow Jackets could play with them.

“We knew they would be good, certainly our coaches did,” Billeter said. “I’m not sure if our players did, but they learned pretty quick. I don’t know that I thought they’d go on to win the national championship, but hey, the guy’s a good coach. He’s going places.”

The Yellow Jackets stormed through the second half of their season, advancing to the title game where they nearly blew a double-digit lead, beating LSU-Alexandria on an overtime buzzer beater from Justin Harley that made the national highlight shows.

Six years as a coach, and Doty had won his third national title.

“I’ve coached in the NAIA tournament, and when you’re doing that you’re going against 50-year-old guys who have seen everything,” Johnson said. “To navigate that three times is really impressive, but to do it at Graceland is amazing. That was a tough job, and to do what he did is unreal.”

On to the next challenge

Don Weast, the associate athletic director at Emporia State, was at the NAIA tournament to witness Doty’s third title. The Hornets were in the market for a new coach, and they zeroed in on Doty.

Once conversations were initiated, Emporia moved quickly.

“There’s just a talent that some people have, and I think Craig is just one of those guys who expects to be successful,” said Hornets athletic director Kent Weiser. “We all look at people in the profession that just sort of have a knack for it, and that certainly came through in the times we met. You just had this feeling that this guy doesn’t just say the right things – he believes them.”

But just what are those things? Doty admits the incredible success he’s had leads some to assume he has some sort of secret weapon. It’s just him. Being himself.

“Chemistry and culture – those are buzz words everyone likes to use,” Doty said when asked to explain his success. “But what is culture? It’s the establishment of a mode of operation. How do we operate? I connect with my student-athletes. My staff connects with them. I’m scared if I’m coaching in my 50s – will I still know what they’re going through?

“Right now, I think I do,” Doty continues. “I’m on Snapchat. I know the newest hip hop songs that are coming out. I hope that my players see that it’s more than just basketball with me. We talk about those things every single day, and when they know they’re more than a basketball player to you I think everything else takes care of itself.”

At Emporia State, Doty is being hailed as, if not a savior, someone who will breathe life into the program. ESU has an enrollment of just shy of 6,000, and Emporia is a city of 25,000 people. The MIAA is up there with the NSIC as one of the best conferences in Division II, but the Hornets had just one winning season in previous coach Shaun Vandiver’s seven years (he left to be an assistant at Wyoming after last year’s 9-19 season).

“Craig's had a great first couple of months out in the community getting people excited about our program,” Weiser said. “We had our first golf tournament auction and the people he talked to came up and said to me, ‘That guy’s got it together.’ We hope something special can happen here and he could lead us to it.”

If he does, Doty will surely be in line to move up another level eventually. But despite his ambitious energy, he’s not as focused on reaching the highest level as some might expect.

“I was born and raised in South Dakota and those are my roots,” says Doty, who has a son from a previous marriage and is expecting a daughter with his second wife. “Dave Boots, Scott Nagy, Perry Ford, Gary Thomas – those are the Division II coaches I’ve always looked at. I’ve had the opportunity to be a Division I assistant and that didn’t intrigue me a ton. Being a Division II coach was always the goal.

“We’re building a house in Emporia, we’re aligning ourselves to be here for many years,” Doty adds. “Sure, USD is a dream job. SDSU is a dream job – down the road. We want to focus on sustaining success here, then there’s always the possibility of those doors opening up. I’m at the right level at the right time and focusing on Emporia State.”