Cason joins Smart, Rams

Kris Mason
Contributing Writer

The VCU men’s basketball program hired assistant coach David Cason to join Shaka Smart’s coaching staff on April 24. Cason spent the past three seasons in the same position at Vanderbilt University. He will fill the void left by former Rams assistant Mike Rhoades, who became the head coach at Rice University  in March.

Cason joins Jeremy Ballard and Mike Morrell as assistants to Smart. 

The highlight of Cason’s tenure at Vanderbilt was in 2012 when the Commodores won the SEC Tournament Championship to reach the NCAA Tournament.

Cason played for Vandy head coach Kevin Stallings at Illinois State University from 1993-95. Like Smart, Cason is a former point guard. He led the Missouri Valley Conference in assists in his two years at ISU.

Cason got his break in the coaching world at the University of Notre Dame in 2000 before becoming the director of basketball operations at the University of North Carolina. He stayed at UNC for two seasons before taking a job at Texas Christian University, where he also stayed for two years.

In 2005, Cason accepted a job at the University of Tulsa. He was on the staff for six seasons and was the associate head coach for his final three seasons there. In 2010, he was named the best assistant coach in Conference USA in a Foxsports.com survey of C-USA head coaches.

Cason joined Vanderbilt as an assistant in 2012.

The coaching shakeup marks the third straight season Smart has lost an assistant coach.

Mike Jones was hired by Radford University in 2011, Jamion Christian was hired by Mount St. Mary’s University in 2012 and Will Wade was hired by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013.

Smart now has no remaining staff members from the original group he assembled during his hiring in 2009.