The routine is nothing new to Tad Boyle. After completing his 16th season as the men’s basketball coach at Colorado, Boyle could probably follow that routine with his eyes closed.
Granted, the spring routine has intensified in recent years, as open player movement via the transfer portal has made the spring recruiting period as vital, if not more, than frequenting the prep recruiting showcases. Yet Boyle has been compiling CU’s roster for nearly full two decades, and this spring marked a significant first.
Boyle’s 17th team at CU will be his first that wasn’t co-authored by Mike Rohn.
Certainly Colorado’s now-former associate head coach played his part in landing a freshman class set to include Phoenix-area wing Rider Portela as well as a pair of Australian recruits, guard Alex Dickeson and forward Goc Malual, who first made contact with CU during the program’s exhibition tour through Australia last summer.
Yet for the first time since he was hired in 2010, Boyle is constructing a roster for a season that won’t include Rohn’s influence on the CU bench. After 16 seasons with the Buffs, at Kansas City, where Rohn has deep family ties.
“Mike was our recruiting coordinator, but we’ve got three coaches in Danny Manning, Bill Grier and Nate Tomlinson who’ve got a lot of experience in recruiting,” Boyle said. “Are we going to miss coach Rohn? Absolutely. We’re going to miss him in a lot of different areas, recruiting being one of them. But those three guys are fully capable of evaluating and identifying talent, getting kids to campus.”
Boyle has had the luxury of taking some time to fill Rohn’s spot thanks to the wealth of experience remaining on CU’s staff. Manning was an All-American at Kansas and, following a 15-year NBA career, served as the head coach at Tulsa, Wake Forest and, briefly, Maryland, after Turgeon resigned in the middle of the 2021-22 season.
Grier formerly was the head coach at San Diego and his own lengthy experience at CU — he just finished his 10th season with the Buffs — has been overshadowed by Rohn’s longevity. And Tomlinson, a former Buffs guard, returned to CU this season after stints working under former Buffs assistant Kim English at George Mason and Providence, establishing recruiting ties on the East Coast. A native of Australia, Tomlinson still has deep relationships to his home country that helped land Dickeson and Malual.
Tomlinson played for Boyle during Boyle’s first two seasons at CU and remains the proverbial bleeding-black-and-gold type whose enthusiasm resonates with the players. That enthusiasm led to a pair of unusual assistant technical fouls this past season, one of which was costly during an overtime loss at BYU, but Boyle cited Tomlinson’s connections and basketball charisma for helping to fill the void left by Rohn.
“Obviously Nate Tomlinson’s really dialed-in to Australia,” Boyle said. “His dad coaches over there and he’s on top of a lot of the good young kids that are there.
“He’s got great relationship with our players. He bleeds black and gold. There’s not a lot of negative things about Nate. But I might have to tame him down on the bench a little bit.”
