Easton Bazzoli was not exactly sure what his future might hold.

A Cranberry native and 2013 Seneca Valley graduate, basketball took Bazzoli from a stellar playing career on WPIAL hardwoods to NCAA Division II Cedarville University in Ohio where the 6-foot-5 guard started for four seasons.

With his collegiate career winding down, though, Bazzoli said he was suddenly forced to contend with a reality most NCAA athletes must face.

“I wanted to play,” Bazzoli said. “I wanted to go overseas. I wanted to have a long playing career. I just wasn’t good enough. I wish I was, but I wasn’t good enough. I had a sales job lined up after college and right about a week before I was supposed to start, I knew this isn’t what I wanted to do.”

That is when Bazzoli said his future suddenly came into focus.

“I decided I was going to go all in on coaching,” he said.

Gannon University is certainly glad he did.

At just 29, Bazzoli is in his first season coaching the NCAA Division II Golden Knights and has his program holding a three-game cushion atop the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference West Division standings behind a blistering offensive attack, which is averaging 93.2 points per game — good for eighth most in the nation.

Gannon — currently ranked 23rd in the D2CSC Top 25 — is coming off one of the greatest seasons in school history a year ago. Led by former head coach Jordan Fee, the Golden Knights captured their first NCAA Atlantic Regional Championship since 2009.

Bazzoli was Fee’s top assistant coach.

“Easton’s commitment to excellence was evident during his tenure as an assistant coach,” said Gannon athletic director Lisa Goddard McGuirk. “His coaching philosophy and commitment to student-athlete development, combined with his vision for our program, afforded us an opportunity to continue our positive forward momentum.”

Bazzoli was named Gannon’s head coach last April after Fee took an assistant coaching position at Division I Florida Atlantic.

“It wasn’t until after college where I kind of really felt the drive to be involved in, specifically, college men’s lives,” Bazzoli said. “I just know the mindset piece of it. I was never the player I wanted to be, and I wanted to help guys get there. I knew how much of it is a mental thing.

“I’d say every coach I’ve had has had some effect on me.”

And that is certainly true of former longtime Seneca Valley coach Victor Giannotta.

Now an assistant men’s basketball coach at NCAA Division III La Roche, Giannotta mentored Bazzoli during his 14-year tenure leading the Raiders program.

Giannotta said he is not surprised his former player has found success as a coach so quickly.

“This is not cliché, I think that whatever it is he decided to do, he was going to be a success at because that’s just him,” said Giannotta, who coached high school basketball for 28 years before resigning from Seneca Valley in 2018. “He works and grinds. The whole time, he just did it in an affable way. He would steal the ball from you and just smile at you.

“He’s a tough competitor, didn’t like to lose, but did it in a genuinely professional fashion.”

Bazzoli averaged 15.5 points and 4 assists per game as a senior at Seneca Valley before moving on to Cedarville. He appeared in 114 collegiate games, starting 95, and scored 973 points with 526 rebounds, 201 assists and 112 steals over the course of his career.

After getting his first taste of coaching as a graduate assistant under longtime coach David Niven at Division II Union University in Jackson, Tenn., Bazzoli was promoted and ultimately served five more seasons as a paid assistant with the Bulldogs.

“Coach Niven is just, he’s a remarkable person,” Bazzoli said. “The best thing about working for him — and really is a huge key to my development as a young coach — was when you get there and you go work for him you better have some initiative because he’s just going to throw you into the fire.”

That’s when a chance encounter in the 2022 NCAA tournament changed the course of Bazzoli’s future.

Union may have lost, 81-80, to then No. 1 Nova Southeastern in the Division II South Region semifinals, but Bazzoli said he was able to reconnect with Fee, who was an assistant under legendary Sharks coach Jim Crutchfield.

Bazzoli said he was recruited by Fee while at Seneca Valley. Crutchfield and Fee were then at Division II West Liberty where the Hilltoppers’ high-paced offensive and defensive attacks were first making waves around the country.

When Fee left Nova Southeastern after the Sharks won their first national championship in 2023 to become the head coach at Gannon, Bazzoli said he had to make the tough decision to leave Union and join his staff.

“I kind of knew Jordan as a guy that everybody just kind of wildly respected,” Bazzoli said. “I kind of told my wife after reconnecting with him that he was a guy that I would go work for. We always said, me and my wife, that it was going to be really hard to leave Union because of how much we loved it, and the community, how much I liked working for coach Niven, all that stuff. We knew at some point when you want to be a head coach, you’ve got to probably make a move.”

In their one season together at Gannon, Fee led the Golden Knights to a school-record 32 victories and a trip to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament. A year before their arrival, Gannon had won just three games.

Gannon’s 24½-game turnaround between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons under Fee was the largest improvement by a program in NCAA men’s and women’s basketball history.

The Golden Knights’ success was predicated upon Fee implementing the high-paced offensive approach and tough full-court defensive attack Crutchfield first used at West Liberty and then brought to Nova Southeastern.

Under Fee, the Golden Knights averaged 100.3 points per game last season, which was good for the second-highest scoring output in the nation.

Bazzoli said he learned a great deal working under Fee during that process.

“I’m not sure any of us had it in mind that it was going to be a 32-3 season, but I think we all had in mind, ‘Hey, we are going to win a lot of games, we are going to go to the national tournament, and we are going to see how it will go,’” he said. “That was all Fee from the beginning. He did a great job of not making myself, or anybody in the program, feel like we are going to be excited about winning 12 more games than the team did the year before or whatever it is.

“Now we are going to win, and that’s the expectation.”

Gannon men’s basketball coach Easton Bazzoli, right, a Seneca Valley product, is in his first season as a head coach and has the Golden Knights alone atop the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference West Division standings. (Courtesy of Gannon athletics)

Bazzoli has kept that mindset alive at Gannon, in addition to many of the same philosophies he garnered over his seven seasons as an assistant coach.

“Systematically, our style is definitely more of what we did a year ago with Jordan,” Bazzoli said. “If you come and watch us play to the naked eye, that’s all that we do, but there’s a lot of things I’ve taken from coach Niven as well. I tried to make the style and system have a little bit of my own touch to it.”

Even with a 106-84 loss against California University of Pennsylvania Saturday, Gannon is (16-6, 11-3) and well on its way to again finishing atop the PSAC West standings.

Sophomore guard Ernest Shelton is averaging a team-high 19.3 points per game for the Golden Knights, while sophomore forward Tasman Goodrick is scoring 14.9 points per outing, freshman guard Pace Prosser is chipping in 13.8 points per game, and graduate student guard Justin DeBuck is adding 11.8 points per game.

“It’s really fun,” said DeBuck, who transferred to Gannon from Union, where he played under Bazzoli. “Maybe I’m a little biased because I’m here, but it’s really fun. I tell the guys all the time, all the freshmen, ‘You guys don’t understand how spoiled you are.’ This is so much fun. There is so much freedom in our offense, and even on defense everything is really instinct based and an awareness thing.

“He gives us so much freedom here,” DeBuck added of Bazzoli. “He’s really big on maximizing everyone’s skills.”

And that’s exactly what Bazzoli said he intends on continuing to do — with the help of his staff.

Bazzoli said assistant coaches Mike Chalas, JC Hawkins and Brandon Richardson have been an integral part of Gannon’s success. Chalas joined Bazzoli’s staff after winning a national title at Nova Southeastern two years ago, while Hawkins was previously a player and graduate assistant at Union.

“We are driven to figure out how to make another big jump here in the next month or so as we hopefully put ourselves in a position to have a high seed going into the national tournament,” Bazzoli said. “I think any expectation, at the end of the day, I hope that I’m always coaching at a place that has the expectation of winning because that will be my expectation.”

Bazzoli said he and his wife, Katrina, and their 2-year-old daughter, Kaiya, have made a home in Erie and around Gannon’s program. He said Katrina is expecting the couple’s second child, a son, later this year.

“I can’t look at my career and where we are and where we’ve been and the people and the relationships we’ve had without looking at it and feeling like this is just God intervening in our lives and making things happen for us,” Bazzoli said. “I just try and remain grateful for every single thing that we have.”

John is a copy editor and page designer at the Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at jsanta@unionprogress.com.

John Santa

John is a copy editor and page designer at the Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at jsanta@unionprogress.com.