UIC Flames hoops coach fired + replacement hired

[Rogobob77]

UIC has parted ways with Steve McClain.

[dennycrane]

What a difference a day makes!! A week ago tonight UIC had pulled the upset of the season in Horizon League play, beating regular season champion Wright State easily in the semifinal round. Clearly, the long delay between games, which is attributed to the double bye, hurt WSU significantly. Regardless, so impressed was analyst Dan Dakich, who is not an easy listen, by the way, that he compared UIC favorably with Big Ten teams he had seen throughout the year. The next night, UIC lost the championship game and their coach was axed. Perhaps there were issues behind the scenes at UIC, but McClain made considerably more progress than Howard Moore did is his five year term as coach. This move seems impulsive.

I did some further looking and Moore was the Flames' only other head coach since Jimmy Collins, who led the Flames to the 1998 NCAA tournament, along with the Titans and Butler. It's the only year in memory when our league received three bids to the Big Dance. Collins coached in Chicago until 2010.

[NC Titan]

From this morning's newspaper:

Illinois-Chicago hired former Texas and Michigan assistant Luke Yaklich as basketball coach on Thursday. Yaklich, 43, played at Illinois State before serving as an assistant at his alma mater from 2013-2017.

From his Wikipedia bio:

Yaklich served as an assistant coach at Illinois State under Dan Muller from 2013 to 2017. He knew Muller from their time in college together at Illinois State, and he helped the team reach the NIT in 2015 and 2017. On August 4, 2017, Luke Yaklich was announced as a new assistant coach on the Michigan basketball staff. Muller recommended Yaklich for the position to Michigan's John Beilein. Yaklich served as Michigan's defensive specialist and helped the team reach the 2018 NCAA Tournament Championship game. In his two seasons on the bench, Michigan compiled a 63-15 record. In May 2019, Yaklich was hired as an assistant at Texas under Shaka Smart.