ISU's Ryan Looney adds another assistant coach to his staff with Devin Kastrup

New job. Moving halfway across the country. New baby. Due any day now. To be born in a new town.

“This year won’t be any different at all,” said new Idaho State assistant basketball coach Devin Kastrup, with appropriate sarcasm. “Just business as usual.”

ISU head coach Ryan Looney announced this week that Kastrup, the head coach at Cloud County Community College in Kansas, has been added to the Bengal staff. Kastrup, 31, will actually replace Cam Clark, who left ISU after one season to take a job at Houston Christian.

Akil Reece, who was added to the ISU staff last week, will take the role of what used to be the graduate assistant.

“New NCAA rules will actually allow additional coaches to be on the floor, so we changed the title of the position,” said Looney.

When the Journal caught up with Kastrup for an interview Friday morning, he was pulling a U-Haul trailer and heading out of Concordia, Kansas, where Cloud County is located, headed toward Pocatello. He and his wife Anna have found an apartment in Pocatello and Anna, who is pregnant and due with the couple’s first child any day now, will be following shortly after. She is planning to give birth in Pocatello.

Anna seems well prepared for the vagabond life of a basketball coach’s wife. When Kastrup was hired as coach at Southwestern Community College in Iowa, the couple lived in a dormitory room.

“You talk about a coach’s wife and the sacrifices they make — she’s right at the top,” Kastrup said.

Kastrup comes to Pocatello after leading Cloud County to a 21-win season − the most wins for the program since 2012. He has something of a reputation for rebuilding down-trodden programs. At Southwestern Community College, he inherited a three-win program, and in year two, he led the Spartans to 13 wins and two top-25 victories. His Cloud County teams were the school’s first ever to record double-digit conference wins in one of the toughest junior college conferences in the country, and they did it three years in a row.

Kastrup became acquainted with Looney and his assistant Joe White last fall, as the Bengals began recruiting Cloud County forward Cheikh Sow, who just signed with ISU this week, and another T-Bird who signed elsewhere.

“Ironically, I had known about coach Looney and coach White for a long time,” Kastrup said. “I knew how good of coaches they were and what kind of program they ran, but we’d never crossed paths until this year. We had a couple of guys they liked, we started building a relationship as they started to recruit them. When they had a job opening on their staff, I couldn’t have jumped on it any quicker.”

After being “the boss” for the past five years, Kastrup will have to revert back to being an assistant coach, but it’s a role he’s ready to assume.

“I’m ready to be an assistant again,” said Kastrup, who played college basketball at Southwestern Community College and Western Colorado, then later coached at both of his alma maters. “I know how I like to do things, but I feel like I have more to learn. The opportunity to serve coach Looney and learn from him, to continue to get better, I couldn’t be more thrilled.”

Idaho State will be rebuilding a team and a culture, beginning with the start of summer drills on June 10. The Bengals lost 10 scholarship players from last year’s team to graduation, medical retirement and the transfer portal. As a junior college coach, Kastrup knows what it’s like to rebuild most of your roster every year.

“I’ve basically been living the portal era for the last five years,” he said. “Junior college coaches have experience turning over a roster every single year, re-teaching your system from scratch, building your culture over and over again, managing personalities.”

The key to successful rebuilds, Kastrup said, is to start with good people.

“It’s just finding the right guys, finding high character guys,” he said. “They (ISU) have done a fantastic job in that area. All those guys (ISU’s junior college recruits), I was aware of and they have done a phenomenal job of recruiting high-character guys who want to play together and win games.”

Kastrup used Sow as an example.

“You won’t find a more kind-hearted person. He’s one of the best people — and he shows up every day, ready to work,” he said.

Kastrup said there may be some adjustment time as he learns the intricacies of Looney’s offensive and defensive philosophies, but he believes he’s pretty much on the same page already with the Bengal mentor philosophically. And as a former head coach himself, he believes he can anticipate what Looney wants and needs from his assistants.

“The thing that helps with the transition is that with my job, I know all the things I wanted my assistants to do,” he said. “The same things I can understand that coach Looney wants from his assistants. I’ve been in coach Looney’s shoes.”