Cuonzo Martin’s coaching staff with Missouri State basketball appears to be taking shape, according to a national report.
Respected national basketball insider Jeff Goodman posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday afternoon the names of three assistant coaches and a director of basketball operations who are set to join Martin’s staff.
The assistants include Carson Cunningham, Tarrance Crump and Marco Harris. Goodman lists Quinn Peterson as Martin’s director of basketball operations. Goodman left the door open for additional additions saying it was the staff Martin had put together “thus far.”
The four names have previous ties to Martin, whether connected to Purdue (Martin’s alma mater), previous assistants, or lower-ranking staff members in his earlier stops.
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Carson Cunningham
Cunningham was an assistant for Army basketball last season after serving five years as Incarnate Word’s head coach from 2018-23. He ended with a 42-105 record and never finished higher than eighth place.
His stop at Incarnate Word followed a successful five-year stretch at Carroll College (NAIA) in Montana, where he finished with a 107-52 record in five years with a pair of NAIA Elite Eight appearances.
Cunningham played at Purdue from 1998-01 when Martin was an assistant on the Boilermakers’ staff.
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Tarrance Crump
Crump was previously on DePaul’s staff as its director of player development since June 2021. The Chicago native was at Mizzou with Martin as a graduate assistant in 2020-21 after five years as an assistant at Southern Illinois Edwardsville and Southeast Missouri.
Crump served in several roles on Martin’s staff at California and Tennessee. At Cal, he was responsible for film breakdown following games, assisting in scouting reports, serving as the staff liaison to the academic supervisor and other roles. He handled many of the same duties at Tennessee in 2013-14 and was on the staff that reached the Sweet 16.
Crump was a Purdue guard from 2006-08. Martin was an assistant in the first year and the team’s associate head coach in the second.
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Marco Harris
Harris was a full-time assistant coach under Martin at Mizzou from 2019-22. After serving as Martin’s director of player development for their first three years in Columbia, he was elevated to the position.
Harris first joined Martin’s staff serving as his director of basketball operations for three years at Tennessee before following him for three years at California. The two have a close relationship dating back to growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois.
Quinn Peterson (director of basketball operations)
Peterson was an assistant on former Evansville head coach Marty Simmons’ staff at Eastern Illinois for at least three years, but it’s unclear when he departed. He, too, served on a previous Martin staff.
Peterson, a DePaul grad, worked as a graduate assistant for Martin from 2019-21 and helped coach All-SEC players Dru Smith and Jeremiah Tilmon.
Before that, he was a high school coach in Illinois with a stint at Walter Payton College Prep in Chicago from 2015-19 and an assistant coach at Oak Park-River Forest from 2011-15.
Wyatt D. Wheeler is a reporter and columnist with the Springfield News-Leader. You can contact him at 417-371-6987, by email at wwheeler@news-leader.com or X at @WyattWheeler_NL.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Missouri State basketball coaching staff under Cuonzo Martin
