On June 1, head Coach Rob Murphy and Eastern Michigan University’s men’s basketball team announced Kevin Mondro will be joining the Eagles as an assistant coach for the 2011-12 season. Mondro is one of many new faces soon to be seen on the Eagles’ sidelines, including Murphy and assistant coach Mike Brown.
Prior to coming to EMU, 36-year-old Mondro was an assistant coach at Loyola (Chicago) University for three years.
He is a native of Dover, New Hampshire, but he spent most of his childhood in Brownston, Michigan, where he graduated from Riverview Gabriel Richard High School in 1993. While in high school, Mondro earned All-Catholic League honors for basketball. He is now married to Liza Mondro.
Mondro graduated from the University of Detroit Mercy with a bachelor’s in communications in 1997 after earning three basketball letters with the Titans.
He then joined the UDM coaching staff as their director of operations for four years, after which he was promoted to a full-time assistant position in the 1998-99 season. He was with the Titans for 11 years, spending his last 5 years as the associate head coach and the second half of the 2007-08 season as the interim head coach after Perry Watson took a leave of absence.
While with the Titans, Mondro worked primarily with the perimeter players and helped current Philadelphia 76ers guard, Willie Green, earn Horizon League Player of the Year accolades in 2003. Mondro also had an active hand in scouting and scheduling, while serving as the staff’s recruiting coordinator and director of the Perry Watson Basketball Camp.
During Modnro’s tenure in Detroit, the Titans recorded four consecutive 20-plus win seasons, qualified for the NCAA Tournament two years in a row (1997-98 and 1998-99) and were also selected for two National Invitation Tournament bids in 2000-01 and 2001-02.
In the 2007-08 season, Mondro joined the ranks at Loyola as an assistant coach for the men’s basketball team.
There, he helped coach two the best players in program history, J.R. Blount and Andy Polka. The Ramblers posted 44 total wins and graduated all of their seniors in those three years while he was there.
Mondro will now get on board with newly hired head coach Rob Murphy and assistant Mike Brown as they look to change the atmosphere and culture of the EMU men’s basketball team and turn that into productive seasons.
“First, I’d like to change the culture of the program as a whole,” Murphy said. “Make the guys believe in themselves, in myself as their coach, as well as pushing them towards academic success while making them believe that they can win.”
