Jay Spoonhour, son of iconic Charlie Spoonhour, to be hired as assistant at Missouri State
Jay Spoonhour, the son of legendary Bears head men's basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour, will be hired as an assistant coach under Dana Ford at Missouri State.
Multiple sources confirmed numerous reports of Spoonhour's hiring that was first broken by longtime News-Leader Missouri State beat reporter Lyndal Scranton on social media.
Spoonhour, 52, was most recently the head coach at Eastern Illinois where he spent nine years and finished with a 119-157 record before being let go following the 2020-21 season.
Spoonhour will replace former associate head coach Jase Herl, who left the Bears to become an assistant at North Texas.
The 1989 Glendale High grad has had many coaching stops since playing basketball at Pittsburg State. Along with EIU, he's served as an interim head coach at UNLV along with successful junior college head coaching stints at Wabash Valley and Moberly Community College where he went a combined 99-28 while winning the 2000-01 NJCAA Division I National Championship at Wabash.
Since 1994, Spoonhour has also had assistant jobs at Central Missouri, Saint Louis, Valparaiso, UNLV and UTSA. He was a graduate assistant at Mizzou from 2004-06.
Spoonhour brings a higher level of experience that Missouri State's other assistants haven't had since Ford, going into his sixth year, was named the program's head coach. He also brings a highly-respected name within the basketball world and across the Ozarks.
His father, Charlie Spoonhour, is one of the most beloved sports figures in southwest Missouri history. He coached nine seasons at Missouri State compiling a 197-81 record with five trips to the NCAA Tournament. He also coached at Saint Louis and UNLV — with his son as an assistant for several years on both staffs.
Charlie Spoonhour, the inventor of the tenacious "Spoonball" defense and inspiration behind Spoon's Temple of Doom, passed away in 2012 from a rare lung disease. He was 72.
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 Twitter at @WyattWheeler_NL.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Jay Spoonhour to be hired as Missouri State basketball assistant
