Ed DeChellis Saved ETSU Basketball
Upon his retirement, the job he did with the Buccaneers needs to be told. Especially because it was not fully appreciated during its occurrence.
There may be no coach who was asked to do more at East Tennessee State and succeeded than Ed DeChellis did as head men’s basketball coach from 1996–2003.
And perhaps no other coach in ETSU history is less appreciated.
The reasons why speak negatively of the Tri-Cities community; of insularity and small-time thinking equating high school sports to college.
But without DeChellis, the likelihood is ETSU basketball isn’t viewed as the respected mid-major program it is today.
Conventional wisdom says Buccaneers basketball took off in 1989 when they made their first of four straight NCAA Tournament appearances; the so-called “Glory Days” of the program.
But in very short order the program fell. When DeChellis came to Johnson City, he inherited a last place team that, unbeknownst to the public, was failing as much in the classroom as they were on the court.
And while 30 years later the losing seasons of the 1990s look like a bump in the road in Bucs basketball history to those that didn’t live through them, in 1996 it was quite possible ETSU would return to becoming the perennial losers they were prior to 1989.
Instead, despite facing a skeptical public who viewed him as an outsider, DeChellis cemented ETSU basketball as a winning program by beginning a streak of 19 winning seasons in 21 years to start the 21st century, a record of unparalleled consistency in Buccaneers history.
Coinciding with ETSU’s demise prior to DeChellis’ arrival was the success of Johnson City’s Science Hill High School. As the Buccaneers swiftly fell to their nadir, the Hilltoppers climbed to their zenith, winning back-to-back state championships in 1994 and 1995.
Suddenly, ETSU basketball games weren’t being televised on WJHL anymore. I distinctly remember a caller to a WJCW’s sports talk show complaining Bucs games were aired instead of Hilltoppers games when their schedules overlapped in the fall of 1994.
A rouge caller? Perhaps. But by the following season, before online streaming, not only were locally-produced telecasts of ETSU games eliminated, but it was commonplace for high school games to pre-empt ETSU basketball games on flagship radio station WJCW.
Attendance fell accordingly. During the 1991–92 season the Bucs averaged 8,410 fans per game.
In 1995–96, they drew 4,281.
And townie as it was, ETSU basketball had fallen behind Science Hill in local media exposure.
There was even a buzz around the Tri-Cities that Science Hill could beat ETSU on the hardwood, which, incredibly, was not dismissed by the local media.
Instead, the local media pushed the idea of Science Hill head coach George Pitts as the next ETSU head coach.
Such was the environment DeChellis came in to. And it also didn’t help he was the least known of the four candidates interviewed for the job, which a list including Buzz Peterson, Derrick Whittenburg, and Dave Hanners.
So why DeChellis?
When DeChellis arrived, only one player, Kyle Keeton, was academically eligible to play the following season.
Even after tutoring the veteran players and recruiting new ones ETSU could still only suit up 10 players in 1996–97. For their third game of the season just seven players were available due to a mixture of academics, injuries, and illnesses.
The program was nothing short of a train wreck.
But DeChellis was an assistant under Bruce Parkhill and Jerry Dunn at Penn State, a men’s basketball team with a 100 percent graduation rate.
The Nittany Lions were just off their first nationally ranked season in more than 40 years even though they’d moved from the Atlantic 10 Conference to the Big Ten.
For a program in peril, DeChellis was the perfect fit.
Still, even though it was the height of insular thinking, many locals clamored for Pitts. At one point in 1996 the Johnson City Press ran letters for six weeks from fans actually upset a local high school coach was not considered for the ETSU job.
It was as if they’d never heard of Gerry Faust.
Or, for that matter, the academic problems of Science Hill basketball players. Pitts never produced a four-year Division I basketball player as Hilltoppers coach. At one point in the ’90s some place called Northern Idaho Junior College had three ex-Science Hill players on their roster.
Historically there was often a feeling of a “town and gown” divide between ETSU and Johnson City, and DeChellis/Pitts was part of that.
But it’s hard to fault DeChellis for the divide. He didn’t start it. He came in to it.
And the dirty little secret is almost all of the players Pitts coached at Science Hill flopped in college.
It all came to a head in 2000 when Science Hill star Demetric Stevens signed with Appalachian State, then a conference rival of ETSU.
Stevens told Doug Fritz of the Johnson City Press he wasn’t heavily recruited by ETSU.
In an adjacent article by Fritz published in the March 30, 2000 edition of the Press, Pitts expressed criticism of DeChellis for not recruiting “local talent that can no doubt play in the Southern Conference and help a team win a championship.”
Except DeChellis DID recruit such local talent. When ETSU returned to the NCAA Tournament in 2003, Rogersville’s Ryan Lawson was a starting guard and Honaker’s Brad Knuckles, who had spurned Clemson for ETSU, began a career that saw him score more than a thousand points for the Buccaneers.
And Stevens wasn’t such a player. He never played a game at Appalachian State and wound up at Division II Lees-McRae.
Surely then the community would recognize how the Buccaneers were improving under DeChellis; from one player in 1996 to 17–11 in 1999.
Surely they’d see how the players he was bringing in, such as Jerald Fields and Zakee Wadood, were better than anyone playing high school basketball in northeast Tennessee.
They didn’t.
The 2000–01 ETSU men’s basketball team finished with the best record in the Southern Conference for the first time in nine seasons.
They drew 2,198 fans per game. As of this 2025 writing, this is the lowest attendance figure for ETSU basketball of the past 46 years save for 2021, when no attendance figures were recorded due to COVID-19.
The next season the Buccaneers again finished with the best record in the Southern Conference in 2002 and returned to the NCAA Tournament in 2003.
You might think those skeptical of DeChellis were won over. He’d taken the Bucs from rags to riches both on the court and in the classroom, as all the players he’d recruited were graduating.
Continuing to clamor for a high school coach would obviously be small minded and silly.
But instead, one might read Fritz write of Pitts “there’s no better coach in Tennessee” after the former Science Hill coach left for Brentwood Academy in 2001.
After ETSU played a spirited NCAA Tournament game against Wake Forest that was tied with less than 30 seconds left before the Bucs fell 76–73, DeChellis left ETSU to go back to his alma mater, Penn State, where he coached for the next eight years. He led the Nittany Lions to a school-record 27 victories and the NIT Championship in 2009 and one of just six NCAA appearances the Nittany Lions have enjoyed in the past 70 years in 2011 before departing for Navy, where he won a regular season Patriot League championship in 2021.
DeChellis retired on March 19 after 29 years as a Division I college head coach.
Yet somehow it seemed George Pitts, who eventually became King College’s head men’s basketball coach in 2006, received more defense from the local media when his coaching career ended with his program on probation than DeChellis received praise for righting the Buccaneers’ ship.
Even after the Murry Bartow era ended in 2015 there were still fans calling in to talk shows suggesting ETSU hire a 69-year-old Pitts with no Division I coaching experience.
And that insular, high school mentality still prevails in the Tri-Cities.
It’s why ETSU athletic director Scott Carter hired George Quarles based on his record as Maryville High School football coach to guide the Buccaneers, and why ETSU fell from 11–2 in 2021 to consecutive 3–8 seasons despite having the majority of starters return in 2022.
It’s why we no longer have professional baseball in the Tri-Cities. Instead of one team for all of the region to bond over with future major league stars, we’re still stuck in the high school mentality of local town against town featuring games played by amateurs in the Appalachian League.
It’s why newspapers in Bristol, Elizabethton, and Greeneville that once covered ETSU athletics with beat writers practically ignore them now and focus on high schools, as does tricitiessports.com.
It’s why when the Johnson City Press started a podcast featuring their sportswriters, all they talked about was high school football.
It’s why ETSU basketball no longer plays at a 12,000-seat venue and has given up on drawing the crowds they did during their program’s heyday, instead actually submitting to high school by playing on the Science Hill campus in a 6,149-seat arena.
Make no doubt, the area’s romanticism of high school basketball in the ’90s not only contributed to the Bucs losing three quarters of their attendance during the era but is still felt today. Even the 2019–20 ETSU basketball team that won a school record 30 games drew roughly half the crowds (4,706) the 1992 team that beat Arizona in the NCAA Tournament did.
That’s what a media promoting minors instead of men does to a Division I basketball program over time.
To say nothing of the community. Playing on a high school campus with no commercial property surrounding it, let alone playing Saturday games in the afternoon or early evening, eliminates any idea of making attending an ETSU basketball game part of a “night on the town.”
It’s no coincidence that Walnut Street, once the hub of nightlife in Johnson City, is now dead, or that the restaurant property at 1709 W. State of Franklin Road has been a revolving door of failure with Bojangles closing and Biscuit Doodle failing.
With tens of thousands of people transplanted from a college to a high school campus, the subsequent demise of restaurants and bars surrounding ETSU is no surprise.
And this small minded, townie thinking is also the mindset that allows the Tri-Cities to fall from being the 92nd largest television market in 1990 to the 101st in 2025.
But the bottom line is while this mindset likely holds the Tri-Cities back, it didn’t hold back DeChellis.
His 29 seasons as a Division I college basketball head coach are the most of anyone who ever guided the Buccaneers.
It’s high time the public give DeChellis the recognition he deserves for building the foundation for a winning basketball program at ETSU.
Back in 1996 as a young sports talk show host, Marky Billson was the first member of the Tri-Cities media to tell the public DeChellis was the real deal. Subscribe to his medium page and follow his ETSU Buccaneers Commentary and Trivia page on Facebook and his You Tube channel.
