Radford University athletic director Robert Lineburg says Coach Mike Jones has been rewarded with a four-year contract extension because of his success both on and off the basketball court.
Mike Jones
This past season, the Highlanders won the Big South Tournament, advancing to the NCAA Tournament with an automatic bid and winning the school’s first ever NCAA contest. Radford downed LIU-Brooklyn before falling to eventual national champion, Villanova.
“Coming off the season we had, we just thought he deserved an extension,” Lineburg said Wednesday. “We look forward to what he and his staff can accomplish here.”
The coach’s contract was scheduled to run out next year, and Lineburg felt now was the right time to extend it through the 2021-22 season.
“The biggest component for the extension is finishing in the top three of the conference, competing for a championship and winning the Big South, and Jones has done that,” Lineburg said.
The new contract comes with a $25,000 increase up from $205,000 to $230,000 and includes several bonuses built on performances similar to the former contract.
Lineburg said that includes winning the Big South Tournament and taking the team to another NCAA Tournament, and the increase is not limited to just Jones. His three full-time assistant coaches also received salary increases.
“Both he and his staff have done a great job with our student-athletes both on and off the court. We think Radford University basketball is at the top of the Big South Conference, and he has managed to do that,” Lineburg said.
The Radford men’s basketball program posted a four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) score of 980 and a 1,000 in 2016-17. The APR, created to be a more real-time measurement of academic success than graduation rates, is a team-based metric through which scholarship student-athletes earn one point for remaining eligible and one point for staying in school or graduating each term. To compete in the 2018-19 postseason, teams must achieve a 930 four-year APR.
Jones, his team and Lineburg have all been out-of-the-country for the past month and were unable to be reached until this week.
The basketball team spent three weeks in Europe on a preseason exhibition tour. Jones has a 116-116 overall mark at Radford University.
The basketball team returns three starters to a squad that finished with 23 wins. They add Kansas State grad-transfer Mawdo Sallah along with three freshman newcomers this coming season.
He was named the 2018 National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) District 3 Coach of the Year.
Jones just completed his seventh season at the helm of the Radford men’s basketball program after taking over in 2011.
During his tenure, Radford has defeated Power Conference foes Georgetown, Virginia Tech and Penn State. He is only the third coach in school history to reach 100 wins.
Jones spent the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons at VCU, which included a magical run to the 2011 Final Four with wins over USC, Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas. While on Shaka Smart’s staff, the Rams posted 55 wins over the final two seasons Jones was on the staff, the highest total over any two-year span in program history.
Prior to his second coaching stop in Virginia at VCU, Jones served a six-year stint on Dennis Felton’s bench at Georgia from 2003-09. While at Georgia, Jones made a name for himself when Rivals.com selected him as one of the nation’s Top-25 recruiters in 2005.
Jones also previously worked under John Beilein at Richmond from 2000-02 and during the early stages of Beilein’s rebuilding project at West Virginia in 2002-03.