Washington Huskies Basketball: T.J. Otzelberger Hired as Assistant Coach

The news has just emerged that Coach Romar has added a new assistant to his bench, T.J. Otzelberger, who previously held the position of associate head coach at Iowa State University. While he has held this title since 2010, he has been an assistant with Iowa State for the past seven seasons.

While the information itself broke on twitter, with Dave Softy Mahler appearing to be the first one reporting, Washington posted Otzelberger’s bio on GoHuskies.com just a handful of minutes later, almost instantly proving Softy’s “sources” absolutely correct.

The bio focuses particularly on Otzelberger’s experience as a recruiter, and runs through a pretty thorough list of the players that have found success at Iowa State during his tenure, including Royce White and Craig Brackins. It also goes over Iowa State’s success in the classroom and in the community over that seven year period, and finishes with a rundown of Otzelberger’s personal history as a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and his time as an assistant at Chipola Junior College.

It is always tough to determine how much of an impact an assistant will have on a college basketball team, especially as they do not usually control specific position groups like a quarterbacks coach or a defensive line coach in football. Recruiting is certainly the place where their impact can be felt the most blatantly, and so it makes sense that recruiting history would be the meat of Otzelberger’s bio.

Hopefully he manages to make a positive impact here at Washington, though at this point I do not know enough about Otzelberger, or how his addition could impact the existing members of Romar’s staff. More information as soon as it becomes available.