Darian DeVries found a love for basketball in rural Iowa, long before he became IU’s coach

As Indiana basketball’s season gets underway on Wednesday with its season opener against Alabama A&M, The Herald-Times is rolling out a weekly three-part series on new coach Darian DeVries that chronicles his career. In Part 1, writer Michael Niziolek traces DeVries’ passion for basketball that led him into coaching.

Read the Road to Assembly Hall: Part 1, Part 2 (Nov. 12), Part 3 (Nov. 19)

BLOOMINGTON — Newly hired Indiana basketball coach Darian DeVries looked up at the Assembly Hall jumbotron only to see his own face staring back at him. His return trip to the famed venue was a bit different than when he walked through the doors years earlier as a visiting assistant.

On March 19, DeVries was introduced as the 31st coach in IU history.

He arrived at the stadium straight from the Monroe County Airport weeks before turning 50 years old, never having stepped foot on campus during the interview process. The parties spoke informally through intermediaries before the end of the season, but didn’t have any serious negotiations until West Virginia fell short of making the NCAA tournament.

DeVries was in Bloomington three days later for an introductory press conference, one of the simpler tasks on a lengthy to-do list that included a complete overhaul of the Hoosiers’ roster.

While athletic department staffers prepped behind the scenes, DeVries took a minute to breathe in the history of a stadium that carries the weight of the state’s proud basketball tradition, from Branch McCracken Court to the championship banners hanging in the rafters.

DeVries felt the weight of the moment as he drifted out onto the court alongside his wife Ashley, and two children, Tucker and Tatum.

For a Midwestern native who grew up with a basketball in his hands, landing the keys to an iconic Big Ten program he long viewed as the mecca of college basketball was the culmination of a lifelong journey that started on a weathered slab of concrete outside DeVries’ childhood home in Aplington, Iowa.

How Darian DeVries trained for basketball in hometown Aplington, Iowa

DeVries, the oldest of five siblings, grew up on a five-acre property in rural Iowa where the family marked each passing season by the sport they played. He went from football to basketball to tennis while mixing in golf as he grew older, and the cycle repeated itself through the years in a small town of 1,116 residents that doesn’t even have a stop light.

Outside a lengthy list of daily chores, there was little else to do.

To get in extra practice time, DeVries and his brother Jared pleaded with their father, Vern, to expand the driveway outside the garage to give them more room to shoot hoops. Vern relented and it became a family project when Darian was in the fifth grade.

Darian used a tape measure to put the finishing touches on the court, laying down proper dimensions for a 3-point line before adding duct tape, a process he repeated every few years. The faded lines from that tape all these years later reveal his dedication to the sport.

The court became a place where Darian could practice 365 days a year — the siblings shoveled snow off it during the winter — and well after the sun set thanks to the spotlight Vern installed over the garage.

“It wasn’t really lit up, but it was just enough,” Darian’s younger brother Dusty said. “The net is still there. It’s crazy it lasted that long.”

Long before Darian built a resume worthy of the Iowa High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame, he was recognized around Aplington for dribbling his basketball from one end of town to another, gravel roads be damned.

He was part of a small group of like-minded friends who spent their Saturdays honing their fundamentals on the side of the road with one of the area’s longtime assistant coaches, Speed Limberg, barking out directions like a drill instructor.

“I tried to find the harder smooth spot otherwise the ball would go flying in the ditch,” Darian said. “And those were deep ditches.”

The end destination for the weekly workouts was usually a now-defunct Dairy Sweet in town where Darian would order a twist cone. The true reward was the work itself — he’d lived for the challenge and competition sports provided for as long as he can remember.

“It’s just the way I was wired,” Darian said.

Darian DeVries leads Aplington boys basketball to state championships, long winning streak

Darian’s former high school still holds faint echoes of his decorated preps career.

He was the starting point guard for an Aplington team that won back-to-back Class A state championships in 1991 and 1992 (the only basketball titles in school history) with an undefeated record.

They put together a 75-game win streak that continued after Aplington’s school district merged with Parkersburg when DeVries was a senior. Most of those wins came in a building that now houses the area’s middle school.

The district removed a third floor known for being unbearably hot and the large silver globe that once sat on the roof was installed outside the front entrance to welcome visitors, but the display cases outside the school’s modest-sized gymnasium have been a permanent fixture.

That’s where the trophies Darian helped bring home are prominently featured alongside faded newspaper clippings celebrating the team’s achievements.

“My first real memory of him playing basketball was his freshman year of high school,” Darian’s younger sister Jodi Vogt (née DeVries) said. “He started on the varsity team, and I think he weighed like 110 pounds soaking wet. He just had a court sense you couldn’t describe; he was just always so savvy.”

The gym struggled to accommodate all the fans who dedicated their Friday nights to the team. Most businesses around town closed during Aplington’s games, home or away.

Fans arriving less than an hour before tipoff rarely got a seat.

“It was crazy, it was pandemonium,” Aplington-Parkersburg’s current middle school principal Brian Buseman said of the fan support. “It really was.”

Darian’s brother Jared remembers lines forming outside the school for preliminary rounds of the state tournament as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day. Jared, who was 13 months younger than Darian, was part of those state title teams alongside his brother.

The build-up before games was a scene straight out of a movie that fans currently rooting for Darian will be plenty familiar with.

“The gym would only hold 2,000 people,” Jared said. “I don’t know if we realized what it meant at the time, but it was really only the kind of stuff you see in something like ‘Hoosiers.’ Everybody was just pulling for each other. It was unbelievable.”

For a certain generation, Aplington-Parkersburg’s loss to MFL MarMac High School in the 1993 substate tournament was a moment crystalized in time.

Aplington-Parkersburg’s win streak came to an end against a Bulldogs team led by Raef LaFrentz, one of the greatest basketball players to come out of the state. The former Iowa Mr. Basketball still holds nine program records at the school.

“Damn Raef,” Darian said with a laugh. “I’ll tell you something, we were 2 for 21 from 3-point range in the game. We made the first one of the game and the last one, and I didn’t hit any.”

Darian’s father offered a more colorful description of Aplington-Parkersburg’s shooting woes.

“They couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but that’s the way it goes sometimes,” Vern said.

The loss made for an emotional drive back home for the entire family.

“I remember just hugging my mom and bawling my eyes out while she’s carrying me out to the car,” Darian’s youngest brother Jay said. “I think it’s why I still can’t stand to lose, those things stick with you big time. Everyone in town felt it.”

Darian DeVries plays college basketball at Northern Iowa, sets coaching path

Darian went on to play for Northern Iowa where met his future wife, Ashley, through mutual friends at a time when he was starting to consider what came after his playing days.

They shared similar small-town roots — Ashley is from Duncan, South Carolina, and spent her formative years across the state from Darian in Eldridge — and athletic backgrounds. She was a standout basketball and volleyball player before a shoulder injury derailed her career.

After attending junior college, she transferred to UNI where she eventually met Darian, who she didn’t even know was a basketball player.

“I was a Hawkeyes fan,” Ashley said with a laugh. “I had seen him play Iowa before on television, but I didn’t even know that was him until after the fact.”

They were engaged by the time Darian put his playing career in the rearview mirror. He received an overture from a team in Holland, but only gave it the briefest of considerations.

“I had pretty reasonable expectations about how long my career would last,” Darian said.

He thought his teaching degree would offer the most straightforward path to getting into coaching. He envisioned being the same type of mentor for young student-athletes as the ones he had growing up in Aplington.

Ashley caught a glimpse of a future that never was when she visited Darian during the 18 weeks he spent as a student-teacher working with fourth graders in Cedar Falls.

“I was in education, too, but I had high school students, so I didn’t really know what to expect,” Ashley said. “He was so good at it. He was just so comfortable in front of the class and really just a natural. The kids, honestly, loved him.”

Ultimately, Darian wanted to teach in order to coach, and decided to dedicate all his efforts to that singular pursuit.

Darian’s inner circle had already seen ample evidence he would thrive in the profession like when his sister asked him for help writing up a scouting report for her basketball theory coaching class taught by UNI women’s hall of fame basketball coach, Tony DiCecco.

“Tony was like. ‘This is really good,’” Vogt said. “I was like, ‘I have to be honest with you, I can’t take credit for any of that. Darian helped me with the whole thing.’”

The frequent trips he made from Cedar Falls during UNI’s offseason to lift weights and hit the court with the Aplington-Parkersburg students looking to follow in his footsteps was similar proof. Darian had the same focus and determination for those informal, voluntary workouts that he brought to the bench while leading Drake to the top of the Missouri Valley Conference.

“He was young and just a college player, but we all listened,” his longtime friend Aaron Thomas said. “He was intense and fiery. He’s 50 years old (now) and still fiery, but imagine him at 21. He knew what he was talking about and he took time to help us all get better.”

Thomas later played for DeVries on a local AAU team, Martin Brothers, that popped up in the area. DeVries spent a few offseasons during college as one of the team’s assistant coaches.

“He appreciated the impact of the coaches he had, and saw the value of being around athletics,” Thomas said. “I think once he got into UNI and college, playing basketball there, he just wanted to coach basketball. He bleeds it. He loves it.”

How Dana Altman gave Darian DeVries a job with Creighton men’s basketball

Darian’s foray into the profession came at a fortuitous time with collegiate coaches expanding their staffs by adding more graduate manager positions.

His career still might not have ever got off the ground without a little help from UNI basketball coach Eldon Miller. He had a lengthy Rolodex of contacts in the business from his three-plus decades on the bench.

Three potential landing spots for Darian emerged thanks to Miller’s efforts cold-calling coaches he knew to see who had openings. Wyoming coach Larry Shyatt expressed interest along with Southeast Missouri coach Gary Garner and Creighton coach Dana Altman.

“When Eldon called me a second time, I knew he was really serious about it,” Altman said.

The in-person interview Darian had with Altman was memorable for all the wrong reasons. He had a staff infection on one of his front teeth that swelled up right before they had their sit down. He was in pain for the entire thing, but was too nervous to say anything about it.

“Larry Shyatt took the Clemson job, so that opportunity kind of fell through,” Darian said. “Fortunately, Dana (Altman) decided, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna create that position and do that.’”

Darian and Ashley moved to Omaha as newlyweds.

She got a job at a vet to support them with Darian spending long hours studying for his masters and working on Creighton’s staff. He didn’t get paid anything from the university and was even required to be a study hall monitor for three to four hours a night during the week in addition to his regular manager duties.

They lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Hamburger Helper.

“If we added something to the Hamburger Helper, that was considered a gourmet dinner,” Darian said.

The first challenge he faced was walking into a locker room with players he competed against. Northern Iowa and Creighton weren’t considered rivals as members of the MVC, but the “heated” battles they had during Darian’s playing career weren’t easily forgotten.

“I remember the first day I walked down into the locker room, it was actually in the weight room and coach (Altman) introduced me to the team,” Darian said. “They were like, ‘That guy’s with us now?’”

Darian won over the locker room and Altman in equal measure during his two years as a graduate assistant. After DeVries wrapped up his master’s degree, Altman created an equipment manager position he never had before.

“We just made up a job to keep him around,” Altman said with a chuckle.

The restricted-earnings spot he earned the following year turned into a recruiting position within a matter of weeks when Kevin McKenna took the head job at Nebraska–Omaha. 

“I got really lucky, because I don’t know if he could’ve hired me into a recruiting position at that time,” DeVries said. “I had no experience, no anything, but because he’d already put me there, it was like, better make it work.”

DeVries may have been nervous given his lack of direct experience, but Altman didn’t have any reservations about promoting him.

“He was just really sharp, picked things up really quick,” Altman said. “Did a great job. I knew he was really good right from the start.”

Former Creighton athletic director Bruce Rasmussen, who was a fellow UNI alum, watched DeVries make the most out of the opportunity from directly across the hall. Rasmussen’s office was mixed in among the basketball staff and the administrator had the same high opinion of DeVries as Altman did.

“Dana was giving everything he had to the job, and he expected that commitment from his staff,” Rasmussen said. “And don’t forget, you only had a couple assistants in those days, you didn’t have 15 staff members like they have now. You had to be all in with Dana to get his respect and trust, and Darian earned that.”

Even at the bottom rungs of the coaching ladder with long hours and little pay, DeVries knew he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

“Really, like, the first weeks on the job,” DeVries said with a wistful smile. “I was like, ‘I love this.’”

Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.