Scott Spinelli enters his third season with the Nebraska men’s basketball team in 2005-06 and first as associate head coach.
Spinelli, who is considered one of the top young coaches in the country, came to the Huskers in 2003 after two seasons at Loyola University in Chicago. He spent two seasons as an assistant coach with the Huskers, helping Nebraska attract two highly rated recruiting classes before he was promoted to associate head coach in the summer of 2005.
Spinelli has practice and game-day coaching assignments and has worked with NU’s perimeter players in each of his first two seasons. He will also represent the Nebraska basketball program in the head coach’s absence.
The past two seasons Spinelli has worked with the Huskers' perimeter players, including guard Joe McCray, who set the Big 12 Conference freshman record with 80 3-pointers last year. McCray, who ranked second in Nebraska history for 3-pointers,
was an honorable-mention All-Big 12 selection (coaches) as a freshman, as he set the NU freshman scoring average record (15.5 ppg) and was sixth in rebounds (140).
Spinelli spends a great deal of his time focusing on recruiting for the Huskers. He quickly made his presence felt as he was the primary recruiter for a pair of prep standouts ranked in the top 100 nationally (C Aleks Maric, G Joe McCray) in Fall 2003 and another in Fall 2004 (G Jamel White).
Spinelli holds a wealth of knowledge on the basketball court. Over the past decade, he has served as a Division I assistant coach, an assistant coach and scout at the professional level and head coach at the prep school level.
Spinelli came to the Huskers after spending two seasons (2001-02 and 2002-03) as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Loyola University in Chicago. At Loyola, he was in charge of organizing all the recruiting activities while assisting in the preparation of game plans and scheduling, practice planning and game day coaching responsibilities. Spinelli helped the Ramblers to 32 wins over two seasons ? the program's most in a two-year span since the mid-1980s ? including a berth in the championship game of the 2002 Horizon League Tournament.
One of the top recruiters in the nation, Spinelli recruited and developed Paul McMillan, a junior college transfer who won the Horizon League’s Newcomer-of-the-Year Award in 2003. It was the first time a Rambler had earned the honor in 15 years. Spinelli’s first recruiting class for the Ramblers also included Terrance Whiters, who was ranked among the top 70 overall prospects in the country and among the top 20 point guards nationally by ESPN.com. Spinelli was recognized as one of the top 10 assistant coaches in the country by CollegeInsider.com in the Fall of 2002.
Before joining the Ramblers, Spinelli spent one year as a scout for the Philadelphia 76ers, evaluating players in the Big East and Atlantic 10 conferences, along with high school players from the Northeast.
Spinelli was an assistant coach for Cincinnati of the International Basketball League (IBL) in 1999-2000, helping the Stuff to an Eastern Conference regular-season championship.
Spinelli also spent two years (1997-98 and 1998-99) at American University in Washington, D.C., where he was an associate head coach responsible for two nationally recognized recruiting classes. Spinelli’s first collegiate coaching stop came at Wyoming in 1996-97.
He began his coaching career on the prep level in 1990 at the Mildford Academy, where he spent three seasons. In 1993 Spinelli started the basketball program at The Winchedon School in Winchedon, Mass., where he produced several Division I products. The Winchedon School remains one of the top prep schools in the Northeast to this day.
The Leominster, Mass., native earned his bachelor’s degree from Boston University in 1989. As a student-athlete, Spinelli initially walked on with the Terriers before earning a scholarship while playing point guard under Mike Jarvis, former head coach at St. John’s University. Spinelli and his wife, Lynn, have three children, Gianna, Gabriel and Joseph.