Published: June 09, 2009 09:23 am      

Men's College Basketball: Texas State hires new assistant

Flaska brings valuable experience to ’Cats

Texas State men’s basketball head coach Doug Davalos filled one of the two vacancies on his staff Friday when he announced the hiring of former Centenary head coach and highly successful assistant coach Rob Flaska to his staff for the 2009-10 season.

“Rob is a tremendous hire for Texas State men’s basketball,” Davalos said. “He has a wealth of experience as a collegiate head coach and assistant coach. I got to know him while he was the head coach at Centenary and the thing that stood out to me was his passion for coaching and his competitiveness.”

Flaska comes to Texas State after serving 11 years as a collegiate head coach and 15 years as an assistant coach with 12 of those years as an assistant coming at the Division I level.

“He has been a high level assistant coach and a NCAA Division I head coach,” Davalos added. “He knows what a head coach needs and what an assistant should do. That makes him ideal from that standpoint as my right-hand man.”

Last season, Flaska was an assistant coach at Texas Southern after serving the three previous years as the head coach at Centenary, three years as an assistant coach at Arkansas and four seasons at TCU under Billy Tubbs.

While at Arkansas, he was named the school’s recruiting coordinator and helped sign a pair of classes that were nationally-ranked fourth in 2003 and 11th in 2004. He also helped guide the Horned Frogs to a pair of 20-win seasons, and TCU ranked among the Top two scoring teams and had the top recruiting class in the WAC each of the four years he was at the school.

Flaska went to TCU after serving as the head coach at Florida Community College, where he compiled a 64-31 record over three seasons. He also was an assistant coach at Trinity Valley Community College in Texas and was the head coach at Mott College in Michigan, where he posted a five-year record of 121-44. He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Indiana State in 1982-84, followed by a two-year stint at the University of Detroit from 1984-86.

Flaska played basketball at Glenn Lake High School in Maple City, Mich., where he earned All-State honors after leading his team to the 1977 state championship. He played at Michigan Tech, and led the team to its first four winning seasons in school history and set school records for assists and steals.

• Texas State press release