Bryan Hodgson in His Own Words: His Style, Staff, and Story
New Providence head coach Bryan Hodgson will be introduced to Friartown at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Ahead of the press conference, PC released a video on Monday of Hodgson and his family touring the campus:
In an effort to learn more about Hodgson as a coach and a person, I listened to a few podcasts he appeared on over the past year. Here are some quotes from two pods that caught my attention.
From the Inside USF Podcast (October 2025):
On his style of play:
“We play a lot like the NBA. We get up and down. On offense, we like to say that we play with pace and space. Defensively, we want to shrink and disrupt. We’d like to, ideally, be in the top 50 in both categories — offensively and defensively.”
On the challenge of scheduling fellow Florida schools:
“If I’m going to call a spade a spade, other people are scared to play us. We called every school in the state of Florida — I could list them off for you — but it would be much easier to tell you we called every single one of them and tried to schedule games, and none of them would play us. It wasn’t for lack of availability of dates. They just didn’t want to play.”
On his childhood and growing up in the foster care system:
“I’ve gone into great detail about it — even more so as an adult to try to help other people in similar situations — but I was born to a teenage mother. She was 14 years old. And to make a long story short, her boyfriend at the time, while my mother was at school trying to get her high school diploma, put me on a burning wood stove as a punishment for wetting my diaper. I was about one‑and‑a‑half years old when that happened and had third‑degree burns all the way from my lower back to below my calves.”
“My mother came home, I was unconscious, I was taken to the hospital, and obviously the hospital called child protective services, and I was placed in the foster care system.”
“I was in the foster care system until I was three, and I was fortunate enough to be adopted. My name, Bryan Andrew Hodgson, was something I received when I was four years old. I tell my players and everyone who will listen: I was very fortunate, first and foremost. A lot of foster children, unfortunately, age out of the foster care system at age 18, and it’s horrible. It’s something that weighs heavy on my mind every day. I was fortunate to be adopted by the Hodgson family — a loving family that invested in me and raised me no different than they raised the children they birthed.”
On recruiting:
“We think that we can compete with anybody in the country — not only in recruiting, but on the basketball court.”
On a humbling opening night as a head coach at Arkansas State and turning the season around:
“I’ll never forget — I tell coaches all the time — my first ever game as a head coach, we’re playing against the University of Wisconsin, and we were in Madison. There were about four minutes to go in the game, and I heard them over the loudspeaker say, ‘With that basket, we have just set a new Kohl Center scoring record.’ I turned to my assistants and said, ‘This is going to be one hell of a year. It’s going to be one long year.’”
“We lost there, we lost at Alabama, but we went on the road and beat Louisville at Louisville that year. We kind of propelled ourselves from there. We beat UAB at home, which was a big win for us in year one. We carried that momentum into year two and continued to increase our talent level and built a strong culture.”
From the Field of 68 (May 2025) after he was hired by South Florida:
His philosophy on building out a coaching staff as he moved from Arkansas State to USF:
“I want to hire people who are a lot smarter than me. I don’t want ‘yes men.’ I want dudes who are going to challenge me every day — whether it’s practice, prep, or in games. Come to me. Talk to me. I learned that from Nate Oats. He hired sharp dudes who do their jobs well so he can lean on his staff. I lean on my staff a lot.”
“Starting there, I brought my entire staff from Arkansas State. Nothing drives me — when you see a guy go from job to job after success and they leave their staff behind, to me that’s disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. The people on that staff helped you get this job, right? You leaving that staff behind is you saying, ‘I did this, so I’m going to move up and you guys figure it out.’ Drives me nuts. I won’t say any names, but there are guys out there who do it, and it’s awful. I brought our entire staff because I wouldn’t be here without them.”
On trying to schedule P5 opponents in Florida:
“We have reached out to every other high‑level program in the state of Florida and tried to schedule games, and they’ve all said no. We’d love to play anyone in the state of Florida.”
On how he approached the players at South Florida after being hired:
“I went to the roster at South Florida and went through every single guy on that roster and made sure that I made contact with them — whether I had intentions on keeping them or not. Those guys were recruited here by Coach Abdur‑Rahim, and it was the right thing to do. I made contact with those guys, and when I got on campus, I set up meetings with them to further the conversation.”
“I brought two guys with me, and we inherited two — two really good ones.”
“CJ Brown decided to stay out of the gate — didn’t take another visit. That was a home run for us. And then Izaiyah Nelson and Joe Pinion, probably my two best players at Arkansas State who had eligibility left, are coming with us. So we had three dudes who could play this year out of the gate, and we were able to build the roster around them.”
Editor’s note: the fourth player referenced here was sidelined this season with an injury.
His approach to the transfer portal:
“What I’ve told my staff here and at Arkansas State is: ‘I want you to prepare to replace 13 dudes every year. Have that mindset. Attack the portal that way. And if we get four or five that come back, that’s great.”