College of Charleston hiring Winthrop’s Pat Kelsey as new head basketball coach

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The College of Charleston have officially hired Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey as their new head basketball.

Kelsey will replace Earl Grant who left last week to coach at Boston College.

The school will hold a press conference on Friday at 2pm to introduce Kelsey.

CofC’s Board of Trustees approved a contract for Kelsey just after 6pm on Thursday night. President Andrew Hsu announced the hiring during the Board’s conference call.

Kelsey’s deal with the school is for 5 years worth a total of $3 million. He’ll be paid $550 thousand in his first season and get a bump of 50 thousand each season after that. He can also earn more with incentives such as $25,000 for a conference championship and $25,000 more for each round the team advances in the NCAA Tournament. Kelsey was making $250,000 per year at Winthrop.

Kelsey spent 9 seasons at Winthrop where he won 185 games, 4 Big South titles and went to 3 NCAA Tournaments.

The coach started his college career working at Wake Forest where he spent 8 seasons as an assistant before spending 3 years as an assistant at Xavier.

This isn’t the first head coaching job Kelsey has accepted in his time at Winthrop though. Back in 2017, he was set to be introduced as the new head coach at UMass before backing out of the position.

It was a similar position that CofC found themselves in almost 15 years ago with another Winthrop head coach, Gregg Marshall. A former assistant to John Kresse, Marshall was introduced at the College in June of 2006 only to return to Winthrop the next day and resume coaching the Eagles.

Kelsey will have some major rebuilding work to do at the College when he takes over. Six CofC players have entered their name in the transfer portal since the end of the season with two of them already picking new schools. Zep Jasper will head to Auburn while Brevin Galloway will join Grant at Boston College.

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