In his words, Chad Dollar is "just a basketball guy."
The veteran assistant coach spends nearly every second he's awake either watching, thinking of, learning more about or just soaking up the game of basketball.
"I know it's probably not the healthiest thing, but I love it," Dollar said. "My dad coached, my brother coached, I coach. It's just in me."
Wes Miller is cut from a similar cloth. During his introductory news conference last month, Miller, the 28th head coach in the history of the University of Cincinnati men's basketball program, said, "I'm single and I don't have any children, so I plan on being married to this program and married to this university."
Miller and Dollar's common obsession for the game is what drew the two together and led them to make a pact. That agreement was to work together to rebuild and restore the Cincinnati men's basketball program.
"The one thing that we talked about a lot during the process of interviewing is we're doing this together," Dollar said of Miller. "This is really going to be a group effort, a staff effort. ... We want the players to look at our staff as together, all in as one. That's how we want the guys to play; we want them to play as one. We want our staff to be as one, too."
After hiring assistant Chris LePore and bench coaches Andre Morgan and Mike Roberts, who all previously coached under Miller at UNC Greensboro, Miller handpicked Dollar as the final piece to his coaching staff. Miller announced the hire last week.
Miller touted the College Park, Georgia, native's "high level of experience" as a reason he added Dollar, who spent the past three seasons as an assistant at the University of Georgia, working under head coach Tom Crean.
"He has been coaching at the high major level of college basketball for over a decade," Miller said. "He's widely known throughout our profession as an elite recruiter, but I think his value is so much greater than that. Going through the interview process with Chad I found that we share the same values, goals and purpose for coaching. I think he is an elite overall basketball coach and I believe he'll be a Division I head coach in the future."
Dollar, a University of Michigan graduate and father of three, has also had assistant coaching stints at Auburn, Georgia Tech, Wichita State, Arkansas State, LSU, Murray State, Georgia Southern, Eastern Kentucky and Western Carolina. But it was his tenure at Georgia that cemented him as one of the top recruiters in college basketball.
Dollar recruited Anthony Edwards to the Bulldogs and helped develop the McDonald's All-American into the 2019-20 SEC Freshman of the Year and the No.1 overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft. Edwards, a 6-foot-4, 225-pound Atlanta native, averaged 19.3 points this season for the Minnesota Timberwolves and is one of the top candidates for NBA Rookie of the Year.
"Anthony is a special individual. He's special on the court and off the court," Dollar said. "I hate to say it this way, but sometimes you just have to be fortunate. It was the right time for me to be at the University of Georgia. I was with the right people to help put things together for Anthony. As a staff, we were able to sell him on the things that he was looking for individually to help him go to the next level. That's for each individual player. There's not one thing that I can say to one player and then say to another player. Sometimes it's just for that individual person.
"Anthony was a kid whose parents passed away at an early age, so he had a small circle of people that was with him to help him through the tough times when his parents passed away, and he wanted to be close to home because of that. So as a staff at Georgia, we were able to sell him on the fact of being close to home. At this particular time, everything you're looking for, we can help you as a group get that. And then in turn, you can help us also."
Now at Cincinnati, Dollar hopes to capture that same magic on the recruiting trail for Miller and the Bearcats. It's a challenge since Miller took over the program after a turbulent month that saw UC fail to advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2010, six players exit the program, and UC Director of Athletics John Cunningham fire then-head coach John Brannen after only two seasons.
"I look at that as something I'm excited about," Dollar said. "One thing, when you look at my career, I've been at several different stops. Some guys' careers, they might be at one or two places. My career has taken me to different locations, and each location had a challenge. Whether it was a school that was on probation. Whether it was a school that's like Cincinnati that's adding a tradition or building a tradition. Whether it was a school that needed to just keep rising the program to the top. So I've seen a little bit of everything. From my standpoint and understanding where Cincinnati is at right now and understanding where it needs to go, I'm excited about that and I'm excited about the opportunity."
Dollar knows all about UC's tradition. Though his desire to be a coach came from watching his father, Don, a longtime high school coach in Atlanta who won more than 650 games and three state titles, Dollar's first taste of coaching came as a graduate assistant at Southern Miss in the late 1990s.
While Dollar was with the Golden Eagles in Conference USA, the conference's king at the time was Cincinnati and then-head coach Bob Huggins.
"That's when they were really, really, really good," Dollar said. "I remember the excitement. I remember the fans. I just remember the basketball tradition of Cincinnati. And then as we moved forward in my coaching career, I've always remembered the consistency of excellence that the program has always had. So being a basketball guy, you always want to be around people that love the game of basketball. So this was an opportunity for me, with the tradition that Cincinnati has had in the past, and then along with Wes Miller, I think he's one of the top coaches in the country. Me aligning myself up with someone like that of his caliber, it was just something I couldn't turn down."
Miller, Dollar and the rest of the Cincinnati coaching staff have one more scholarship to offer as they continue to build a roster for the 2021-22 season. Dollar, who has already hit the recruiting trail, will no doubt play a major role in deciding who receives that final spot.
"At Cincinnati, we want to make sure that we find guys that are tough, that got the grit, gonna be ready to defend and rebound," Dollar said. "That's Coach Miller's philosophy when it comes to the guys he likes, and then that lines up with Cincinnati basketball. That's another reason why this job excites me because what Coach Miller likes and what he instills in his players is what Cincinnati has traditionally been."
But Dollar said returning the program to the standard that past UC teams created won't happen overnight.
Dollar said he watched with admiration from afar as Miller over a decade lifted UNC Greensboro from the bottom of the Southern Conference to averaging 25 wins per season and earning two NCAA tournament berths.
Dollar said success in Year 1 for the Bearcats under Miller will be learning not to settle for being anything less than competitive every time they're on the court.
"Compete every day, play hard, show some toughness, play with some excitement and just enjoy the game of basketball and do things the right way," Dollar said. "Once you do things the right way and enjoy the game of basketball, I think everything else will fall in line."