David Jablonski: Dayton basketball: New UD assistant likes talent level and character on 2026-27 roster
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Jordan Talley hasn’t been on the University of Dayton campus long, but he has been around long enough to provide one of the first impressions of the 2026-27 Dayton Flyers roster.
Talley, one of two new assistant coaches on head coach Anthony Grant’s staff, talked to the Dayton Daily News on Tuesday, June 30, about what stands out about this team in summer workouts.
“The talent level,” he said, “the willingness to do everything that is asked and then the character.”
Talley worked last season as an assistant coach on Dru Joyce III’s staff at Duquesne. That one-year stint followed a three-year run as a player development assistant on Todd Golden’s staff with the Florida Gators. Prior to that, Talley worked as a graduate assistant at James Madison for Mark Byington, who’s now at Vanderbilt.
Talley won an NCAA championship with Florida in 2025 and knows talent when he sees it, but he also knows teams need more than that.
“Todd was really big on the character of our players,” Talley said. “We can have the most talented roster, but if our character isn’t right, the winning won’t go to the level that we want to be at.”
In three weeks at Dayton, Talley has noticed “size, athleticism, versatility and ability to shoot the ball,” but more than anything, he said, “the guys really, really like each other.”
That’s important, Talley said, because the eight weeks of summer practices mark the start of a long journey from June to March — one that Talley hopes includes a NCAA tournament run.
“I’m blessed to have sat in that seat and been a part of being a No. 1 seed,” Talley said, “and to know that Anthony Grant at the University of Dayton had this program as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament shows me that national championships can be won at the University of Dayton. We have the character and the talent level to compete with the schools that we’ll be playing against. I’m really excited about where we are and where we’re going to be.”
A dream job
Dayton announced the hiring of Talley on May 14. He joined the staff along with another new assistant coach, Nick Irvin.
Like Grant and assistant coach James Kane, two other Florida natives, Talley’s journey to Dayton started in the Sunshine State. He spent half his childhood in South Florida before moving to Lake City in northern Florida.
Talley did not know he wanted to be a coach even when he was playing at Fort White High School, south of Lake City, and at Southeastern University, a NAIA program in Lakeland, Fla.
“I love basketball, and I love sneakers,” Talley said. “I moved home after I graduated from college, and I worked at a sneaker store, trying to learn the ins and outs of owning and operating a sneaker store.”
Talley first coached as an assistant at Columbia High School in Lake City in 2016. The head coach, Steve Faulkner, invited him to talk to the team, and that led to the coaching opportunity.
“It just so happened one of the players on the team was one of my little cousins,” Talley said, “and then all of his friends’ older brothers were my friends. The first day I walked out there, I realized that I could do this for the rest of my life. That was about 11 years ago, and I haven’t looked back. I promised myself that if it ever felt like work, I would quit, and I haven’t woken up one day and felt like this was something that was hard or something that I didn’t love. It’s hard because it has different things you’ve got to learn, but as far as getting up every day, I feel so blessed to be able to coach basketball for a living. It’s my dream.”
After one season at Columbia, Talley moved often in the following years, working as an assistant at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla., Polk State College in Lakeland and Tallahassee Community College. He also had a one-year stint as a head coach at Lake Gibson High School in Lakeland in the 2018-19 season.
“Those jobs were all just unbelievable,” Talley said. “You don’t know what you don’t know. Looking back, I didn’t know as much as I know now, but those experiences shaped who I am as a basketball coach.”
The jobs led to an opportunity at James Madison in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons. Those were the first two seasons for Byington, whose four-year run there culminated in a 32-4 season in 2023-24.
“He took me under his wing,” Talley said. “He gave me the development. He told me to make guys better. He held me accountable. He’s one of the best offensive coaches in the country. Being able to ask questions, being at practice every day, learning and picking his brain and winning a championship with him, it propelled me for my next situation.”
At Florida, Talley experienced a losing season in 2022-23, which was Golden’s first with the Gators. Two years later, they won the national championship.
“Todd came in with a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish,” Talley said, “and alongside everybody else, I was trying to promote his vision. We were able to build something really special. We knew going into Year 3 that we had a really good team with really good players who were incredible human beings who really cared for one another. We took it game by game, and we were such a tight-knit group that when we got to March Madness, we all had it in our mind, ‘Let’s take this thing as far as we can take it.’ Credit to our guys for just being unbelievable shot makers and having unbelievable confidence and belief in themselves.”
A no-brainer
Talley left Florida after the national championship season for Duquesne, which finished 18-15 in Joyce’s second season. That was a five-win improvement for the Dukes.
“Dru Joyce is an absolutely great human being,” Talley said, “and he’s a rising star as a coach. He’s really put the program in a place where I think he’s going to have sustained success.”
Duquesne lost twice to Dayton last season as Talley experienced UD Arena for the first time. He remembers talking to Kane at the arena before the game in Dayton in February.
“I knew nothing about Dayton,” Talley said, “other than it has a really good basketball program. I had never been to the facilities. When I came here, I was sitting in the gym, and then Kane came out. We met at half-court. I said, ‘Coach, is this place really going to fill up?’ He said, ‘I’ll see you in 10 minutes.’ So we go back, we change, we come back out, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness.’ ”
Talley was happy at Duquesne but loved the atmosphere at UD Arena and knew he had to pursue the Dayton opening.
“I just fell in love with it the first time I was here,” he said. “There’s a passion that the fans have. I want to be somewhere where if you lose, the fans aren’t really happy with you because that means that they really care and that’s OK. With Dayton, I want the pressure. You can go places where that may not necessarily be the case. It was a no-brainer to me. This program is on the level of the highest of high majors.”
Talley has already hit the recruiting trail for Dayton, visiting Gainesville, Sandusky and Atlanta. Dayton coaches made five offers to members of the 2028 recruiting class in June.
Talley expects to use his connections in the Southeast, mentioning Florida and Georgia specifically, as he recruits. While the season opener is still four months away, Talley said the job has been everything he hoped it would be.
“I’m just a basketball guy,” he said. “I love basketball. Having an opportunity to work at the University of Dayton with such a prestigious program, with Anthony Grant, who I just think the world of is really an unbelievable opportunity.”
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