OXFORD — Chris Beard admitted recently what most coaches won’t — sometimes, recruiting conversations are downright boring.
There are plenty of those conversations in a coach’s life, of course, even more now in an era when rosters are built — at least, in part — through the transfer portal.
However, when the second-year Ole Miss coach first started courting Belmont transfer portal forward Malik Dia last spring, he found himself wanting more talk time, not less.
“This is a guy who walks into a room and has his own opinion,” Beard said, adding he always finds himself drawn to intelligence. “He thinks things through. I really enjoyed recruiting him and I enjoyed the conversations. Sometimes in recruiting — and I’m sure players can say the same thing about coaches — you just try to get on and get off. With Dia, I’d look up and it’d been 30-45 minutes on the phone. We talked about things other than basketball, too. How that relates to basketball, I think it relates in a big way. Because when you have some personality and some intelligence and some things going on in your mind other than basketball, I think it bleeds to having a chance to be a pro one day.”
Dia chose Ole Miss out of the portal and appears poised to play a huge role in the Rebels’ frontcourt when the season begins Nov. 4 versus Long Island. Dia, who scored 16.9 points and grabbed 5.8 rebounds last season for Belmont, went through the NBA pre-draft process before moving to Oxford.
The feedback from NBA personnel, he said, has helped define where he’s looking to improve during his season at Ole Miss.
“The next step would be to simplify my game,” Dia said. “Also, I’m trying to get myself in better shape, which I think we’ve done a really good job of here at Ole Miss each and every day, doing the extra conditioning, the extra lifts and early-morning runs. I think there are a lot of tools and assets I use a lot and if I can just focus on the two or three things I’m really good at and getting simple, I think that can take it to the next level.”
Dia said he wants to limit turnovers, something he attributes to “trying to do too much at times,” and he wants to embrace a mental approach in which he doesn’t “have to prove or show anything to anybody.”
“I know what my game is,” Dia said. “I think if I simplify that and make that more efficient, I think there’s nothing that stops me.”
That work ethic and intellectual approach attracted Beard to the 6-foot-9, 250-pound Dia via phone calls and Zooms. That has carried over to his Ole Miss career.
“He’s as good as advertised in that way,” Beard said. “He really does put in the work He comes in the film room every day and he grinds it out. …With Dia playing at the mid-major level, we saw things that we think translates to the SEC. It starts with talent.”
Even though he’s a newcomer to the program, Dia has naturally embraced a team-first vision. That’s always been his philosophy, but he’s already motivated to help some veteran Rebels such as Matthew Murrell and Jaemyn Brakefield get to the NCAA Tournament after selling recent seasons of falling short.
“I think I’m here just to do whatever it takes to have winning basketball,” Dia said. “I just come in here each and every day working and working hard to get my teammates involved. I think that’s the next step in my game.
“We have a lot of team chemistry. We do a lot of things off the court together and on the court, I think we communicate very well. This is a veteran team and we have a bunch of guys who haven’t made it and if they have, they haven’t made a deep run. You definitely want to do it for them in their last year in college basketball because the tournament is just so big. You want to do it for your teammates and be able to share that moment.”
