WATCH: Former Georgetown Coach Craig Esherick Speaks at MSB Alumni Event

Last week, it appears that the Georgetown University McDononough School of Business invited Craig Esherick (B ’78, L ‘82) to be a part of a panel discussing “Sporting Events in a Post-Pandemic World, The Effect on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.”

For those of you who don’t immediately recognize Esherick’s name, shame on you. He was the men’s basketball coach between John Thompson Jr and John Thompson III. He coached from 1999-2004 with a record of 103–74.

With regard to the Olympic-focused speaking event, Esherick’s experience comes from joining the elder Thompson as an assistant coach and scout for the 1988 Olympics, where the USA finished third behind the (presumed to be heavily doping) Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Professional players were permitted in following years giving rise to Patrick Ewing and the Dream Team dominating in 1992.

Esherick is now an associate professor at George Mason University and TV color commentator.

Here is his GMU bio:

Professor Esherick was a scholarship basketball player at Georgetown University while earning an undergraduate Finance degree. He attended the Georgetown University Law Center and also was a graduate assistant basketball coach for two of those years. After graduating from law school and passing the DC Bar, Professor Esherick became a full-time assistant coach at Georgetown for the men’s basketball team.

His tenure as an assistant lasted 17 and a half years and included a stint as the assistant basketball coach for the USA Olympic team that won a bronze medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He became the head basketball coach in 1999 at Georgetown University and held that position long enough to win 103 games.

He worked briefly for AOL’s new online radio venture from 2004 until 2005, where he commented on-air about college basketball news and wrote articles for the AOL Sports website. Professor Esherick took a job with a startup television network in New York in May of 2005; that network, CSTV, has now become CBS College Sports. Esherick came to Mason from NYU, where he taught in their Graduate Sports Management program for two years.

Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

Here is the video recording of Esherick’s recent appearance for the MSB virtual alumni event: