Couch: For Grand Valley's Cornell Mann, coaching against MSU at Breslin Center is a trip down memory lane

When Cornell Mann takes his seat — the head coach’s seat — on the visitor's bench at Breslin Center on Tuesday night, before his Grand Valley State team plays Michigan State in an exhibition game, he might take a minute to let it soak in.

Mann, beginning his first season as Grand Valley’s head coach, has been coming to Breslin since the building opened. Since he was a Michigan State recruit. Since he, Anthony “Pig” Miller, Shawn Respert and Eric Snow spent the summer of 1990 working at the Meijer Warehouse in Lansing. Since his cousin and close friend Dwayne Stephens began playing for the Spartans, long before he was on Tom Izzo's staff.

The connections for Mann aren’t all nostalgic, either. One of them is ongoing. Mann’s son, MSU tight end Maliq Carr, might play again this season for MSU’s basketball team, once the football season is over. “It would shock me if he didn’t do it again,” Mann said. “I know he enjoyed that.”

MSU is almost a second home to Mann, a place he's never lived but has always been welcome. He described himself as an MSU basketball "stepchild,” always treated "with favor."

“I mean, they recruited me. And once they got Shawn Respect, they were done recruiting me,” said Mann, a Ferndale native, who began his college career playing at Colorado and finished at Akron.

“It’ll be surreal, because there's a lot of history there,” Mann said of being a head coach at Breslin on Tuesday. “I used to live with Pig Miller. Izzo looked out for me and got me a job (at Meijer) when DJ (Stephens) was there. I spent my first two college summers in East Lansing. And it was a great experience.”

Mann’s trek to Grand Valley has been a winding one — two seasons as an assistant coach at CMU (2001-03), five at WMU (2003-08), three at Dayton (2008-11), four at Iowa State (2011-15), one at Oakland (2016-17) and five at Missouri (2017-22).

He worked for former MSU assistant Brian Gregory at Dayton and brought MSU transfers Chris Allen and Korie Lucious to Iowa State, coaching under Fred Hoiberg. Mann’s career was temporarily derailed when Hoiberg took the Chicago Bulls head coaching job and, with the move late in the college coaching carousel, Mann was left without a landing spot. He spent part of that next year attending MSU practices — as well as several other places — trying to stay sharp, before going to work for Greg Kampe at Oakland.

Having his own program had long been a dream. He hoped it would be at the Division I level. But Grand Valley offered him a lot of that D-I experience in a Division-II package.

“I jumped at this because this is a Division I school,” Mann said. “We were in a Division-II conference (the GLIAC), but everything about Grand Valley is Division I. This is the only Division-II job I would have interviewed for and I'm blessed to have it.”

Mann considers himself lucky to have a roster of good kids, ones that aren’t likely to keep him up at night.

“It’s definitely awesome, that we have a team full of great young men, all high-character individuals,” Mann said. “And we'll keep it that way. In this day and age, it's hard to take chances on a low-character kid. So we won't do that.”

Mann’s first roster includes six true freshmen and two new transfers, taking over a program that’s had stability for 18 seasons with Ric Wesley, who retired in March.

There are elements of MSU’s style that you might recognize in Grand Valley under Mann, who installed the “(fast) break and blitz” that he picked up at Dayton from Brian Gregory, who got it from his time at MSU. Some of the Lakers' defensive principles are similar, too.

Keep in mind, Mann has been talking with his cousin, Stephens, regularly for all of the 19 years Stephens was on Izzo’s staff. Now Stephens is just down the road as the head coach at Western Michigan.

“We talk way more now than we talked the last 10 years. We talk all the time,” Mann said. “Because we're both head coaches, we talk a little more shop. Before we didn't talk shop that much. Because we were sometimes competing for the same kids in terms of recruiting. But we bounce things off of each other now. I've been to a (WMU) practice. I took a couple of drills from from his practice. … Of course we talk other things as well, family stuff, but we do talk shop more than we ever talked shop.”

RELATED: The hard, abrupt goodbye to Dwayne Stephens Sr., lost to COVID-19

Two first-time head coaches, each prepared by two decades working for other people.

“I feel like I fit in very well in this position” Mann said. “It's a little bit of a calming effect, because you only know what you know. And so from all of the people that I worked for and all of the ways that we played, all of the ways that we guarded, I got a lot of experience with playing basketball differently, but successfully in each spot. So I feel comfortable.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: MSU basketball: For Grand Valley's Cornell Mann, coaching at Breslin is a trip down memory lane