Southeast hires two assistants

Southeast Missouri State added two assistant coaches to its men's basketball staff this week, bringing coach Gary Garner's staff to three.

Ronnie Dean and Toby Lane began their duties Tuesday. They join Robert Guster, the fomer assistant at Southwest Missouri State-West Plains who was hired last month.

The new coaching assistants replace Mark Bernsen, now the head coach at Moberly Community College; Gary Abner, now an assistant at Tennessee-Chattanooga; and Kevin Williams, now an assistant at Hancock High School in St. Louis County.

"This will be a staff that concentrates on recruiting," Garner said in a statement. "I am confident they will be able to recruit players that will make us competitive for the Ohio Valley Conference title year in and year out."

Dean was an assistant last season at Jacksonville University for former Georgia coach Hugh Durham. It was Dean's lone season at Jacksonville after previously assisting at the University Of Montana, Long Beach State and Cal State Fullerton. He also coached junior college teams at Barton County, Kan.; Lamar, Colo.; and Howard College in Big Spring, Texas. He was head coach in his one-year stint at Lamar Community College in 1993-94.

Dean is from Charleston, Mo., and played college basketball at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, Mo., before finishing his education in 1990 at Harris-Stowe in downtown St. Louis.

"I've followed Southeast Missouri basketball my entire life," Dean said in a statement. "I've always had a special place in my heart for the great tradition of Southeast basketball. I look forward to working with a great coach like Gary Garner, and I look forward to recruiting the best basketball student-athletes ever at Southeast so we can move back to the top of the OVC and make a return to the NCAA tournament on a regular basis."

Lane had been the video coordinator for the University of Oklahoma basketball program for the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons. He previously had been Long Beach State's administrative assistant in 2001-02, was on staff for four years at Central Oklahoma -- two as a graduate-assistant and two as a full-time assistant -- and also assisted at Neosho County Community College.

Lane graduated from Wichita State University in 1993 and earned a master's degree from Central Oklahoma in 1999. He went to high school at the Berean Academy in Elbing, Kan.

"Toby Lane comes to our program with a great work ethic," Garner said in the statement. "He is very organized and has great computer and video skills. Lane has a good knowledge of the game and really works well with players on the floor."