Florida State Associate Head Basketball Coach Stan Jones is the longest tenured assistant coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference and his wisdom proves that. Having spent the past 18 seasons at Florida State under Head Coach Leonard Hamilton (previously with Hamilton at the University of Miami and with the Washington Wizards), Coach Jones’ college teams have only experienced two losing seasons in 24 years. Each year, the FSU basketball team comes up with a theme, with the most recent being “Our Turn” when they were named regular season ACC Champs in 2019. Going into 2020 Coach Jones says the theme is “New Blood” as they compete against many traditional powerhouses like UNC & Duke (the “Blue Bloods”) in the ACC. When describing the importance of team chemistry, Coach Jones said that the “team must take over the team” in order to find success. To encourage this, the FSU basketball team has a period in practice called “Sugar & Hot Sauce” where one player calls out another and looks him in the eye in front of the entire team, offering one positive (sugar) and one negative (hot sauce) that he is challenged to improve on. In 2019, Coach Jones was inducted into the College Basketball Assistant Coach Hall of Fame.