Ben Wierzba has been around great basketball coaches all his life, and those role models made him the ideal candidate for assistant coach when Marty Simmons first hired him at SIU-Edwardsville three years ago.
Wierzba’s father, Tom, recently retired as head coach at Farmington High School and is a member of the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. Ben also learned the game under former UE coach Jim Crews at Army, where he served as director of basketball operations from 2002-2004. In 2006-07, he coached at his alma mater, SIU-Edwardsville, under Marty Simmons, before coming to Evansville when Simmons was selected as UE’s head coach in 2007.
Coach Wierzba’s younger brother, Rhet, served two years as director of basketball operations at the University of Evansville and is now at the University of Maryland. As a player, Ben was a member of South Alabama’s 1998 NCAA Tournament team. He transferred to SIU-Edwardsville and was all-Great Lakes Valley Conference in 1999. Coach Wierzba served as a student assistant coach there in 2000 and later coached at the University of North Dakota, Saint Joseph’s College and Lewis University before joining Coach Crews’s staff at West Point.
“Ben has a great sense of how to communicate with players on the court and off,” says Simmons. “He comes from a legendary basketball family, he’s a very good teacher, and Ben is a very caring person who our players trust and believe in.”
