FAYETTEVILLE — Chris Crutchfield grew up around a handful of people involved in law enforcement.
There was a sheriff that his family became close with, and a state trooper who lived approximately one block away in his hometown of Hopkinsville, Ky. He always admired the officer as he donned the uniform and pulled off in his car each day.
Crutchfield did not have a desire to pursue careers of that nature, but he was growing increasingly fascinated by similar lines of work. That interest ultimately led to him selecting criminal justice as a major at Nebraska-Omaha, where he earned his degree in 1992 and set his sights on a lofty goal.
“My plan was really to try to do something in the criminal justice field and kind of go to the FBI Academy,” Crutchfield said in an interview in his office this fall. “That was the plan, and I was going to either go be a cop or a state trooper or something for 3-4 years. Everybody told me, ‘This is the route you need to take to do this.’
“I was on that track to do that, then all of a sudden it changed.”
Out of college, Crutchfield began an internship with a juvenile probation officer in Omaha. He was immediately put to work and handed roughly 30 cases, he said. Time passed and he decided it wasn’t working out like he had imagined.
Crutchfield was ready for something different.
“I was playing noon ball and one of my coaches ran into me and asked me did I want to be a GA,” he said. “The timing was perfect. I didn’t know I wanted to coach. I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to try to help young people. I said, ‘OK. Let’s do it.’
“I jumped into it, didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but here we are 26 years later and seven moves. But it’s been fun and we’ve met a lot of people along the way and lived in some places that we’ve been very fond of and met so many people that have been great.”
Crutchfield was hired at Arkansas on May 17 following nearly a decade as an assistant coach and associate head coach at Oklahoma under Lon Kruger. Initial communication regarding the job with the Razorbacks began with Corey Williams, who was Eric Musselman’s first official on-court hire on April 24.
Musselman, Williams told Crutchfield, was looking to bring on a coach who knew the area and the region well from a recruiting standpoint. He also wanted someone with experience at the high-major level who had found success. Crutchfield, though, told Williams he was in a good place in Norman. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Williams, the former Stetson head coach, was persistent. He called Crutchfield again around a week later and urged him to give Arkansas serious consideration. Musselman wanted to talk, he said.
“We got on the phone and I was driving to Florida picking up my son from college at the time,” Crutchfield said. “This is the middle of May and school had just let out and we talked on the phone for about an hour as I’m driving and he kept saying, ‘Come see me. Come up and take a look. Just come meet. Come meet.’
“You’re going to have to talk to coach Kruger,” he said.
“Crutch, I do not want to call him,” Musselman responded.
Musselman eventually called Kruger, and Crutchfield visited Fayetteville. He was impressed with the new Razorbacks coach’s vision, as well as the program’s facilities and readily available resources.
“My wife talked about it, kids talked about it and everybody was gung-ho,” he said. “They were more gung-ho about it than I was. I was like, ‘You guys are crazy. Are you serious?’ It’s been fun. People don’t realize this is the start of a program, and we did it at Oklahoma.
“You’ve got to put in a lot of time and a lot of work to get it started.”
Crutchfield describes his time with the Sooners as some of the best days of his career. But it wasn't always easy. Coming from a mid-major to a high-major program in need of a rebuild, he arrived on the ground level.
"It was bad," he said. "We kind of had to get it back going again. Eight years later we got it going and actually jumpstarted a year ahead of what the plan was."
Getting to work has never been an issue for Crutchfield. Growing up in Kentucky, he watched his stepfather get up at 5:30 a.m. each day and drive 30 miles to an Army base. He would return home then take on everything that needed to be done around the house.
The stepfather was structured and disciplined. He kept Crutchfield on the right path. They also hung out a lot because Crutchfield had six sisters, and he was the only boy. He didn’t want to hang out with the girls.
“I grew up watching people take pride in their work,” he said. “I think that was instilled in me at a young age that you have to work. If you want anything in life, you have to work. The work ethic part that was instilled in me as a little kid, I just saw people get up in the morning and go to work and never miss a day.
“What we do from a coaching standpoint is fun, but I take pride in recruiting, I take pride in putting together a good scouting report, I take pride in building relationships with players and making sure they understand I’m genuine and I’m sincere about what we’re trying to get done.”
Crutchfield has been shaped by a number of the game's best coaches, including Leonard Hamilton, who has spent the last 18 years leading Florida State, and Kruger, a father-type figure to him in his time at Oklahoma. He particularly looked up to Hamilton because he coached at Kentucky and was "the only black assistant coach in the country at the time," he said.
Once in the coaching world, Lou Henson, the longtime Illinois coach who won 779 games in his career and in 2015 was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame, Eddie Sutton and Tim Carter, who gave Crutchfield his first Division-I job at Texas-San Antonio, were very influential in his development.
One interaction with Carter, on the day Crutchfield informed him he was leaving UTSA for a junior college job, still stands out in his mind. At that time, he was unable to hit the road and recruit. He coached on the floor during games, but his job responsibilities were that of a present-day director of basketball operations.
"Everybody kept telling me, ‘Crutch, if you want to move up then you’ve got to get some recruiting experience,'" he said. "(Carter) was pissed. He did not like it. So I ended up taking an assistant job at Tyler (Junior College) and I was on the road recruiting the whole time.
"Then, a year later, I get the head coaching job. I spent two years as the head coach then it was time to move just because at that time I just had two kids and it was time to make some more money."
Jodi, Crutchfield's wife, has grown with her husband in his profession. They have been together for more than 25 years. He can remember the two of them cutting up game tape in the film room back in the day when he was a grad assistant.
"We were going VHS to VHS, play and pause," he said. "When I got in we had just gotten married, then our kids (Derrick, Jalen, Josh) just grew up in the gym playing sports. We're a sports family."
Crutchfield says Arkansas' roster is full of players starving to be coached. They are bought in to what is being taught and bought in to the staff's philosophy. That is evident with the team's 10-1 start.
"They’re working hard every single day. We never have to talk to them about working hard," he said. "Normally when you take over a program, the biggest thing is guys’ effort or, I call it, their give-a-shit level is very low, and this wasn’t the case. These guys care about the program. They care about winning.
"They just need a little more structure, and that’s about it. And we’re going to continue to recruit hard and get good players. Hopefully by Year 2-3 we’ll be back to some kind of national relevance."