Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray is the director of recruiting for the Vanderbilt men’s basketball program. The 2023-24 season is his first in the role.

Gray spent the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons at McNeese State as an assistant coach. He has SEC experience, spending three seasons as the Ole Miss coordinator of men’s basketball operations from 2018-21. 

As the head coach at Southwest Mississippi Community College from 2014-18, Gray compiled a 61-39 record over his four seasons. He guided the Bears to the NJCAA Region 23 semifinals in each of his final two seasons. During his tenure, Gray coached 15 players that went on to earn NCAA Division I scholarships, the most of any Region 23 team over that four-year span. Student-athletes excelled on and off the court under Gray’s tutelage with all but two holding grade-point averages that exceeded 3.0 throughout his time as Southwest’s head coach.

Gray led the Bears to their third-consecutive season of at least 17 wins, the first time Southwest accomplished that feat in three decades. During the 2016-17 campaign, Southwest finished runner-up in the MACJC South Division, the highest division finish since 2001, with an 18-9 record.

His team was named the NJCAA Men’s Basketball Academic Team of the Year for the second consecutive year with a team GPA of 3.59, the second-highest cumulative GPA in the history of NJCAA Men’s Basketball. The Bears became the first MACJC men’s basketball team to ever win the award in 2015-16, boasting a 3.42 GPA. In just his second season as Southwest head coach, Gray led the Bears to a MACJC state championship for the first time in 53 years.

After spending three seasons as an assistant at SMCC, Gray was named assistant coach at UT Martin until he got the call back to Summit to become the school’s head coach. He began working in the college basketball world as a graduate assistant at Mississippi College, where he earned his master’s degree in 2011. Gray also attended Mississippi College as an undergraduate, collecting a bachelor’s degree in 2009.