IOWA CITY — As he tried to close a recruitment that would end up changing their lives, Ben McCollum went old-school.
By his own estimation, only about 20 times in his coaching career has McCollum handwritten letters to recruits. Bennett Stirtz was one of them.
McCollum, then the head coach at Northwest Missouri State, was trying to land Stirtz, a player who had slipped through the cracks in the high school recruiting process. McCollum felt like he needed to do something to put Northwest Missouri State over the edge.
“Choosing NW allows you to play for coaches who have proven through their actions we would value everything you are about as a player and person,” McCollum wrote in the lengthy note. “…You are not a commodity to us (as players are for other programs), you are special and you deserve a place that understands that.”
A few years later, now existing in a totally different spotlight than that low-profile recruitment, Stirtz reflected on what the letter meant.
“Pretty cool,” Stirtz said. “He won three straight Division-II national titles before that and he’s writing me a letter. So it was pretty cool and kind of sealed the deal for me.”
After he decided to attend Northwest Missouri State, Stirtz picked McCollum not once, but two more times in his college career.
Four seasons. Three schools. One head coach.
Iowa’s senior day matchup with Michigan on Thursday, March 5, is not the end of their time as coach and player, but the end is nearing.
Together, Stirtz and McCollum have been the face of a new era of Iowa basketball. Stirtz, a D-II afterthought turned NBA prospect, has been the motor to the Hawkeyes’ success this season. McCollum, a rising star at the Division-I level, is trying to rebuild the program in the city where he was born.
Their relationship has transcended schools, conferences and states.
“It’s so much deeper than what you can see watching the game,” said Xavier Kurth, Iowa basketball’s Director of Player Development, who has been with McCollum and Stirtz at each stop. “It’s so much deeper than that. And it goes way beyond this year and last year and even the second year (at Northwest Missouri State). It goes so far beyond that.
“Because the roots of the relationship are from family. You recruit the kid, but you also got to make sure the family is along with the ride and has the belief that coach (McCollum) has in their kid. Yeah, it’s really special, the relationship they have. It’ll be long-lasting, even after he’s done playing.”
Stirtz understood the strength of their bond before he even played a possession at Northwest Missouri State. It was built during the recruiting process. Stirtz agreed it’s fair to say McCollum had more belief in Stirtz than he had in himself. McCollum sent highlights of Tyler Herro, who was Stirtz’s favorite player at the time.
“Just talking about sports, stuff like that, on phone calls,” Stirtz said. “He called me every week in the recruiting process. I don’t know, it’s just like the little things. He wanted me to send him my favorite NBA player, even back in high school. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I think you can be this way.’ Just the amount of confidence he had in me when I wasn’t even getting NBA looks was something that meant a lot to me.”
As a coach, self-belief is something McCollum can help unlock.
“I think he’s got a great self-esteem,” McCollum said of Stirtz. “That’s why he’s self-confident. But sometimes people hold themselves back and they don’t realize how good they actually are. So you have to convince people sometimes of how good they can be. That’s probably a strength, where I can identify talent and try to infect them with some kind of belief and then they shine.”
After two seasons together at Northwest Missouri State, McCollum made the jump to Division I, accepting the head coaching job at Drake. Stirtz joined him in Des Moines and they had immediate success, winning the Missouri Valley Conference regular season and tournament titles before advancing to the round of 32 in the NCAA Tournament. Then, for the second time in two years, McCollum took a new job, this time at Iowa.
Stirtz’s circumstances during this move were different than before because he was now a household name in the college basketball world. He had just been named Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year and would’ve been coveted if he looked elsewhere in the transfer portal.
“It was hectic,” said Roger Stirtz, Bennett’s father. “But once again, he simplified everything. So, yes, he could’ve gone to the open portal and marketed himself to the fullest extent and done really well. But as (McCollum) has said previously, Bennett continues to choose people over anything else, and that includes money.”
The way McCollum expresses himself during competition is in stark contrast to Stirtz. McCollum, the embodiment of an Energizer Bunny on the sideline, seems like he is exerting himself almost as much as the players on the court. On the other hand, Stirtz is far from demonstrative.
“The emotions that you don’t see with Bennett, you see with (McCollum),” Roger Stirtz said. “And so, it’s oil on water. It’s night and day. It’s black and white. It’s a huge difference there.”
But that’s part of why their relationship works.
“His pulse probably sits at about a 20 and I can rise that thing to about a 35 maybe,” McCollum joked. “He’s borderline just there. Mine sits at about 150 and maybe he can take mine down to about 120. So it just kind of balances itself out a little bit, where I’m excitable and he’s calm. It certainly works out better because I raise him up and he calms me.”
On the surface, it might seem like a true Yin and Yang dynamic, but it is more complex than that. Because it’s not like there aren’t similarities — Stirtz and McCollum share a competitive drive that burns inside, they just show it differently on the outside.
“He has like an intrinsic emotional meter, which is partly why he’s super competitive and you’ll never really know it sometimes,” Kurth said of Stirtz. “He’s more of that even keel, cool, calm, from a facial standpoint. But intrinsically, he’s more like (McCollum) than people think he is.”
There are times when those two forces react with each other. McCollum said that he and Stirtz “were about to kill each other” multiple times during Iowa’s signature win over Nebraska on Feb. 17. But their relationship allows for very direct communication like that in the heat of the moment.
“To get that out of Bennett, you’ve got to know how to, which means you need to know how he was raised and what he likes to do and things about his personal life,” Kurth said. “You’ve got to have built trust to that point to be able to pull that out of kids, which for five years, including his recruitment now, it’s been that. It’s been a lot of relationship building with coach (McCollum) and the staff and his family.”
Just like McCollum has helped Stirtz, Stirtz has helped McCollum.
Though it’s not a certainty yet, the Hawkeyes are trending toward their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2023. If McCollum takes the program to great heights, part of Stirtz’s legacy will be helping build the foundation for the future.
Credit Stirtz, unofficially, with an assist.
“I think we’ve been through a lot just moving so many different times,” McCollum said. “We’ll probably never realize it until five, six years down the road, like this is a pretty epic deal. Like, who does that? Who does what he did? Go from D-II to mid-major to the Big Ten over a span of like two years. He was just in Maryville (Missouri) two years ago. This is ridiculous what he’s done. And so, we’ll probably look back on it in four, five years and be like, man, this is pretty cool.”
Follow Tyler Tachman on X @Tyler_T15, contact via email at ttachman@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Special bond is clear between Iowa basketball’s Bennett Stirtz, Ben McCollum
Reporting by Tyler Tachman, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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