It’s not physically possible to see and do everything, but new Cleveland State assistant coach Steve Lanpher has come awfully close, at least in college basketball terms.
He’s been a Division I head coach, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology between 2012 and 2018, and built up to the position with the Highlanders through DI assistant roles at Vermont, UMass and, briefly, Lamar. In the 2000s, he ran the program at Division III school Norwich, a highly-successful tenure preceded by another in the junior college ranks, at Kansas’ Pratt Community College.
After graduating from the College of St. Joseph in 1987, Lanpher began his career in the Vermont high school ranks, then at his alma mater.
Most of that probably sounds routine for someone who’s devoted their life to a decidedly-nomadic profession, but Lanpher has a couple extra resume lines that set him apart from most others.
In 1996, he helped establish the women’s basketball program at Dean College in Massachusetts, a former juco that now competes in DIII. After the Bulldogs’ first season of play and a 12-5 record, Lanpher was named the NJCAA Region XXI Coach of the Year.
Just before that, he served in the United States Army, with the First Ranger Battalion in Savannah, GA.
“I’ve been able to live in nine different states,” Lanpher said on the Cleveland State Women’s Basketball Coaches Show this week. “Every place I’ve been, I’ve enjoyed the people, I’ve been able to meet different people from different walks of life. It’s just truly been a blessing for me.”
“Whether I was at Division I, Division III, or junior college, it was all about growth, and just being part of a program that looks at character, and just tries to impact student-athletes in a positive way.”
Most recently, Lanpher was the head coach at Randolph College, until accepting the CSU job in July.
It’s nearly impossible to describe what he accomplished at the Division III outfit based in Lynchburg, VA.
The WildCats’ program began play in 1964. Over its first 55 years, it managed exactly seven winning seasons – none of those more recent than 1982. In fact, Randolph had cleared the extremely modest goal of ten wins just eight times.
Then, in 2019, Lanpher showed up. By his third season, Randolph was 16-7. The following year, 2022-23, was even better: a 19-8 campaign that ended with a first-ever trip to the Old Dominion Athletic Conference semifinals. That effort qualifies as the most successful in WildCats history, in just about every measurable way.
Overall, Lanpher went 72-65 at Randolph, and is the only coach ever to leave the school with a winning record. The WildCats’ overall mark prior to his arrival was 296-725.
As a man in his early 60s who had spent a lifetime hopping around the country for the next opportunity every two or four or six years, Lanpher had discovered a great situation with immense job security at Randolph. There’s little doubt that he could have settled down and run out the clock in Virginia as the savior of a bad program, before retiring and waiting around for a court dedication, or perhaps a statue.
Why abandon that idea for Cleveland State? Largely, the answer traces to a long-term friendship with Chris Kielsmeier, and an adopted love for Kielsmeier’s favorite defense, the matchup zone.
Lanpher estimates that he’s run that zone for about a decade, first picking it up from Merrimack head coach Joe Gallo, then veering towards Kielsmeier’s version of the system five or six years ago.
“More importantly, he’s just a class act and someone that I really look up to, and character is important to him, as it is to me, and we agree on a lot of the same philosophies,” Lanpher added. “I knew when I wanted to get back into the Division I level that, if the opportunity arose, I’d want to do it with Chris.”
“He knows how we go about doing things, and how successful we’ve been, and how we develop, and that aligns with him,” Kielsmeier added. “Those are things that he chases as a coach. And I think the opportunity to do it at an elite program, in a very tough conference, was appealing to him, and he wanted to be challenged with that.”
Of course, all of the philosophical alignment in the world doesn’t do any good if the timing isn’t also in sync.
It certainly was on the Vikings’ side of things. In addition to CSU’s well-publicized player departures, Kielsmeier entered the offseason needing to rebuild his staff for the third consecutive year. One of his two assistant coach vacancies was filled relatively quickly by Jenna Bolstad, who had most recently been on the staff at Northern Illinois.
Meanwhile, though Lanpher enjoyed the stability of Randolph while his family grew up, as his children finished school and left the house, he grew an itch to jump back on to the coaching carousel.
Ideally that would involve a return to Division I competition, even if he couldn’t be in charge of his own program for the first time in 14 years.
“You’re going to take the step from being an assistant [coach] to a head [coach], there’s a lot of questions that come with that,” Kielsmeier said. “You’re going to take the step from being a head to an assistant, there’s obviously a lot of questions that come with that as well. So he answered those questions in his head the way he wanted to, to feel like this was the right move in his career, and it’s certainly a big step for him and his family.”
As it turned out, he was the perfect plug-and-play option for Cleveland State. Though that final staff vacancy lasted until relatively late in the offseason, with Lanpher, there wasn’t really much runway needed. After all, he was already perfectly paired with Kielsmeier systematically and culturally, and as a recruiter.
“We focus on character and work ethic first,” Lanpher explained. “We like players with length, if we can get it, and obviously, you’ve got to have the ability. But that makes it easy in terms of knowing that we both want high-caliber character players, players that are going to do well in the classroom, and that are going to act appropriately besides being great basketball players.”
Though the season is just three games old, it has decidedly been a case of so far, so good.
With one more experienced expert on staff, Cleveland State’s defense has looked re-invigorated after spending most of 2024-25 fighting doldrums. Both Kielsmeier and Lanpher are quick to point out that their team is still very much a work in progress, but CSU has exceled at a couple of stylistically-crucial statistics; the Vikings’ 13.3 steals per game rank 46th nationally, while its opponents’ 14.3 percent rate on three-pointers places sixth. Last year’s versions of those numbers sat 224th and 299th.
Really, there’s only been one problem.
“Coach Kielsmeier told me it was 65 degrees year-round [in Cleveland],” Lanpher joked. “That may not be true, but I’m enjoying it and it’s just a great city. Everybody’s been really welcoming to me and my family – the administration, the coaching staff, all the coaches, so it’s been an easy transition.”
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