Arizona men’s basketball assistant Riccardo Fois is leaving the program for a job in the NBA.

Fois is joining the Sacramento Kings coaching staff, according to Italian basketball coach Gianmarco Pozzecco, who announced the move Saturday at a team press conference. Fois serves as an assistant for the Italian national team.

Fois joined Tommy Lloyd’s Arizona staff in 2021 after spending the previous two years with the Phoenix Suns organization. Before that, Fois worked as director of analytics for Gonzaga from 2014 to 2019. Fois began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Pepperdine.

The Olbia, Italy native is highly regarded in the sport. At Arizona he was credited with developing future pros Bennedict Mathurin, Dalen Terry, Christian Koloko and Azuolas Tubelis.

Fois is the first full-time assistant under Lloyd to leave for another job.

To get ready for the upcoming Arizona football season, All Sports Tucson offers a countdown, which will include history notes and a look ahead to the season — a good way to keep Arizona football on the mind in the summer months leading up to fall camp in early August and then kickoff against New Mexico on Aug. 31 in the start of the Brent Brennan era.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS PREVIOUS DAYS IN THE COUNTDOWN

A LOOK BACK — NO. 70 JOHN FINA

With it being the 70th day until kickoff between the Lobos and Wildcats, the best player to wear No. 70 for Arizona is offensive tackle John Fina, a Salpointe Catholic graduate who played at Arizona from 1988 to 1991. He was a first-round pick (27th overall) by the Buffalo Bills who spent 11 years in the NFL, 10 with the Bills. He went on to play in two Super Bowls with Buffalo. He has been inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame and the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame. In his junior year at Arizona, Fina played both offense and defense and won the team’s Bronco Nagurski award for the best two-way player on the team. John started 27 games on the offensive line and finished his career at Arizona by earning second team All-Pac-10 honors and being named the team MVP. He was also a three-time All-Pac-10 Academic selection (1989, 1990 and 1991). He started 131 of the 148 games he appeared in for the Bills. His eleventh year with the NFL was spent with the Arizona Cardinals. Fina has coached on Salpointe’s staff in recent years with his sons Bruno and Roman (both offensive linemen) playing for the Lancers. Bruno started his college career at UCLA but transferred to Duke after last season. Roman, a Class of 2025 prospect, has committed to join his brother at Duke. The elder Fina is also regional sales manager at Thales Cloud Security.

NO. 70 IN 2024 — OT ZARIUS WELLS

Wells, 6-foot-6 and 305 pounds, hails from powerhouse Chandler High School. redshirted as a freshman last season. While at Chandler, he played under offensive line coach Dominic Raiola, a 14-year center for the NFL Detroit Lions. Joined the Wildcat program as a preferred walk-on.

NOTE

According to Matt Moreno of GOAZCATS.com, here is a preliminary list of expected of Class of 2024 visitors on Arizona’s campus this weekend (already-committed QB Robert McDaniel of Hughson, Calif., is among them):

THEY SAID IT

Muizz Tounkara, a 3-star Class of 2025 standout receiver from League City (Texas) Clear Springs High School, has narrowed his list to Arizona, Wisconsin and Kansas as his final three choices. He announced on X (Twitter) on Friday that he will announce his decision July 13. Here is what he told TTJH Sports:

FOLLOW @JAVIERJMORALES ON TWITTER!

ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon. He became an educator in 2016 and is presently a special education teacher at Sunnyside High School in the Sunnyside Unified School District.

The offseason is here, with all of Arizona’s sports done for 2023-24 season and the 2024-25 campaigns still a little ways away.

Which makes this a great time to step back and see how all of the Wildcats’ programs are doing, especially with the impending move to the Big 12 Conference.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at each of the UA’s men’s and women’s athletic programs to see what shape they’re in and what prospects they have for the near future. We’ll break down each team and evaluate how it is performing under its current coaching staff, looking at the state of the program before he/she arrived and comparing it to now while also looking at the upcoming debut in the Big 12 and beyond.

Next up: Clancy Shields’ men’s tennis team

How it looked before

For the longest time, men’s tennis had been one of those sports that Arizona participated in but never really competed in. From 2011-16 the Wildcats didn’t have a winning record, going winless in Pac-10/12 play all but once during that stretch.

But when it came time to make a coaching change, athletic director Greg Byrne made one of the most underrated hires of his tenure in Clancy Shields. A young, up-and-coming coach from Utah State who was Mountain West Coach of the Year in 2016, Shields came to Tucson with a vision to turn Arizona into one of the top programs in the country.

It took a few years, with the UA going winless in Pac-12 play his first two seasons, but in 2019 it broke through with an NCAA Tournament appearance and it’s been nothing but up since.

Where things stand now

Arizona has reached the Sweet 16 in three of the last four seasons, hosting the first weekend the last two years. The Wildcats lost 4-3 at Columbia in mid-May to close out a 29-4 campaign that included winning the final Pac-12 regular-season title and becoming the first non-California team to claim the conference tournament championship.

The UA also won a pair of matches at the ITA National Indoor Championship, knocking off a pair of ranked programs en route to having the highest ITA ranking (No. 5) in school history.

And on the individual front, junior Colton Smith reached the Division I semifinals, became the school’s first All-American since 2006 and qualified for the ATP Next Gen Accelerator program which will give him access to professional tournaments.

Smith is one of three returners from the singles rotation, along with Casper Christensen and Jay Friend. And the Wildcats are bringing in the No. 5 recruiting class in the country, per tennisrecruiting.net, highlighted by 5-star prospect Santiago Padilla Cote and Serbian Zoran Ludoski.

Clancy has had his contract extended multiple times, currently through 2028, but probably needs another raise to ensure he’s not poached.

What life in the Big 12 should look like

Fresh of conquering the Pac-12 in its final year of competition, Arizona now heads to a Big 12 Conference that features the reigning national champion. TCU beat soon-to-be-former Big 12 foe Texas in the NCAA Division I finals.

Baylor, Oklahoma State and UCF also made the NCAA Tournament this past season out of the Big 12, which will feature nine schools in 2025 with the addition of Arizona, ASU and Utah. BYU and Texas Tech are the other men’s tennis participants.

One big question

Is the Sweet 16 the ceiling? Arizona had never gotten out of the opening weekend of the NCAA tourney until 2021, but it’s now done that three times in four years. But each trip to the Sweet 16 has ended in defeat, and half of the 2024 team has graduated.

Getting to host the third round would be the next step in getting over that hump. All three of Arizona’s Sweet 16 appearances have been on the road, with this past season as the No. 9 seed.