The562’s coverage of Long Beach State athletics for the 2026-27 season is sponsored by Marilyn Bohl.
The Long Beach State basketball programs are looking to revamp their operations with the hiring of Ken Ammann, which was announced last week. Ammann will serve as the Associate Athletic Director of Basketball Strategy & Revenue and General Manager for both the men’s and women’s basketball programs.
According to Long Beach State athletics, Ammann’s role will primarily focus on fundraising, donor relations, NIL partnerships, revenue sharing, roster planning and student-athlete support. Under the new landscape of college basketball in the NIL era, the goal of this role will be to strengthen competitiveness and strive for long-term success within the programs.
“With revenue sharing, NIL, and the transfer portal significantly reshaping roster construction and the overall landscape of college basketball, this position will serve as a critical resource for our coaching staff, student-athletes, and community,” Athletic Director Bobby Smitheran told LBSU Athletics. “[Ammann] brings a championship pedigree and longstanding connection to our region that will make a meaningful impact on our basketball programs.”
Ammann was the longest-tenured coach in Concordia University Irvine history after completing his 25th season last year, winning 546 games during his tenure along with two NAIA National Championships. He also played a pivotal role in fundraising at CUI, raising over $250,000 annually to help sustain the men’s program.
Prior to CUI, Ammann was a Division I assistant coach at Pepperdine and San Jose State following a successful playing career at Stanford. Ammann is also a Southern California native and a Hall of Famer at his alma mater, Edison High School, with ties to Long Beach through his grandparents who lived in the city.
“To be at a place like Long Beach State is invigorating—it’s a new challenge,” Ammann said. “The people here work really hard and these programs are moving in such a great direction, so it’s an exciting time to join them. These programs have such a storied history for both the men and women, and so everyone here is working together to get that back.”
Ammann joins the department at a pivotal time for both programs. The women’s team is now under new leadership in Minyon Moore following a three-year stint under Amy Wright, who finished last season with a disappointing 5-25 record. The last time the Beach finished in the top three of the conference was in 2023, when they placed second with a 17-3 Big West record in Wright’s first season.
The men’s team has similarly struggled over the last two years under head coach Chris Acker, going 17-47 dating back to 2024, including a 19-game losing streak during that stretch that was the longest active losing streak in the nation at the time. The Beach has missed the Big West Tournament in both of those two seasons.
Both programs have done a fine job finding and building talent, but perhaps the biggest goal of Ammann’s new role will be retaining that talent, which has been a struggle for both programs as they try to compete with outside offers. The men’s program has had to continuously wave goodbye to its top talent, including last year’s leading scorers in standout freshman Gavin Sykes (TCU) and Petar Majstorovic (Syracuse).
For the women’s side, the Beach lost their top player JaQuoia Jones-Brown after last season when she announced that she was transferring to James Madison. Lauren Cummings also announced shortly after the season that she was entering the transfer portal, writing on Instagram, “With the current direction of the program, I have decided to enter the transfer portal.”
In trying to retain that talent, the Beach is not reinventing the wheel but rather trying to raise its level of operations at the Division I level. Big-name schools like Duke and Villanova were some of the first to adopt similar positions around four years ago, and Ammann estimates that five or six schools in the Big West already have a similar role filled.
“These development and fundraising positions are in pretty much every single Division 1 school. There are all sorts of positions like this opening up because of the new world we live in,” he said. “It’s a necessary thing to recruit and obtain quality athletes. Both [LBSU] programs have put together great roosters and we need to work really hard to retain those student-athletes that we work hard to get here. We want to make this a home.”
