Just as he expects his players to do in the offseason, Chris Hamilton is keeping his skills sharp this summer.
 
Not content to rest on his laurels after guiding the Franklin College men to the HCAC tournament championship and a second-round NCAA tournament appearance, Hamilton will have his whiteboard and dry-erase markers at the ready this weekend when he serves as an assistant coach for the Rise and Grind team in The Basketball Tournament (TBT), an annual summer showcase that sees 64 teams — most made up of collegiate alumni — playing for a $1 million winner-take-all grand prize.
 
Hamilton will be part of a veteran coaching staff led by Kerry Keating, a former head coach at Division I Santa Clara from 2007 through 2016 and an assistant on two UCLA Final Four teams featuring Kevin Love and Russell Westbrook.
 
"It allows me to be in a different role, which makes me be just as much a student of the game as I'm asking our guys to be when they're here," Hamilton said.
 
Hamilton's introduction to TBT came last year. Buzz Anthony — a former NCAA Division III national player of the year who Hamilton coached during his final year as an assistant at Randolph-Macon, his alma mater — reached out and said that Rise and Grind was looking for another assistant. Since the team was playing its regional games in Hamilton's hometown of Dayton, Ohio, the coach jumped at the opportunity.
 
Coaching much more experienced players, including several who've been playing professionally overseas, offers Hamilton a different perspective on the game.
 
"All week, you kind of just get to see how they handle their business," Hamilton said. "And yes, competing for the prize at the end is enticing, but at the same time, because of the caliber of competition, these guys are all competing for another contract. ... Any chance I can get to be around the highest levels of not just talent, but the professional mindset and how these guys handle their business."
 
Unlike many of the teams that pool former players from a specific college, Rise and Grind features a hodgepodge of talent from various different schools, most of them outside of Division I.
 
Hamilton helped Rise and Grind push 2023 champion Heartfire to the limit in the opening round last summer before suffering a narrow 68-64 defeat.
 
Seeing a squad loaded with former Division II, Division III and NAIA players nearly pull a historic TBT upset only reinforced Hamilton's beliefs about the quality of play at the top of Division III.
 
"Having played and coached Division III at a really high level, by the time that you're a junior and senior for the highest-level Division III programs, you can compete with scholarship-level schools," the coach said. "That's what we say in recruiting a lot ... some people view you as 18- and 19-year-olds; we see a version of you at 22, 23 that could compete with anybody. These (Rise and Grind) guys are proof of that."
 
Rise and Grind opens up this year's TBT as the No. 6 seed in the Syracuse Regional, where it faces the third-seeded Green Mountain Men, a team of University of Vermont alums, in a 3 p.m. game on Saturday. The winner moves into a July 21 matchup (6 p.m. on Fox Sports 2) against either the Stars of Storrs, a team of UConn alumni, or the Brown Ballers. The top seed in the region, Syracuse-based Boeheim's Army, could potentially await in the July 23 regional final (7 p.m., Fox Sports 1).
 
Seeing how hard it is to win just one game in such a high-level tournament last summer helped Hamilton prepare his Franklin team for last season's NCAA tournament, where the Grizzlies advanced to the second round for the first time since 2000.
 
The hope is to advance beyond that point this coming season, but Hamilton has learned not to put the cart before the horse, whether with the Grizzlies or in the coming days.
 
"I would love to get to a Sweet 16, an Elite Eight, Final Four," he said, "but when you see the caliber and how hard it is, you've got to take it one game at a time."