Ben Pallardy has already turned around one basketball program. Now he's ready for a new challenge.
Pallardy, who has been the boys basketball head coach at Fayette the past five years, announced Tuesday he will take over as Eldon boys basketball head coach for the 2018-19 season.
"I'm really excited about it," Pallardy said. "I love the new challenge of taking over a program that has been really good in the past, and I want to get them back to prominence, getting Eldon back to where it needs to be and where it should be.
"It's going to take some time, it's going to take some special players to be able to turn that around."
In his first season at Fayette, Pallardy and the Falcons posted a 1-23 record in 2013-14.
"I came in thinking I knew everything there was to know about coaching," Pallardy said. "I was quickly humbled."
But it didn't stay that way for long at Fayette. Pallardy finished with a 63-67 record with the Falcons, going from one win to seven in his second season, then to 14, then to 18.
This past season, the Falcons finished with a 23-4 record and were ranked as high as No. 3 in Class 2.
"This past year, it just all came together," said Pallardy, who guided Fayette this season to its first Lewis & Clark Conference championship since 2010. " The only way this season could have gone any better is had we made a run to the Final Four.
"The biggest thing we did at Fayette was we turned the culture around, where the guys loved to play, they loved to compete and we became really close. We played for each other."
Pallardy takes over an Eldon team that was winless in 25 games this season, and posted just one win the season before that, beating Warsaw in the seventh-place game of the Tri-County Conference Tournament.
So why go from a successful program to a rebuilding one?
"I'm excited about going into a rebuild," Pallardy said. "I feel like that's one of my strengths. I think I'll be better off as a coach going into a rebuilding situation than taking over an established program, where things are done a certain way and they've been successful.
"I like to do things a little bit different. I think it's a draw that I can come in and we can overhaul what's going on and try and do it a different way."
Pallardy said he will bring his read-and-react offense to Eldon, but he said his first goal is to get the competitive fire going for the Mustangs.
"If we can reach our goal in a shooting drill, it's a small victory and it doesn't necessarily win you a game, but it's little things like that that we just get used to winning," he said. "No matter what we do, we're going to compete.
"The competitiveness and the will to win have to be there, and then you have to develop your skills as you go along."
Pallardy, a 2006 Fort Zumwalt South graduate, played two seasons on the JV basketball team at Central Methodist University in Fayette. After his playing days, he remained with the Eagles' JV team, serving one season as a student assistant coach and then three seasons as the JV head coach before taking over for the Falcons.
Now he's ready to make the jump from Class 2 to Class 4 basketball.
"I have a lot to learn about the program, about the players and everything that's going on," Pallardy said.