Texas A&M Aggies Coach Bucky McMillan Explains 'Bucky Ball” Origins

The Aggies’ new coach has an impressive high school coaching resume at Alabama’s Mountain Brook High School, where McMillan said “Bucky Ball” was coined.

“When I was coaching high school basketball in Alabama back in the day, all the coaches in the suburban schools they played in the ’30s and ’40s,” McMillan said. “Really slow. Ran the flags. No shot clock. Shoot it after a minute, and we were just — if I coached, we were never going to do that. We were going to trap until they shot the ball. Shoot as quickly as possible. Take a lot of threes.”

Essentially, his different pace and style set his teams apart from the teams they were playing, thus bringing on the term “Bucky Ball.”

McMillan is not the only contributor to “Bucky Ball,” he told Rothestein. He said his collegiate coach played a major role in shaping his own game plan as a coach.

"I played for a great college coach in Duane Reboul, who was the coach of Birmingham Southern, who was in the Big South at the time," McMillan said. "He went to an NAIA national championship before that, and he was kind of the same way, early three-point shooting before it was popular, spacing the floor. I studied him a lot."

The Aggies will see “Bucky Ball” in action as they traverse through their gauntlet of a road SEC schedule. They will travel to Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Auburn in McMillan’s first year as A&M’s leader.