Bruce Alan Pearl (born March 18, 1960) is an American college basketball coach, and the head coach of the Auburn Tigers men's basketball team. He previously served as the head coach at Tennessee, Milwaukee, and Southern Indiana. Pearl led Southern Indiana to a Division II national championship in 1995 and was named Division II Coach of the Year by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. He has won four conference championships and three conference tournament championships as a Division I head coach, and has made ten NCAA tournament appearances and one Final Four. Pearl was named Coach of the Year by Sporting News in 2006 and was awarded the Adolph Rupp Cup in 2008. He also served as the head coach for the Maccabi USA men's basketball team that won the gold medal at the 2009 Maccabiah Games. Early life A Jewish native of Boston, Pearl attended Sharon High School in Sharon, Massachusetts. He is one of the few Division I basketball coaches who never played high school basketball, even at the junior varsity level (being the only head coach in the 2022 NCAA tournament with that distinction); a shoulder injury while playing football in his first year of high school prevented him from further pursuing sports as a player. Pearl is a 1982 graduate of Boston College, where he served as the manager of the men's basketball team. His Hebrew name is Mordechai, named after Queen Esther’s uncle in the Purim story. Coaching career Pearl has also been the head coach at Tennessee, Milwaukee and, prior to that, at Southern Indiana, where he won a Division II national championship. He also served as an assistant coach at Stanford and at Iowa under then-head coach Tom Davis. Among his achievements, Pearl is the second-fastest NCAA coach to reach 300 victories, and needed only 382 games to reach this mark (Roy Williams needed 370 games at Kansas to reach this milestone). Against division rival Kentucky and in-state rival Vanderbilt, Pearl chose to wear a brightly colored orange jacket in honor of the late UT coach Ray Mears. Pearl also wore the jacket during the 2009 SEC Men's Tournament Final. Pearl was the first president of the Jewish Coaches Association. Assistant Coach (1982–1992) Pearl served as an assistant coach at both Stanford from 1982 to 1986 and at Iowa from 1986 to 1992 under Coach Tom Davis. Davis had served as head