McCollum Added to Northridge Staff : College basketball: Former Carpinteria High coach fills one of two vacant assistant’s positions.

Cal State Northridge didn’t have to go far to find a full-time assistant coach for its men’s basketball team.

Tom McCollum, the boys’ basketball coach at Carpinteria High for the past three seasons, has agreed to fill the CSUN position vacated by Rusty Smith, who resigned in June to take a similar post at Eastern Washington of the Big Sky Conference. Smith held the CSUN job for seven years.

Although his Carpinteria teams compiled an unimpressive 24-46 record during his stint at the Tri-Valley League school, McCollum has several years of collegiate experience.

From 1985-87, he was an assistant at Santa Barbara City College. He was an assistant coach for the UC Santa Barbara men’s team during the 1983-84 season and for the women’s team from 1984-85. Before that, he was an assistant at Chapman College from 1973-81 and a part-time assistant for Utah during the 1982-83 season.

“I’m very pleased to have Tom McCollum as a primary member of my staff,” Northridge Coach Pete Cassidy said in a release from the CSUN sports information office. “Tom has had extensive experience at various levels of basketball and is extremely dedicated. . . . He has been so dedicated to the game for so long; he has a lot of networking type of things that are essential to the recruiting process.”

Northridge, which will make its NCAA Division I debut on the road against Colorado on Nov. 23, is still expected to hire a part-time assistant to replace Dave Fehte.

Fehte, a Northridge assistant for the previous six seasons, accepted a full-time assistant position at St. Mary’s College three weeks ago.