After starting the season outside the Associated Press Top 25, Arizona is now ready to make the program's first Sweet Sixteen appearance since 2017 as the top seed in the South Region.

Credit for this surprise season goes to first-year head coach Tommy Lloyd, the coaching staff, and the players who have helped Arizona get back into the national spotlight.

When you look at Lloyd's staff, it features one of the most accomplished assistant coaches in the game, a coach who has been a head coach in the past, and then there is assistant coach Riccardo Fois.

"Ricky and I are great friends, and I basically was the first person to get Ricky involved in real coaching," Lloyd said of his first-year assistant. "I think Ricky wanted to be a scout, but once he and I got together, we figured out that we are pretty like-minded from a basketball standpoint and development standpoint, so we shared a lot of similarities."

Before his time with Arizona, Fois held the title of coordinator of basketball analytics and video operations from 2014-19 at Gonzaga under Lloyd and coach Mark Few. He helped them with evaluating player analytics as well has handle day-to-day operations.

"The first thing is you're working for a hall of famer who has seen it all," Fois said of his time with the Bulldogs. "I think the biggest thing was how personable of those guys are, they were these great coaches, but they were these great people. You know, like we will go out and drink beers or go and eat chicken wings at night. I remember I had friends coming from Italy, and they treated them like they were family.

"And the same for everyone who's ever been around their program, and now this program is like you obviously want to win you want to win at the highest level but, you are also a normal human being and like we do something pretty cool and the humbleness. I think of them was like, okay, like you can win and do this. That was my first thing of okay, you can win and have fun and be normal and treat the guys like adults. That really stuck out to me because it was like that when I was growing up in Italy. European teams are more like that. And then you get to professional basketball, and it's not like that because there is a lot of tension and it's hard you try to win. But they had a great balance."