Jon Adams steps away from MØDE Prep basketball after first season

Jon Adams has stepped away from MØDE Prep after one season, leaving the Liberty Lake program to manage its next coaching move while it tries to hold together a young basketball pipeline in the Inland Northwest. Adams said family and personal obligations now need his attention after guiding the school’s first season-long prep basketball effort.

His departure lands at a sensitive moment for a program still defining itself. MØDE Sports brought Adams in after five years as varsity coach at Coeur d’Alene High School, where he went 71-37 and finished his final Viking team 21-5 in 2023-24. That Coeur d’Alene run produced the school’s first league title since 2016, its first regional title since 2011 and its first state berth since 2012, a résumé that gave MØDE immediate credibility with players and families considering the jump to prep basketball.

MØDE’s boys basketball operation currently lists three levels, High School Prep, Junior National Team and National Team, and the teams train at The HUB Sports Center in Spokane Valley and Ridgeline High School in Liberty Lake. Those details matter because the program’s identity is built on more than one roster. It is selling a full pathway, and Adams has been one of the faces explaining how that pathway works to recruits, parents and the local basketball community.

The first season showed both the ambition and the strain of that model. Under Adams, MØDE went 16-17 and played mostly in Grind Session events, the winter circuit that spans more than 400 games from November through March. Nearly all of the team’s games were away from the area, with only one at North Idaho College. The schedule took the program from a debut at the Spooky Nook facility near Cincinnati to Grind Session stops in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and later to the postseason in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where MØDE reached the playoffs and championship bracket this spring.

Adams said he will still help with the hiring process and assist remaining players with recruiting, a sign that the program is trying to keep continuity even as the head coach moves on. That continuity will matter because MØDE still wants to build a multi-purpose indoor athletic complex on campus, and the permitting process has slowed that work. The school had hoped to move toward two national-level teams and one local high school program, but the high school team has already seen delays getting off the ground.