| ChurchBeat | | Wednesday, April 24, 2024 |
The Handwritten Note New BYU Men’s Baskeball Coach Kevin Young Keeps in His Glove Box Thanksgiving Point sits halfway between Salt Lake City and Provo. One of the attractions is a restaurant where the rush-hour lunch crowd skews to women and retirees. On this afternoon in 2010, the lunch crowd is confused by the two men setting basketball screens between the tables. One of the men is an under-30 Kevin Young, then the head coach of the D-League’s Utah Flash, based in Orem, Utah. The other man is a guy Young cherishes, Gordon Chiesa, who spent 16 years as an assistant coach with the Utah Jazz. At the time of this lunch, though, he works for the NBA as a consultant mentoring the coaches in the NBA Development League, or D-League. That means he’s advised Nick Nurse, who will go on to win an NBA title as head coach of the Toronto Raptors; Darvin Ham, who took the Los Angeles Lakers to the Western Conference finals in 2023; and Chris Finch, now the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, who are playing the Phoenix Suns — and associate head coach Kevin Young — in the NBA playoffs. Small world, right? Chiesa’s go-to sandwich — turkey club — sits on the table near Young’s tomato basil soup, but the two coaches are on their feet. Chiesa and Young take turns setting screens on each other. Chiesa is emphasizing how a player should jump stop when he sets a screen, how his feet should pop when they hit the floor and stay in place to make it a legal screen. A Jersey guy with a delightful accent, Chiesa brims with optimism. It’s fitting a guy who set his Catholic high school’s record for assists became a coaches’ mentor. He lives to share his knowledge and help people. “I call it share and care,” Chiesa said this week, when I noted that he’s tweeted 13,200 times. Most of it is coaching advice. In microbursts, he has written a manual on basketball and emotional intelligence. Chiesa’s TLC will be exactly what Young needs a few years after this lunch, in 2013. By then, the Flash franchise had folded and Young had become the head coach of the Iowa Energy, another D-League team. He’s the youngest coach in the league, by far, and believes he’s on the fast track to the NBA. The problem is the Energy are 6-17 because of an unusual number of injuries and the usual zany D-League roster turnover. “Coaching in the G-League is maybe the hardest coaching job there is,” BYU legend and Utah Jazz CEO Danny Ainge told me last week after BYU introduced Young as its new men’s basketball coach, “just because you don’t know who’s on your roster from game to game as NBA teams send players down from the big club to play on the G-League team and take the best players off your G-League team to play for them. “There’s so many egos, and nobody wants to be in the G-League. They all want to be somewhere else. So it’s really hard, but it’s great coaching experience. A lot of coaches that have coached in the G-League have turned out to be fantastic NBA coaches.” The Energy fired Young. “It put me on my heels,” he says. Thankfully, he had mentors ready to pitch in to help, including Chiesa. The retired coach is an old-school guy. He sent Young a handwritten note. In the mail. Seriously. “Sports is a really unfair business where you’re judged by so many different variables, especially from a coaching standpoint,” Chiesa told me last week. “When it didn’t work out for Kevin with the Iowa Energy, I wrote a note to him that said, ‘I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing about you being the comeback person of the year in coaching.’” The note is powerful enough that Young still keeps it in the glove box of his car for ready reference. The paper is worn out from a decade of use, but the message retains all of its power. “I love that guy,” Young says about Chiesa. “He’s one of the all-time best. He’s an old school guy, man, he’s a class act.” Please read my in-depth profile of Kevin Young to learn more about the faith journey with his wife that brought them to BYU after eight years in the NBA and about the backstory of how BYU hired him. The link is below: |
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What I’m Reading ... This was extremely interesting: “The AP’s general conference coverage is a cautionary tale for people of faith.” This was an embarrassment: “The New York Post gave a tutorial on how not to write about Latter-day Saints.” Deseret News writer Holly Richardson wrote a great tribute to Melissa Inouye, the groundbreaking historian who died of colon cancer this week. Melissa was kind and patient with me whenever I asked for her help. As a woman so interested in peace, she modeled it. My prayers and best wishes go out to her family. I really enjoyed reading the inside story of a baseball player’s search for the perfect swing. |
Utah Jazz assistant coach Gordon Chiesa, right, goes over some plays with Raul Lopez, left, and Curtis Borchardt in 2005. Chiesa was a Jazz assistant coach for 16 years. (Jeremy Harmon, Deseret News) |
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