Before we get into Coach Taylor's story, I want to recognize and turn your attention to the continuing struggles of the Black population to seek justice and equality. Please check out Rachel Cargle's Instagram to process and think through how our daily use of language shapes our thinking about color and other people.
Player Intro
Kyle Taylor has been a college-level basketball coach for fifteen years. He began his career in sports as a grad assistant at Pepperdine after his graduation from UCLA in 2005. Over the following years, he coached at Cal State Northridge, William Jewell College, and Minnesota State University Moorhead. He became the head basketball coach at Covenant College in 2009, coaching there until 2016; from 2013-2016, he also doubled as the athletic director at Covenant. Following his tenure at Covenant, from 2016-2018, he became director of player development at Utah State. From 2018-19, Coach Taylor was associate head coach at Idaho State. He is currently head basketball coach at Salt Lake Community College.
Coach Taylor played basketball at the high school and collegiate levels, noting that his time as a player helped him to realize that he is passionate about working with college-aged men, and using that platform as a coach to help shape men's lives.
Gameplan
pD: Talk to me about your philosophy and approach to coaching.
KT: As a coach, and as a parent with sports, you always have to be prepared and ready to utilize teachable moments. I think a lot of people say "sports does such a great job of shaping people," and that's true, but there has to be a conduit through which that happens, there has to be a person that helps that process happen. If you just go out and play sports, but don't ever reflect on things that happen or talk about what happened, then you aren't going to grow. You're not just going to automatically grow because you played sports.
If you follow that train of thought, you could say that you could grow from video games too, but you don't see a lot of kids grow from playing video games; some might, but in general, you don't. I think the difference between video games and sports, oftentimes, is the coach or parent that takes those teachable opportunities and actually talks about them. A coach who praises or disciplines you for doing something, or a coach who helps develop team chemistry, or helps people to value one another.
One of my core reasons for coaching is to shape men's lives
For me, one of my core reasons for coaching is to shape men's lives; I say that all the time to people and to our players. I have to be intentional on a daily basis with that; I have to be able to see our players as individual people and not as pawns or tools in the game of basketball, that we use and discard when we're done. I have to be aware of their personalities and attitudes and be able to identify when they're having a bad day, or are sad, or something is bothering them, and be intentional and go pursue them, which isn't always easy; to have that conversation and encourage them and get them to open up and share what's going on.
I also love seeing our guys graduate. I'm proud of them, a lot of first generation college students, who are the first in their family to graduate from college; to me, those are things that you celebrate long after winning a conference championship or advancing to a national tournament. For me, those are big reasons that I coach.
pD: Since you've identified these priorities of shaping men's lives and seeing them succeed outside of basketball as well, what kinds of habits have you had to develop to meet those priorities?
KT: Discipline is definitely a habit I've developed through playing and coaching; grit is a word I use a lot with my own children and with our players. Response to failure: everyone fails in life at different points, and I have as a husband, as a father, as a man, and certainly as a coach, so learning to respond to failure has been a tremendous thing I've learned through sports. Communication: I think I'm a far better communicator in all aspects of my life because of coaching, and playing as well. Finally, more than just teamwork, specifically a reliance on others; when you play team sports, you are reliant on others, and that's a habit or trait I think has really helped shaped me as a person.
My daughter is an introvert, and there's nothing wrong with that, but we talk with her about the importance of being part of a community, doesn't matter how big or small that community is, but you have to have other people you can rely on, that you can count on in times of need that we're all going to face. So those are five habits I would say I've really developed and grown through my life in sports.
pD: I wonder if you could please elaborate on the grit, which you said is something you emphasize with your players as well as with your kids, and everyone might define grit a different way. Tell me a little more about what that means for you.
KT: Grit is both a mental and a physical toughness. All of us, in addition to just failure, go through hard and difficult times that may not be related to failure. It may just be depression, or it may be the loss of a family member or loved one through death, or it may be the loss of a relationship because you've moved or go off to college or just drift apart. I think in school, at some point, no matter how smart you are, you run into a class or subject that you don't understand and you have so much trouble getting.
Grit is a mental and physical toughness
To me, grit is the ability, in the midst of hard things, to persevere, to keep trying, to search for answers. To me, that's just a really valuable skill to develop, and I think sports is a great place where you're working with a player one-on-one on a particular dribble move, and they physically can't figure it out, so it's the encouragement and the challenging of them to say: "we're going to accomplish this. It may take a day, a week, a month, or a year, but we're going to persevere, we're going to stay the course, and we're going to figure this out together."
And also celebrating when those things happen, like with one of my kids, when they finally understand some concept, whether in science or in math, when they understand it, to celebrate that. When you see someone display grit in their lives, to compliment them and say "that's grit. You just showed grit; that's what we're talking about." So pushing people to get through tough situations, and then acknowledging and praising them and celebrating when they do make those strides.
pD: You've hinted at how a lot of these habits are not just basketball or coaching habits, but also have carried over into other parts of your life: as a parent, as a husband. How have some of these translated from sports over to other parts of life?
KT: I think the first one that has been life-changing and helpful in other areas of my life is just recognizing the need and desire for community. I think sports showed me that I needed other people in a way that I wouldn't have figured out as quickly, but as an adult, I see the value of relationships and see the importance of having quality relationships with people who can help you through hard times, who can support you, people who can pray for you.
For example, we're in a community group in our church probably in large part because of me playing sports and seeing the importance of being around others and having relationships and counting on people. Some of the life choices we've made as a family: for example, we're really intentional with the neighbors on our street, to build relationships and be able to help them when they have need and to ask for help.
Just a couple weeks ago, one of my neighbors is super handy, and we were wanting to build an A-frame swing set, and because I know him, and because we have a good relationship, and I know his skillset, I was able to go to him and say: "Hey, I probably can't get this done on my own, at least not safely for my kids to play on, would you come and help me?" And because of the relationship that we have, we were able to spend an afternoon building a swing set and it was really fun to be together, and we also accomplished something that was really helpful that my kids love and get to play with. I think I've grown in being aware that I have limitations, and that it's OK to have others come alongside us and support us in that. So that's a big trait that sports has taught me that has now carried over into lots of other areas of my life.
I've grown in being aware that I have limitations
Another one I wrote down is how I communicate with other people, particularly my responsiveness. I think there's a lot of people who you never hear from again if you call or text them. Through sports, especially in coaching and recruiting and learning to build relationships, I see the value of responding and getting back to people. I don't always do it in a perfect time of the next day, but just the commitment to effectively communicate with people in my life and maintain those relationships over time. I think sports, and particularly coaching and recruiting, have taught me that, which translates to other areas of my life, and helps me to maintain relationships and continue to impact people's lives that you don't interact with or see regularly.
pD: What's one of the biggest challenges you've faced, either as a coach, or in life, and how did you overcome it?
KT: The first real challenge I faced in my coaching career was at 26, young and still pretty naive and immature in coaching, I took over as the head coach at Covenant. Covenant had gone 2-29 the year before I got the job, so was about as bad as you can be in college basketball.
I had only been coaching for about four years, so I was pretty young and not necessarily very experienced as a coach, and probably not a very good coach at that time. So that was an incredible challenge over the seven years I was at Covenant, to shape and develop that program into a winning program.
It took four years before we had our first winning season, and probably the hardest part of that journey was, we got to the point where we had our winning season, and I kind of exhaled and thought "we made it; we had a winning season, this is awesome," and just kind of assumed that that would continue, and that we'd just keep winning after that.
You can never stop working
We immediately had a losing season the next year, and that was really challenging for me to think I had figured it out, knew what I was doing, and then the next year we're struggling again. So the process of building to a winning season, then experiencing another losing season and having to build again, to me, just showed that you can never stop working. I kind of exhaled after that and thought we had it figured out, I thought it would just keep clicking and going.
For me, it was not necessarily a negative, it's just the reality that you can't have a good season and take a break. You can't just celebrate in any field; you can learn from those things and continue to grow, but you have to keep working. For me, that was a challenging time to build Covenant's program, see it fall off, and then rebuild it.
But it was obviously very rewarding, and my last year, we made it to the NCAA tournament, we won our conference championship, and made it to the postseason tournament for the first time in the school's history. And the cool thing is that Covenant hasn't had a losing season since I left, which is a testament to the work the current coaching staff has done to sustain it. It's been cool to see, five years later, Covenant's one of the best teams in the conference, respected in that region, had five straight winning seasons, which is cool to see.
Another big challenge that I faced in my coaching career is: I have worked for three different bosses who were fired. At the end of the 2006 season at Pepperdine, Paul Westphal was fired, so I found myself looking for a new job after just my first year of coaching.
Again in 2018, Tim Duryea was fired, so I began looking for a new job at that point, and in 2019, just a year ago, coach Bill Evans was let go at Idaho State.
So three times in my fifteen years, my boss has been fired, which in college coaching, basically means you've been fired too. It's not quite as personal, and I'm thankful that I haven't experienced this myself, being the one who's actually fired; I think that's more emotionally painful and hard, but it's still hard when you're married, and in two of those situations, had kids, and trying to figure out where you're going and what your next step is.
So I've been really fortunate in the midst of those challenges that, not quickly, but in all three of those situations, not only did I end up with a job the next season, but I ended up with a better job all three times, maybe a higher position or a better salary in all three of those situations.
I was very fortunate in those situations to be able to come out on the other side; one of them was only a month [in between], one of them was two months, and one of them was three months, so the time varied in terms of the process of looking, but those challenges were difficult and hard, but those were also times where, as a family, we trusted God; it was also a great opportunity to just talk with our children about how we will go through hard things in life.
We'll trust that God will provide
I think we did a good job in the midst of that as parents of explaining that we'll trust that God will provide, and we're not going to blame anybody, we're not going to be mad at these coaches or AD's or presidents who fired these people, we're not going to hold bitterness or resentment; we'll have as positive an attitude as we can, but also show our kids that we're sad and hurting in that.
Also, we showed them that Daddy's going to work hard and try to find something; I'm not just going to sit around and twiddle my thumbs, but also trusting that God has to be part of that process too. I can't just work really hard and it'll happen for me; I think we showed them the balance of doing our part and having faith. He's provided and put us in some good spots, and we're fortunate to be in a really good spot right now, and if we choose to, we could probably be at for a long long time.
pD: I hadn't realized you had so many coaching gigs throughout your career.
KT: It's not always been easy. Early on, we were intentional; the first three or four moves, all the way through Covenant, were pretty intentional. We didn't have kids through those first four moves, so we were trying to climb the ladder at each of those jobs, opening more opportunities.
Leaving Covenant was the right time, and we felt at peace about it, but it was a really hard decision to do that. That was probably the first really hard move we made as a family, but as AD and head coach, after about three years of doing that, Shannon and I just looked at each other and said "I don't think this is a sustainable plan for me."
It was a lot, and our kids were just starting to get older and more involved at church and school and with sports, so knowing that their lives were starting to expand meant my life and my career needed to shrink some. So people are surprised when I say this because you think of Division III [Covenant], small college, as enabling more time with your family, and you think Division I [Utah State] as this rat race, which it is to a certain extent, but for me, just because of the roles that I had at Covenant versus the role I had at Utah State, I worked way less hours and was way more involved with my family when we made that move.
So in that sense, it was a really good professional transition for us, and the two moves after that were hard because they weren't moves we wanted or were expecting; those three moves were the hardest for various reasons, but good too, because we've had a lot of cool experiences, and have landed in a place in Salt Lake City that we love, and I think we've found a place where all five of us are flourishing, which is part of what I think is important as a husband and father, to put your family in a situation where everyone's in a good place, not just you.
Execution
Coach Taylor has shared two ballhandling and conditioning drills that he uses with his players to develop an ability to control the ball through contact and aggressive defense. Like and subscribe for more great drills and workouts from Player Development!