SAN DIEGO — When Steve Lavin was a toddler, his parents were concerned that he wasn’t talking enough. They took him to see their pediatrician, who assured them that this was normal behavior for a boy who was the youngest of six children born in a 10-year span. There was a lot for young Steven to observe, the doctor said. The words would have to wait.
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The more things change, the more they … change. Bill McGillis found that out on Sunday, April 3 in New Orleans. A few days before, McGillis, the athletic director at the University of San Diego, was on a plane getting ready to take off for the Final Four when he received a text message from Lavin expressing interest in the school’s coaching vacancy. McGillis had already interviewed a few candidates, and he was hoping to make his final decision that weekend. He replied to Lavin that he would like to get together, and after a few more exchanges they agreed to meet for a cup of coffee at McGillis’ hotel at 4:45 p.m.
They were only supposed to meet for an hour or so. But then coffee turned into dinner — well, an order of french fries anyway — and pretty soon it was 10 p.m. and the waitress was kicking them out. “Several times I said, ‘OK, I’ve got one more question,’” McGillis says. “It just kept getting extended and extended and extended.” They walked the streets of New Orleans looking for a place where they could further extend the conversation. Eventually, they wandered into another hotel lobby, settled into a pair of chairs, and talked some more. Finally, at around 1 a.m., they wrapped things up, climbed into separate Ubers, and agreed to speak again the following day.
McGillis had never met Lavin, and he was immediately struck by how different he was from the impressions McGillis formed while watching Lavin coach at UCLA and St. John’s, and also serve as a TV analyst for 14 years. “I didn’t know if Steve Lavin had substance,” McGillis says. “But when we sat down, I really felt the authenticity. He was easy to talk to. He’s a great listener, but he’s also a great storyteller. He’s a lover of books, he’s got an incredible memory, he’s very worldly. I definitely thought to myself, this may be the guy.”
From there, things moved at warp speed. The next day, Lavin and McGillis had a four-hour lunch with USD president Jim Harris. Later that afternoon, Lavin did a Zoom call with members of the Board of Trustees. He and McGillis communicated throughout the day and night on Tuesday, and on Wednesday they met for lunch to go over the terms of Lavin’s contract. Lavin took notes on a paper tablecloth, and at the end of the lunch he folded it up and tucked it in his pocket. Lavin signed a contract Wednesday night, and by Thursday morning he was off to San Diego to begin his next chapter.
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Lavin has not stopped moving — or talking —since. He originally went to New Orleans assuming he would return home to San Francisco the morning after the championship game. It was more than 50 days before he made it back. In the intervening weeks, he set up shop at a Hyatt near the San Diego airport and got busy. He conducted workouts for the USD players to assess the talent level in the program. Like every other college basketball coach, Lavin searched through the transfer portal, affixed himself to his cell phone, and set up a whirlwind of recruiting visits. The efforts bore fruit as Lavin brought in 12 new players — five transfers, two high school seniors, two junior college players, and three preferred walk-ons. He did all this largely by himself because he didn’t have time to hire a staff.
Steve Lavin, left, with Rockies outfielder Connor Joe, a San Diego alum, before the former threw out the first pitch at a Padres game. (Courtesy San Diego Athletics)Amidst all this activity, Lavin packed up his apartment in San Francisco and moved with his girlfriend into a rented house in San Diego’s eclectic Hillcrest neighborhood, just a few blocks from where Bill Walton lives. (A happy coincidence, that.) Throw in a few media obligations and public appearances, including throwing out the first pitch at a Padres game, and Lavin still hasn’t emptied all of his boxes. He is 57 now, two decades and multiple reinventions removed from those early days at UCLA, but he remains chronically chipper and forever young. At a time when so many coaches are quitting, retiring or complaining about the stresses of the profession, Lavin is thrilled to be back in the game.
“Either you have energy and vitality, or you don’t,” he says, cheerfully sipping a glass of red wine while sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant along University Avenue. “It feels different in terms of the frequency of transfers, but in terms of a young person coming to campus and having a 40-hour visit, building a rapport with a player and his family, that ultimately feels the same. I’ve had a lot of good laughs, because you realize you’re back in this business, and everything that comes with it is suddenly part of your life again.”
Lavin needs to work hard because he has a lot of work to do. Unlike San Diego State, the publicly funded mid-major powerhouse across town, USD is a private Catholic school of around 8,200 students with scant basketball tradition. The school has only been playing Division I basketball since 1979, has played in four NCAA Tournaments (the last in 2008) and won just one tournament game. Moreover, the program has been tinged by controversy. In 2011, USD was hit with a point-shaving scandal that ended with the school’s all-time leading scorer, Brandon Johnson, and an assistant coach being sent to prison. (An NCAA investigation found no improper conduct committed by any other USD players or officials.) In 2019, the university revealed that former coach Lamont Smith, who had resigned the year before following an arrest for domestic violence (the charges were dropped), had been accused of accepting a bribe from a Beverly Hills real estate developer in exchange for helping his son get into USD. The school replaced Smith with his top assistant, Sam Scholl, who during his four seasons went 18-39 in the WCC and never made the NCAA Tournament. McGillis, who came from Southern Miss in 2016, fired Scholl on March 6, and despite local pressure to fill the vacancy quickly, he took 31 days before he made his move.
Having coached at two prominent programs with proud traditions, not to mention his high-profile TV gigs, it might seem at first blush that taking over a struggling mid-major program would be a comedown of sorts for Lavin. Not so, he says. Through all the twists and turns of his career — not to mention the personal challenges, including a serious health scare 11 years ago — Lavin has always maintained balance and perspective. He was never full of himself when he had the UCLA job, and he’s not down on himself now that he’s at San Diego. “The opportunity to get back into coaching, to do it at a good academic school, at a program that has upside, the possibilities intrigued me,” he says. “Relationships are at the root of it. The camaraderie with your staff, the camaraderie with your players, that journey you’re on every season to do something special — no one can rob you of that experience. Ultimately, that’s what moves my spirit.”
At one point during yet another lengthy conversation, Lavin puts down his wine glass and calls up a picture on his cell phone. It was taken in 1987, and it shows Lavin as a counselor at Hank Egan’s basketball camp at USD. He is surrounded by members of his fourth- and fifth-grade team that had just captured the camp title. Besides the full-circle irony that Lavin is back to coaching players in that same gym, the most noteworthy thing about the photo is that it marked the beginning of some beautiful friendships. “I’m still in touch with all of them,” Lavin says, rattling off the players’ names, hometowns and current professions.
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This is one of the foremost things about Lavin that struck McGillis during that initial, interminable job interview. “His ability to connect with people is way beyond the norm of most of us, and most coaches,” McGillis says. “It’s obvious that he builds lifelong relationships, and he does it in a really authentic, genuine way.”
Lavin has always viewed the profession through the sacred prism of the teacher-student relationship, which quite obviously traces its roots to his father. Albert “Cap” Lavin played for the University of San Francisco in the early 1950s and was inducted into the school’s athletics Hall of Fame in 1997. He spent over 40 years teaching AP English at Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo and several local colleges, and he published 19 books on writing and composition. Steve wasn’t nearly the player his dad was — he played at a pair of Division II schools in California, San Francisco State and Chapman University — but he knew that he wanted to go into coaching. After he graduated, Lavin wrote letters to some of the biggest names in the business, which led Indiana’s Bob Knight and Purdue’s Gene Keady to invite him to volunteer at their camps. Keady was so impressed with Lavin’s energy and acumen that he brought Lavin on as a graduate assistant.
In 1991, Lavin was hired as a restricted earnings coach at UCLA, a position he kept for three years until he became a full-time assistant in 1995. Prior to the start of the 1996-97 season, UCLA’s top assistant, Lorenzo Romar, left to become the head coach at Pepperdine which, coupled with Mark Gottfried’s departure for Murray State the year before, made Lavin the most tenured assistant on the Bruins’ staff. That became hugely relevant in November, when head coach Jim Harrick, who had coached the Bruins to an NCAA championship two years before, was fired for falsifying an expense report. Lavin, then 32, was promoted to interim head coach, and though UCLA at first was intent on conducting a national search, Lavin was named permanent coach in mid-February. Seven weeks later, he was coaching the Bruins in the Elite Eight.
This was the version of Lavin that remained imprinted in the minds of McGillis and most basketball fans — gelled hair, Hollywood smile, finely tailored double-breasted suits with “enough fabric to hold a circus under them,” as Lavin quips. Underneath all that flash was the soul of an English teacher. Lavin would need all the balance and perspective he could muster. Over the next six seasons, he took the Bruins to four Sweet 16s, but this being UCLA, he was constantly criticized for not doing more. The school finally let him go after the Bruins failed to make the 2003 NCAA Tournament.
Lavin immediately landed at ESPN calling games alongside Brent Musburger. He enjoyed it so much that he turned down several coaching offers, most notably from NC State in 2006. Finally, after seven years on the air, he took over at St. John’s. He reached two NCAA Tournaments in his five years there, but his tenure was marked by personal setbacks. In the summer of 2010, Lavin was diagnosed with prostate cancer, eventually forcing him to undergo a seven-hour surgery and miss most of the 2011-12 season. Seventeen months later, Cap died. After St. John’s fired him in 2015, Lavin went back into television, working primarily for Fox Sports. In 2016, Lavin and his wife separated after nine years of marriage. (They did not have children.) Two years later his mother, Mary, died after a long illness at the age of 85.
Two deaths, cancer, a divorce, getting fired for the second time — that’s a lot of life to pack into eight years. Unsettling as they were, those events provided Lavin with the hard-won wisdom that comes with advancing age. Yes, getting fired from St. John’s was painful, but it gave Lavin the chance to spend time caring for his ailing mother. Yes, losing her was painful, but it freed him up to consider a return to the sidelines. The proximity to the game he enjoyed as a broadcaster offered reminders of what he loved most about the job — not the hunt for championships, per se, so much as the energy of a shootaround, the grind of a film room, the teasing in the locker room. “I definitely felt I had another run in coaching, but I also didn’t feel I needed to go on wild goose chases,” he says.
Steve Lavin, left, and San Diego athletic director Bill McGillis immediately found a strong working relationship together. (Courtesy San Diego Athletics)Lavin came close to taking the job at San Francisco, his dad’s alma mater, in 2016, but the deal fell apart at the last minute. Shortly after USD came open in March, he asked his representatives at Wasserman to reach out to McGillis. When those messages went unreturned, Lavin texted the AD himself. “It was definitely impactful on me that he reached out directly,” McGillis says. Lavin also unwittingly helped his cause when he received a text from McGillis late in their process that he mistakenly interpreted as telling him that he was not getting the job. Instead of expressing anger, Lavin thanked McGillis for considering him. McGillis called Lavin to assure him that he was still their guy.
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Lavin is coming to USD at a propitious time. The campus is routinely ranked as one of the most beautiful in the country, and the location by Tecolote Canyon with a view of Mission Bay is hard to beat. Yet, though Jenny Craig Pavilion is one of the better arenas in the West Coast Conference, USD has long been well behind its competitors on the facility front. That should change soon as the school has committed to building a new men’s and women’s basketball practice facility that will be conjoined with a wellness and fitness center for all students. The project is in its beginning stages, but USD has retained a design firm that produced some initial plans. The school is hoping to break ground early next year with a target completion date of August 2024.
“I’ve had people ask me, how come we don’t win more? We’ve got the beach,” McGillis says. “That’s a huge asset, but Division I basketball recruits today care about a lot of other things.” McGillis also brushes aside concerns that USD’s high academic standards have left it at a disadvantage. “Our (recruiting) pool is without question sufficient to compete at a championship level in the WCC and beyond,” he says.
Over the last few weeks, Lavin has finally started to assemble a staff. Last week, he called on another lifelong relationship when he hired Tyus Edney, the hero of UCLA’s ’95 title team who spent nine years on staff at his alma mater, including two as an assistant under Steve Alford. “You can already see with the all the recruits he brought in how energized he is,” Edney says. “He’s older and has more seasoning, but he’s still the same guy I played for at UCLA. I’m excited to try to help him do something special.”
As Lavin applies his energy, vitality and hard-won wisdom to this new chapter, he often reminds himself of the pet phrase Cap used to utter regarding the proper work/life balance: time, space and pace. “Most people only have one or two of those things in the right amounts,” Lavin says. “But if you can have all three, you’ve won.” It’s a nice thought, but Cap would be the first to remind his son that winning should never be the point. If Lavin wins at USD, great. If he loses and gets fired again, that’s OK, too. Either way, he’s going to make a lot of really good friends.
(Top photo: Courtesy San Diego Athletics)
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