USD Magazine, Fall 2002

ALMANAC

• • 1 e1ne

•

arrt

by Timothy McKernan

Former USD Player is NBA's Youngest Head Coach T here's a unique relationship that forms between coach and player, a combina– tion of teacher-student, mentor-protege

retired from coaching after eight years as an assistant with the San Antonio Spurs. "I cold him I'd think about it, but I cold him no- twice. ''After he got the job, he called and asked again," says Egan, who will be one of the team's assistant coaches. "I was sitting in my living room, wondering what I was going to do wim all the free time I had, so I said yes." The fact that coach and player are together again, in collaborative roles, is tribute to the friendship they developed over me years. The duo kept in contact after Musselman graduated and launched a successful coaching career, first as a head coach in the Continental Basketball Association - basketball's minor leagues - then as an assistant for me NBA Orlando Magic and Atlanta Hawks. Some NBA fans were surprised when the Warriors tapped Musselman - at 37 the youngest coach in league history - to reverse the fortunes of a team mat won only 21 of 82 games last season. But Egan says the struggling franchise may have found rhe perfect remedy. "Eric is young enough to relate to today's NBA players, but he has been around the game so long and understands it so well that he commands their respect," Egan says. "There were a lot of headlines about Eric

being the youngest coach in the NBA, bur age is just a number. He has been preparing for this his whole life." In fact, basketball runs in the Musselman blood. Eric's father, Bill, who passed away five years ago at age 59, led the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers and Minnesota Timberwolves. The elder Musselman held 14 head coaching jobs over 35 years, each time moving his family with him. One of those ports of call was San Diego, where in 1975 Bill coached the now-defunct San Diego Sails of the CBA, and where Eric remembers taking in USD games at the Sports Center. "Because I grew up as the son of a coach, I think I understood the game a lot better man most of the guys I played with through high school," Musselman says. "I loved play– ing, bur I also loved the strategy and rhe techniques it rakes to make strategy successful." Ir was rhe same way in college, where Egan says Musselman quickly became an on-court extension of tl1e coaching staff, directing his fellow players and providing mspHanon. "He was a feisty player, nor the quickest and certainly not the biggest, bur he knew the game better than any college kid I ever coached," Egan says. "We had more talented players, bur no one with whom I was more comfortable handling the ball. " After graduation, Musselman sold season rickets for the L.A. Clippers for six months

and, for a select few, father-son. So it was natural for former USD basket– ball guard Eric Musselman '87 to dial up his college coach and share the crowning moment in his basketball career - landing a job this summer as head coach of the NBA Golden State Warriors. And it was natural to ask his old coach for a little help, too. "Eric had asked me previously to join him witl1 me Warriors if he got me job," says Hank Egan, who skippered the USD men's basket– ball team from 1984 to 1994, and recently

Former USO head coach Hank Egan will assist Eric Musselman in his new NBA job.