Steve Wojciechowski grew up loving basketball. It was his love and passion for the game that steered him into becoming a McDonald’s High School All-American in 1994 and guided his college career at Duke, where he was the 1998 NABC Defensive Player of the Year.
That love for the game and joy in being a part of the game was why he got into coaching, first as an assistant at Duke and Team USA and then as head coach at Marquette, where he led the Golden Eagles from 2014 to 2021.
It is that same love and joy that brought Wojciechowski back to coaching, after two years away, this time as the newest head coach of the G League Salt Lake City Stars.
“I found joy in the game as a young person, and if I’m completely transparent and honest, at the end of my coaching journey (at Marquette) I lost that,” Wojciechowski said.
The last two years have been a time of self-reflection for Wojciechowski after he was fired from Marquette in March 2021.
Wojciechowski, his wife Lindsay, who is from Salt Lake City and still has family in the area, and their two children Jack and Charlie would often spend time in Utah during family trips. When COVID-19 shut the sports world down in 2020, they were able to spend an extended amount of time in Park City and they bought a home there, intending for it to be a second home. After he was let go from Marquette, the family moved to Park City full time.
So, for the last couple of years Wojciechowski has been assisting the coaching staff for Jack’s football team and coaching Charlie’s basketball team and it was coaching middle school football and basketball that reignited that spark for loving the game that Wojciechowski thought he’d lost.
It wasn’t his intention to get choked up and speak through tears at his introductory press conference as head coach of the Stars, but when he was asked about what he learned coaching his sons, he couldn’t help but get emotional.
“Through coaching my kids, it was the joy,” he said with tears in his eyes. “Sometimes in college that can be robbed from you. And to see the game through my kids’ eyes again and their friends’ eyes, that was awesome. One of the things I promised my kids is that when I got back into coaching, there was always going to be joy to it.”
Fortunately, Wojciechowski had quite a few connections within the Utah Jazz organization — former head coach Quin Snyder recruited him to Duke and Wojciechowski was on the coaching staff for the 2008 Olympic team that featured Dwyane Wade, who is also a proud Marquette alum and now minority owner of the Jazz.
So, over the past couple of years Wojciechowski was invited to sit in and observe practices and coaches meetings and see how things were run at the NBA level.
Now Wojciechowski joins the Jazz as the head coach of the team’s G League affiliate and is happy to have found the joy he’d been missing and to share that with the developing players on the Stars roster.
“As a head coach or any coach, you have the ability to impact people and make deep connections with people, and I missed that,” he said. “I look forward to the opportunity to do that, with both the staff and the players. I’m honored to have that opportunity and responsibility again.”
