DENVER — Growing up in Marietta, Georgia, first-year BYU basketball coach Kevin Young’s idol wasn’t any of the players who were dominating the NBA in the late 1990s and early 2000s, guys such as Karl Malone, Michael Jordan and David Robinson.
It was his high school coach, Roger Kvam.
“He’s the whole reason why I wanted to be a coach,” Young said last April, shortly after he was introduced as BYU’s 20th men’s basketball coach. “He was the most impactful person of my life when I was in high school, and I wanted to be like him. He had a great life. He had five kids and he coached basketball and taught P.E. every day, and I was like, ‘That seems pretty cool.’”
Young, 43, now has three kids, made millions of dollars a year as an NBA assistant coach, and now is the coach of an NCAA Tournament Round of 32 team. His sixth-seeded BYU Cougars (25-9) face the third-seeded Wisconsin Badgers (27-9) at approximately 5:45 p.m. MDT (CBS) Saturday at Ball Arena in Denver.
Suffice it to say Young hasn’t forgotten Kvam (pronounced: Quam) and Kvam hasn’t forgotten Young, who played for him at Sprayberry High in Georgia and then played two years at Middle Georgia College and two years at Division II Clayton State University before going into coaching.
“He doesn’t really ask for a lot of coaching advice, but he has kept me informed before every move he has made,” Kvam told the Deseret News recently. “That’s been an awesome experience, being in on that. I am so unbelievably proud of him and his success.”
BYU and Young’s family hosted Kvam when the Cougars played Kansas State and Kansas in Provo in mid-February, and Young has mentioned the impact his prep coach has had on his life on more than one occasion since he was hired 11 months ago.
“We got the royal treatment out there, the VIP treatment,” said Kvam, who coached high school basketball for 40 years before retiring four years ago. “Kevin’s got an unbelievable family.”
A couple other coaches with Utah ties were also instrumental in getting Young into the coaching business — former BYU interim coach Tony Ingle and former Utah Valley coach Dick Hunsaker. Ingle recruited Young to play for him when he was head coach at Kennesaw State, but Young ended up playing across town at Clayton State.
“We actually played them in the conference championship game the year they won the national championship,” Young said. “It was the most exciting, boring game. Dogfight type of game.”
Along the way, Young told Ingle he wanted to get back out West — he was born in Salt Lake City — and Ingle called Hunsaker and got Young on the staff at UVU in 2005-06.
“It is crazy how all those things came full circle,” Young said.
‘Super competitive, fearless and unafraid’
Young’s family moved from Texas to Georgia when he was 12, and he was not happy about the move — until he met Kvam and fell in love with basketball. Kvam’s first impressions of Young were that he was “super competitive, fearless and unafraid.”
He remembers Young getting into a “scrap” as a freshman with a senior who was much bigger than him in a pickup game.
“He was so little, but he was not afraid,” Kvam said. “He had big hands and shoulders and so he filled out as he got older. He grew up with four brothers. They were very feisty.”
Kvam said Young became team captain because “he was always a leader” and was “different than the other kids” in the way he approached the game.
“I would have him come up and coach our kids in the summertime, in summer league, just because he was such a good teacher, and he wanted to be a coach,” Kvam said.
A 23-year-old head coach
Young actually got his first paid coaching job at Oxford College in Georgia when he was 23. After his year at UVU, he coached in Dublin, Ireland, for the Shamrock Rovers in that country’s Super League. Then he returned to the U.S. and eventually became head coach of the Utah Flash, the Jazz’s NBA D League affiliate.
“I think BYU is a perfect spot for him, and for his family and his kids.”
— Roger Kvam on Kevin Young
In August 2016, Young was promoted to the Philadelphia 76ers staff, and he remained in the NBA until BYU came calling last year.
“As soon as he got in there in Philadelphia, I talked to everybody and I told them that he will be a head coach in the NBA some day,” Kvam said. “I knew that because of how determined, and how competitive, he was.”
Kvam said Young interviewed with several NBA clubs for head coaching positions, and it was “just a matter of time” before he got a head coaching job in the best professional basketball league in the country.
That said, the coach believes Young will be at BYU for a long, long time.
“I think BYU is a perfect spot for him, and for his family and his kids,” Kvam said. “He’s not away so much. I think (the NBA coaching experience) has definitely prepared him. I am so impressed with how he does with the media. And I think when you are in all those games, you develop a measured approach. You don’t go through the highs and lows. In college, you only play 31 games (plus postseason).
“That works for Kevin and his family,” Kvam continued. “I have been super impressed watching him, and catching up with him. … It is fun for me to see him on his TV show, knowing that I knew him when he was a 15-year-old kid.”
