Basketball Coach- Tested Acceptance
He knew he would be a good coach. Would others let him prove it?
CHILDHOOD
Matt Lynch (ML) has had the coaching bug since a church-league dad handed him a clipboard and asked him to design the final play for his teener-league basketball team.
EDUCATION
After his high school graduation, ML earned a four-year college degree, followed by his Master’s degree in sports psychology.
ML enjoyed his time playing basketball in high school but opted not to try to play in college. Perhaps he was not yet ready to deal with his self-assumed, personal burden.
A HIDDEN BURDEN
Between his freshman and sophomore years in high school, ML told his parents that he was gay. His parents accepted the news without any pushback or disappointment. His father assumed that his son was just ‘going through a phase.’ Many years later, while the father was dying in a hospital, he asked his son, “Are you sure you’re gay? There’s a really pretty nurse here,” but ML told his father that he had no interest.
Through high school and college, ML equated being gay with being ‘soft’ so he vowed not to be soft. He wasn’t nice to girls in high school. He ignored the janitor who cleaned the basketball office. He’d walk around the college campus after midnight for hours to tire himself out so he could sleep.
CARRYING A BURDEN INTO EARLY ADULT YEARS
Maintaining privacy about his personal life, ML’s first job after college was video coordinator for the men’s basketball team at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He hoped this would be an early step along a career path for coaching men’s college basketball.
“Sexuality is a very powerful thing if you’re going to suppress it,” ML said. “Lying becomes very heavy.” Though his family knew the truth, few others did. He dated occasionally and warily. Certain that coming out would be a career killer, he began to think about doing something else for his career – or coaching women’s basketball.
SHEDDING THE BURDEN
As he began his third season on the men’s basketball staff in Wilmington, ML summoned the courage to ask an assistant coach on the team, with whom he had spent many long nights breaking down film, to meet for drinks. Sufficiently ‘lubricated’ ML handed the friend his phone and asked him to read a long note, which included, “About the ninth or tenth grade, I realized that I’m gay.’”
The friend gave ML a hug as a sign of the friend’s unwavering support.
Building his confidence to accurately describe himself to others, ML drafted an essay about his life, including his sexuality, which he submitted for publication to Outsports, the website that chronicles L.G.B.T.Q. athletes.
Minutes before his essay was published, he drove home during a school break. When he stopped for a brief rest, he routinely checked his phone and found more than 300 supportive text messages.
ML has described that day as the best of his life – so far.
Six months later came the worst, with the death of his father, a former college basketball player with strong opinions on almost every subject but who had always accepted and loved his son.
FIRST STEPS ALONG A CAREER PATH MAY BE UNSUCCESSFUL, REQUIRING PERSISTENCE TO PROCEED FURTHER
After three losing seasons as part of the basketball staff at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, the entire staff was fired.
FINDING A FIRST JOB TO ESTABLISH YOUR PROFESSIONAL REPUTATION
“If I was going to get a head coaching job, I knew it was going to be at a place that needed to be built,” said ML .
Needing a paying job to cover his living expenses while wanting to remain on a path leading to being a head coach for a men’s college basketball team, ML’s attention was drawn to a job opening which might have been described in one sentence: ‘Applications being accepted for the worst college coaching job in the country.”
That was literally true: The starting pay was $38,000 per year (2023-2024 academic year) with no recruiting budget or staff. The facilities were a gym whose court is seven feet short of regulation, whose showers didn’t have running water and whose men’s locker room didn’t have a toilet. Plus one other important fact: there were no players.
Such a job would test anyone’s career ambitions. ML thought it seemed a perfect match for him.
“All I ever wanted was an opportunity. The way I looked at it was this may be a bad job, but it’s my bad job. You’ve got to make the big time where you are.”
BUILDING A NEW PROGRAM ONE DAY AT A TIME
ML’s first moves were enlisting two volunteer assistants, prodding sympathetic administrators for help and gathering an all-freshman roster with a global background.
In assembling a team, ML could only sell a vision. He was limited to partial scholarships and had no track record as a head coach. So, he scoured the state for under-recruiting high school gems, sending by mail daily puzzle pieces that would lay out to recruits, why SALK (the short name for the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie) would be a perfect fit.
ML canvassed former players who were playing abroad for recommendations. He watched games online at all hours. The result was a roster with five Australians, four South Carolinians, two Englishmen, one German, one Costa Rican and one Virginian.
On a 500-mile drive home from a recruiting showcase outside Washington, D.C., ML stopped for a video call with the family of Rhys Grocott, a beefy 6-foot-9 center from Portsmouth, England, Grocott’s mother asked about in-person classes: “I want him up and out of bed,” she said.
“There’s nothing unique or historic about SALK,” Lynch told the family. “But if your son comes here and misses any classes or is late to any classes, both the professors and I will get after him. Joining our team will make him a better man, a better student and a better athlete – in that order.”
The next day, Grocott called to say he would be the 12th commitment.
Over the summer, ML gut renovated the men’s basketball locker room, ripping out dilapidated carpet with a box cutter and taking a sledgehammer to a broken pool table. His mother, sister and brother arrived to slap fresh paint on the lockers and cinder block walls; he scavenged leather sofas to replace the ratty one he inherited; and he scrounged new carpet, blinds, a full-length mirror, a dry-erase board and a television on the cheap.
A built-in bookcase is filled with framed family photos of every player and coach. The flag of each player’s home country hangs over his locker.
There are no dormitories at SALK, so the players are housed in a seven-bedroom apartment a mile from campus, developing the sort of chemistry that comes from the communal realization that someone has to wash the dishes piled in the sink.
“This is good for him,” said one parent about her son who was on the team. “He had emergency surgery after being struck by a stray bullet while playing pickup basketball at home. He’s my only child and he’s never shared a room, never shared a bathroom with anybody. Now he’s in an environment where everybody is from a different background.”
ML made no assurances to parents about playing time or winning. But he made two promises: that they would know how to change a flat tire and properly knot a tie.
CHALLENGE – WOULD HE BE ACCEPTED?
Without a preceding – dead or alive – head coach example, there was no way for ML to know if being gay would affect his job prospects, but he said it remained a question in the back of his mind – even for a job for which he seemed to have sufficient experience and motivation to succeed.
Since players arrived in late August 2023, ML has addressed his sexual orientation with the team once – when he hosted a September retreat at his off-campus house. On their last night, the team sat around a bonfire in the backyard.
He wrestled with talking about his sexuality. “My issue addressing it had nothing to do with any fear of coming out,” he said. “None of my guys said, ‘Hi, my name is… and I’m gay or straight.’ I don’t know why, internally, I feel like I have to tell people. I struggle with that.” He told the players he did not need their acceptance – that it had taken nearly 30 years to accept himself.
“He’s not afraid to open himself up to use, which is a big positive, said a player from Australia. “We might not like him when he wakes us up early to go to the weight room, but we know he’s doing it because he really cares about us.”
AS ML closes out his first season with a winning record, his X-and-O acumen has been challenged, he has leaned on his master’s degree in sports psychology, dusted off his carpentry and painting skills and shaken hands and kissed babies as if he were running for mayor.
What he has rarely done is address his sexual orientation. There have been no taunts from opponents. Nobody has made him feel unwelcome in the hometown for the university’s campus. Within the team, there were instances early on when a player would quip that something uncool was “so gay” before catching himself, with the help of a teammate’s side-eyed glance, and apologizing to ML.
“The truth of it is there hasn’t been one incident with malicious intent,” noted ML. The only instance of discomfort came when he met an older, prospective donor who is gay, for lunch. The man badgered ML to go swimming in the pool, with the suggestion that what happens in the backyard stays there. ML declined, “I told him if you’re interested in donating, great.” he said. “I haven’t talked to him since.”
ALIKE BUT NOT ALIKE
Like all college-level coaches, ML embraces long hours. He schemes persistently. He exhibits a genuine, caring personality for his players and potential recruits.
What sets ML apart is that he is building a men’s college basketball program as an openly gay man.
In almost any field other than men’s sports, this might be met with a shrug. It’s been more than a decade since the U.S. military repealed its “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy and the last presidential election cycle featured a gay candidate (Pete Buttigieg – BA degrees from Harvard and Oxford; former U.S. Navy officer who served in Afghanistan; Mayor of South Bend, Indiana). Acceptance of gays has extended clearly to women’s sports but men’s sports, despite a trickle of out-athletes and assistant coaches, largely remains one of America’s last ‘closets.’
According to Outsports, there had never been a publicly gay men’s head coach in any of the North American major professional leagues, nor in college football or men’s basketball, before ML.
CAREER SATISFACTION
While the SALK Indians were, in their first season, 17-3 overall, 6-10 in their conference (with six of the conference losses by 5 points or less), ML frets that a more experienced coach might have won each of those games.
A fellow coach noted that “ML wants the end game, the championship, but he forgets how far his guys have come and how much of an impact he’s making. He’s got no scholarships and he’s getting kids to chase the American dream. I don’t think he’s grasped how important he is to the gay community. But he doesn’t want to be recognized as an openly gay coach; he wants to be recognized as a really good coach.”
In time, perhaps, he will be. Until then, he will remain busy with his restoration project at school, where he is already a successful college basketball coach.
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This career story was based on a news article written by Billy Witz, published by the New York Times on March 10, 2024.
