Dream job? Virginia Tech’s coach doesn’t want to wake up
Mike Young is in his second season at the helm of the nationally ranked Hokies
Even 22 months later, there are still times where it all doesn’t feel entirely real to Mike Young, as if his life as Virginia Tech’s men’s basketball coach is part of some elaborate hallucination.
From the window of his office on the school’s campus, he can see Cassell Coliseum, the Hokies’ 59-year-old home arena where he saw his first college basketball game in the early 1970s. It’s a place he returned to many times, making the 15-mile drive with his family to satiate a budding obsession with a sport that became a calling.
Nearly a half-century later, he now presides over that kingdom, tucked away in the mountains of southwest Virginia.
“Those are memories, things that I don’t take for granted, that I’m appreciative of,” Young said. “To be able to be here is awesome.”
In his second season at the school, Young has Virginia Tech rolling, with a 13-3 record and a place in the top 20 of the national polls heading into its game Wednesday at Pitt. While not a culmination, it’s a high point in a lengthy career for the 57year-old coach, who spent his entire basketball life at the mid-major level before being hired in 2019.
A native of nearby Radford, Va., Young has arrived in more ways than one. The small-college coach not only made it to the most prestigious conference in the sport, but once he got there, he has been excelling against some of the most decorated, revered figures in the game.
“Certainly, you want to challenge yourself,” Young said. “Can we do there what we’ve done here with the same guiding principles that we had in place down there? We’re still working at it, but to have the opportunity to come to the Atlantic Coast Conference, to come to Virginia Tech at this stage in my career was exhilarating.”
That road home was ultimately a long one.
For 30 years, Young was at Wofford, a liberal arts college in Spartanburg, S.C. with fewer than 1,800 students. When he was promoted to head coach in 2002, the Terriers had been a Division I member for just seven seasons and never finished better than 14-16.
By the end of his tenure, Wofford had become a consistent winner. In Young’s final 10 years at the school, the Terriers made the NCAA tournament five times and in his final year, they were 30-5 and narrowly lost to Kentucky in the tournament’s second round. Success came with spoils and recognition. Young was named the national coach of the year by the Sporting News in 2019. Wofford became a program that punched far above its weight, regularly beating major-conference opponents, including a 2017 road upset of then-No. 5 North Carolina. It even received a couple of unofficial visits from a hometown recruit named Zion Williamson.
While Young was from Virginia, he made a life for himself at Wofford. He got married, had children and, along the way, transformed from an eager young assistant into a sage veteran. Near the end of his run with the Terriers, he envisioned staying the next 10 or 15 years at the school before hanging up his whistle. He was following the advice he had been given long ago — be where your feet are.
“I had internalized that,” Young said. “I was completely at peace with that. I loved that place. I still do.”
For all he achieved at Wofford, Young was caught in a quandary. Loyalty and personal contentment had kept him with the Terriers, but even as the wins piled up, he accrued the profile of a coach who often remains at that level.
At the end of the 2018-19 season, he was 55 years old, with coaching stops at Wofford, Radford and Division II Emory & Henry, his alma mater. From 1998-2018, only 20 major-conference coaching hires of a possible 204 were 55 years or older. Unlike Young, each of those 20 hires had experience of some sort coaching in one of those six leagues, even as an assistant.
He loved Wofford, but in the back of his mind, he was open to the right fit, should it present itself.
“This opportunity at the highest level, in the mecca of college basketball — the ACC — and it just so happened to be kind of in his hometown, it just all made sense,” said Kevin Giltner, a Virginia Tech assistant coach who played for Young at Wofford and coached under him there for six years. “But you better believe he wanted to come here and prove he can do it at this level and he wanted to prove that he could do it at a different situation. Like, ‘Hey, I can do it at Wofford. I can do it someplace else.’ I think that was a part of it. He would probably never admit that just because he’s so humble and doesn’t like to talk about himself, but I do think that was a part of it.”
Such an opportunity, perhaps even the perfect one, eventually emerged.
Virginia Tech wasn’t just any opening. He had grown up a relatively short drive from the school’s Blacksburg campus and spent part of his upbringing going to Hokies football and basketball games. To this day, he can vividly recall sitting in his grandparents’ home in Marion, Va., in 1973 watching Virginia Tech beat Notre Dame in the NIT championship on a Bobby Stevens buzzer-beater.
When he was introduced as the Hokies’ new coach in April 2019, he described it as his dream job. What’s usually empty, hyperbolic rhetoric for coaches looking to woo an eager fan base was anything but for Young.
“I don’t think anybody said ‘Yes’ any quicker,” he said about being offered the job. “I didn’t have to talk to my wife. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I was in.”
On paper, he inherited an ascendant program at Virginia Tech, which had made three consecutive NCAA tournaments for the first time in school history, including a Sweet 16 run in 2019.
The task that awaited Young, however, was more complicated and daunting. The Hokies lost their top five scorers from the 2018-19 team. The four recruits who had signed with the program under previous coach Buzz Williams had asked for releases, which were granted. Even for those who hadn’t left, Young had to sell them on him and his vision.
“I don’t ever want to experience it again,” Young said of his early days at Virginia Tech. “I cherished it. Here’s another opportunity and you want to do it the right way. Get it right. I remember sitting here April 9, 2019. I’m in the office, where I was sitting at that particular moment. It was midnight and the glitter has faded and everybody is gone and I’m here by myself. I’ve got no staff. We had four players.”
There was doubt surrounding Virginia Tech, which had only eight NCAA tournament appearances in the 106 years before Williams’ arrival and was now having to start from scratch. Young did fairly well in his first season, going 16-16, but heading into this season, some uncertainty remained as the Hokies were picked 11th in the 15-team ACC in the league’s preseason poll.
More than halfway through the season, they’ve exceeded expectations, sitting a half-game out of first place in the conference standings and owning wins against No. 3 Villanova and No. 14 Virginia. They’ve thrived with the freedom and trust offered by Young’s motion offense and have one of the ACC’s best players in forward Keve Aluma, who played for Young for two seasons at Wofford before following him to Virginia Tech.
“To think that kid was at Wofford … it’s the reason why Mike’s teams were winning 30-plus games a year there,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said.
Young is flourishing in a comfortable environment. His family still lives in the region. Before his death last March, his father was able to attend a few games at Cassell Coliseum, getting to watch his son pace the sidelines of the arena where he once took him as a child. As he learns seemingly every day, Young’s roots go even deeper than he once thought.
“It’s incredible the amount of people he knows and people that know him. ‘Hey, I had class with your dad,’ or, ‘I know your mom,’ or, ‘Your cousin and me are best friends.’ It’s incredible,” Giltner said. “We talk about it all the time. We can’t go anywhere outside of the office with him because it’s going to be a long trip because he’s stopping and talking with somebody who knows him and he knows them and they’re telling old stories for 45 minutes. It’s funny because we’re like, ‘Man, he is so made for this job. He is so made for this area.’ He’s a rock star.”
As those close to him like Giltner will tell you, though, Young has only changed so much, if at all. It is seen in things like his pregame ritual, something he has been doing for so long, he can’t remember exactly when it started. Before every game, Young sits courtside with a bag of popcorn from the arena’s concession stand. While snacking, he’ll watch warmups, and talk with other coaches and even opposing players, some of whom he once recruited. It began as a way to calm pregame nerves and collect his thoughts. He preferred the openness of the gym over the loneliness of the locker room, where many head coaches spend their time until the final minutes before a game.
It’s unconventional, but it’s who Young is. His feet are where they were meant to be.