MARK DOWNEY – ARKANSAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 940

Website – https://arkansastechsports.com/sports/mens-basketball

Email – mdowney@atu.edu

Twitter/X – @mdowneyATU

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Mark Downey recently completed the fourth season of his second stint as the Head Men’s Basketball  Coach at Arkansas Tech University and his ninth season overall at Tech in 2023-24 which saw the Wonder Boys go 25-7 in 23-24 and lose to eventual national champion Minnesota State in the DII NCAA Tournament. Downey’s first stint at Arkansas S was from 2006-2010.

In 2010 Downey returned home to his alma mater to become the head coach at the University of Charleston. He remained at Charleston for three seasons before moving on to become the head coach at the University of West Alabama for the 2013-14 season.  After his one-year stint at West Alabama Downey became an assistant coach at the NCAA Division I level, serving as an assistant at Bowling Green State University (2014-15) and at Purdue University-Fort Wayne (2015-16 to 2017-18).

After those four seasons as an assistant coach at the DI level, Downey returned to NCAA Division II as head coach at Northeastern State University in 2017 before returning to Arkansas Tech in 2020.

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Have a notebook handy as you listen to this episode with Mark Downey, Head Men’s Basketball  Coach at Arkansas Tech University.

What We Discuss with Mark Downey

• Growing up in West Virginia and his love for Mountaineers Basketball
• “Problem solving is something that we talk about with our team all the time.”
• “If you ever hear me coach, you’ll be hearing me yell, fix it, fix it.”
• “Be relentless, every single possession.”
• “We’re going to coach you extremely hard, but we’re going to love you harder.”
• An everyday pursuit of winning
• Playing smashmouth, physical basketball that reflects his personality
• “If I’m not ready to go and I’m not the example then how are my guys going to do that?”
• Tracking winners and losers in practice drills
• Building a program and including the alums who are a part of that process
• His decision to transfer from Wheeling Jesuit to Charleston so he could continue to play college basketball pursue a career in physical therapy
• “Basketball was everything to me. I didn’t quite realize it till I was done playing.”
• His first coaching job at Barton College under Dave Davis
• “If you’re doing this job for anything else, wealth, fame, even winning if you’re doing it for anything else other than those dudes in that locker room, then go do something else.”
• “Significance over success”
• “I love that our assistants are former players. I love to bring guys back that played for us.”
• “We try to meet with somebody before and after practice every day. Just an individual meeting just to let them know that we hear them.”
• “We want to do things the right way, and that is going to carry over into your life when you’re done playing basketball.”
• Learning about recruiting from Chris Jans
• Avoiding “shufflers” during the recruiting process
• His journey to Arkansas Tech and why he came back to coach there a second time
• “From now until next October, every day, we’ve got to wake up thinking, what can we do to get back here and what can we do to make a run at a national championship?”
• “I want them to see me and know that I’m holding myself accountable physically. And being accountable for the same focus that they are every day.”
• “I have no greater joy than watching my kids play basketball.”
• Taking the time to enjoy the team, the wins, and the process
• “I’m just a guy that hates to lose. And usually when I’ve got players that hate to lose. We’ve got a chance to be pretty good.”
• Fighting complacency
• “We just work really hard at cultivating good people, and we have a phrase that character wins.”
• “What do you do when coach isn’t in the gym?”
• His upcoming coaching clinics for high school programs

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THANKS, MARK DOWNEY

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TRANSCRIPT FOR MARK DOWNEY – ARKANSAS TECH UNIVERSITY MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 940

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight, and we are pleased to welcome in Mark Downey, head men’s basketball coach at Arkansas Tech University. Mark, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:13] Mark Downey: Thank you. I appreciate you guys having me. Jason, Mike, it’s great to be here and look forward to catching up and telling some stories.

[00:00:21] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. We are excited to have you on, looking forward to diving into the diverse range of experiences that you’ve had in your career. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about some of your first exposures to the game and just what made you fall in love with it.

[00:00:37] Mark Downey: Well, I think, I mean, I fell in love with it. I mean, you go back to, I grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. So I’m a Mountaineer and always will be. And I grew up watching them play. I have five brothers and sisters that are all a lot older than me and none of them played basketball. I don’t know how the baby came about that orange round ball, but it happened some way, shape or form.

I was just watching the Mountaineers play. Throw out names people probably never heard of before. Dale Blaney played for West Virginia when I was young. And I also watched St. Francis high school play where my brothers and sisters went to school. And they had some really good small high school teams in West Virginia in the early eighties and just watching West Virginia, the Gail Catlett years way back when.

Going to the Coliseum. I remember when I was in junior high, I had a neighbor that worked in the pharmacy department at West Virginia University, and they allowed me to buy a faculty season ticket, and I bought one, and my parents let me do it, and back then when you’re 12 or 13 years old, you can venture into a college basketball game with 14, 000 people by yourself and sit in the arena and your parents can pick you up afterwards and wouldn’t think of doing that today probably, but just fell in love with rolling out the carpet.

They do that at West Virginia games to announce the starting lineups and I was all about it. And singing country roads and just fell in love with the game. And, it was something that I could do to get away. I don’t know where I was getting away from.

I had a great family life, but I just love to go work out and get shots up and whether it was in the driveway and the rain or the snow or whatever it may be. And then that eventually went to the park and then getting in the gym with my high school coach and just fell in love with it.

And then and back then Stansbury Hall where Jerry West played they had taken that arena and put a bunch of PE classrooms in it, but they took the court and made it about five courts sideways. And that’s where the Mountaineers used to go play pickup in the fall, in the spring, in the summer.

And you could walk in there and get in the games. And so I remember in high school, just getting on the center court with the, with the Mountaineers and playing with those guys. And that’s where I fell in love with it. You know, just trying to hold my own at Stansbury Hall where Jerry West made his name and Hot Rod Hundley and Rod Thorne and all those guys played when they were coming through. And that’s where I found it.

[00:03:15] Mike Klinzing: A little bit different now today than it was back in the day when you were growing up and when I was growing up. I always lament with people kind of who are of my age bracket just the disappearance of pickup basketball kind of in its purest form the way you just described.

[00:03:31] Mark Downey: No doubt. I mean Marilla Park and Morgantown two courts side by side and there was a winner’s court and a loser’s court and shoot it took forever to get on the loser’s court and then you knew if you lost you were going to have to sit down and wouldn’t get back on for a while.

So. I’ve heard Coach Huggins is a mentor of mine, and I’ve heard Coach talk about it over and over and over again. The difference nowadays between players 30 years ago, 25 years ago, and players now. They never experienced the playground and trying to figure out how to stay on the court. How to figure out how to win problem solving is something that we talk about with our team all the time.

And I think when I was young and trying to get to the center court at Stansbury Hall and trying to stay on the court at Marilla Park, you learned how to fix it, how to find a way that you do anything to, to win. And I don’t think that’s there much anymore. The kids growing up nowadays, they’ve got a trainer, they don’t play as much pickup anymore.

And when they do, there’s 10 or 11 guys there. And if you lose, you get to play again. And then AAU basketball is the same way. You play at 9am and you lose, you play at two. If you lose, you play at nine and then you get in some crazy bracket. And if you lose your first game in that bracket, you go in the consolation bracket or the purple bracket, whatever it may be.

And it’s like, man, winning doesn’t mean as much as it used to. And that’s, That’s something within our program that we talk about all the time and just figuring out a way to win, figuring out just problem solve. And we try to put our guys in those situations all the time as well. And you’ll hear me, if you ever hear me coach, you’ll be hearing me yell, fix it, fix it.

You know, when we’re scrambling, it’s just fix it. And that’s a big mantra of our program is to learn how to problem solve.

[00:05:20] Mike Klinzing: But how do you teach that? I know we’re kind of jumping ahead, but let’s, let’s touch on that topic right now, because clearly if that’s something that we feel like players are deficient at, which I agree with you a hundred percent, I think that when you start talking about players finding a role and trying to figure out, Hey, what is this particular team?

I mean, when, look, when you’re playing pickup basketball, right? depending on the level of competition, sometimes you’re the best dude on the team and sometimes you’re the worst. And you’ve got to figure out, okay, in this game, where do I slot? What’s my role? What do I have to do? And so you’re trying to fix it.

So how do you think about trying to teach players to sort of develop that in a way that you and I maybe developed it more organically?

[00:06:00] Mark Downey: Well, I think one of the many reasons that I coached college basketball and not high school basketball was the ability to change players, the ability to go recruit players.

That’s one of them. The other one was parents you don’t want to deal with parents all the time and having to teach all day. Just wasn’t a big fan of that. But I can relate to that. I can relate to that, Mark. No doubt. And I still teach a class here, so I do it a little bit, but not all day.

But we try to recruit it. And it’s really difficult, when guys come on their visits, we show I’m a Michael Jordan guy too. You talk about finding the love of the game. Like, like Michael was coming out of North Carolina in 1984. And I was 12 years old, So I wasn’t a Carolina fan, crazily, but I became a Chicago Bulls fan and just watching them.

And he’s got that killer. Like he does, he’s got that, that’s why I think he’s the GOAT just because he would do anything to win. And probably my second favorite player is Kevin Garnett, even though I was a guard, just watching Kevin Garnett go about his business and studying him, especially since I’d become a coach just how they approach the game.

So we show a video. It’s Area 21. It’s kind of like the trailer for Area 21 that used to be KG’s show that was on after the TNT games and the playoffs and stuff like that. And if you just put in there KG Area 21 in YouTube, it’ll pop up. It’s like two and a half minutes.

And we show that to our recruits when they come on campus and we say, okay, this dude was crazy. And if you’re not like him, then this probably isn’t the right place for you. Because that’s really me up there telling you the same thing that KG’s telling you. And so first we try to recruit it. And try to find do our due diligence and try to find guys that are all about winning and will cut your head off to try to win.

We had our character coach come in and faith is extremely important to me as well. Especially, I went through a divorce almost four years ago and I was born again in early 2021. I’ve always been a believer and went to Catholic school, but just faith in my Savior became hugely important to me going through that tough time.

And our character coach and another guy that leads a men’s group of mine at church came in and talked about David and Goliath to our guys, and he said the David and Goliath story, whether we’re talking about Christ or faith or whatever, it, it gets tossed around like David was some little scrawny guy that never had been in a fight before and that’s not true he was a warrior too, he was just not very big, he wasn’t as big as Goliath, and he went in front of the empire after he slayed the stone or threw the stone or whatever, he cut Goliath’s head off and basically finished the job.

He didn’t just hit him with the stone and say, oh I won. He cut his head off and carried his head in front of the empire and said I’m victorious and we really preach that as well, when guys are down finish the job, be relentless, every single possession, every single cut, every single pass, every single defensive possession, every checkout we just preach, preach, preach to be relentless and keep fighting, keep swinging.

I think that just comes with me being extremely demanding on our guys. You know, it’s another thing when we’re sitting there watching KG, we’re saying, Hey man, we’re going to love you. But we’re going to coach you. And Lenny Acuff at Lipscomb says it all the time and I borrowed it for him.

Hey, we’re going to coach you extremely hard, but we’re going to love you harder. And I, I’m just a big, I’m an old school guy. So I’m a believer in, we’re going to hold you to the highest accountability. We’re not going to let anything slip. And through that, we’re going to teach you.

And it’s just an everyday pursuit of winning. Every single drill has, even our warm up drills, have consequences. And we want our guys just going at it. I mean, we want them going at it every day in practice, and we’re looking for those guys in the recruiting process, but I think we teach it a little bit too.

I think a month into our year about late September, guys are really starting to buy in to, Hey man, we’re going to a fist fight, and that’s what we’re about. And there’s a tunnel where our visitor’s locker room comes out onto our court, and we tell our guys in recruiting, we tell them in practice, Hey man, when that other team comes through that tunnel, We want them to be fearful.

We want them to know that they’re walking into an inferno, like they’re walking into not necessarily a beat down, but they’re walking into a fist fight and they’re going to have to play their best to beat us. And it’s going to be physical. It’s going to be a football game on the basketball court.

And if they walk out black and blue if they walk out just beat up, if they walk out bleeding, well, so be it. Because we’re going to do what we’ve got to do to, to play a physical brand of basketball and that’s just kind of who I am, Matt Painter, Bobby Huggins.

I love Kelvin Sampson, although I don’t know him as well as Matt and Hugs. But I worked for Chris Jans two different times, I mean, he’s the same way, smash mouth. We’re going to guard you, we’re going to make you earn everything that happens on the court tonight. That’s just who I am.

I’ve tried to change. I worked for John Kaufman at Fort Wayne for a couple of years, and he’s more of an offensive guy and we still do a lot of things that he did and that I learned from him. But when you go back to me being me, we’re probably going to play some smash mouth basketball. We’re going to defend you and we’re going to rebound the ball.

And that’s kind of who I am. So I think it’s just something that we do every single day. And it’s my personality. And one of the other phrases that we use with our team is, We will win if you take my personality to the floor. And we preach that as well. So we try to get guys that first of all, Come into the program with somewhat of that personality.

But guys that are capable of learning that and then taking it to the floor. And it’s just an everyday pursuit of it.

[00:12:38] Mike Klinzing: Practice setting. What does that look like in terms of trying to build in that competitiveness that do anything to win? Is that tracking everything? Is that keeping track of winners and losers and drills?

Just how do you make sure? Other than obviously bringing your personality to the practice floor, how do you make sure that your guys are at that high level of competitiveness that obviously you want in order for them to compete and play that style of basketball?

[00:13:05] Mark Downey: Yeah, I first of all, it’s energy.  I’ve got to bring a crazy energy every day to it. I think that’s part of leadership. I mean, one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. And again, one of the guy that runs my men’s group at church is a former military guy and a football coach.

And he had me read Extreme Ownership. Jocko Willett and Lathe Babin wrote Extreme Ownership and it is just a, a mentality like every day I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta be ready to go. If I’m not ready to go and I’m not the example then how are my guys going to do that? And we talk about holding, I know I’m being really cliche in some of the things that we say every day, but we talk about holding that rope even day to day, yesterday we had a great practice.

We were competitive for an hour and 45 minutes or whatever, two hours and 15 minutes, and today we got to hold the rope. Today we got to do it again. So it’s, it’s from the jump just that crazy energy. That’s the first thing. And the second thing is yes, everything we do, every shooting drill, whether it’s an individual shooting drill, whether it’s a team shooting drill, we’ll have a goal.

We will have, and if we don’t get that goal, we have some punishments that we do. And then the things that are really important to us in our program. You know, we punish that too. And I think it just we do carpets coach, coach Hugs used to do the treadmill, the feared treadmill that they had.

But we do, we put a 45 pound weight on a carpet and we push those things for conditioning. We also push them for turnovers and missed checkouts and things of that nature. But it’s just again, we go back, we’re tracking. We don’t necessarily track every single possession and every single shot and all that stuff ’cause we at the D two level just don’t have that personnel to do that.

But everything that we do, every single the only thing we don’t chart or, or we don’t keep track of in a practice is our dynamic stretch. Everything is winner or loser. As a matter of fact, I will write down on my practice sheet if it’s black versus white jerseys in our first drill of the day, and black wins, I’ll write it down.

And black wins, and I’ll put the score. And then the second drill of the day is a shooting drill. If we have a team goal that’s I get 140 makes in three minutes, whatever it may be, I put the number down and we keep track of program best or and then the next drill is another competitive drill.

You know, what, three on three closeouts or whatever it may be. Who got the most stops? Well, white won that drill and about 10 practices into the year. I’ll go back and look at every drill and I’ll have teams on the second sheet of our practice plan. And I’ll go through and mark down who won, who lost, and I’ll have a win loss record for everybody in the program.

And then I’ll do that again, maybe a month later. And our guys you start to look at it and tell these guys, okay, this guy wins every day. Like every drill that we put this guy in, he usually wins. He’s got to find his way to the floor. And then we make it vocal to our guys too. They know who wins and who loses.

And then we get to the point too, where we don’t really sub. You know, we don’t, if we have 16, 17 guys on our team, we don’t, we don’t sub when we go to team drills and our guys start to learn who needs to be in the drills as well. If it comes down to game point or a critical possession where the defense wins, if they get a stop and the offense wins, if they score well.

The guys on the floor are scanning their team before the possession starts. And they’re saying, Hey man, get in here. We get, we need you. Get in here. You know, and some feelings get hurt, but it’s reality, you know. And it kind of teaches guys, Hey, you got to figure out how to win.

And if it’s personnel, if it’s effort, if it’s technique. If it’s relentless effort, whatever, a second multiple effort, whatever it may be you’ve got to do it to win on that critical possession. We do that a lot, too. You know, we’ll get to the end of practice and we’ll say, okay, white’s won four drills today, black’s won five drills today.

It’s black’s ball, white’s on D, and it’s critical possession, one possession. The winner of practice today is the team that wins. You know, if you get it, white gets a stop, black gets a score. You know, whatever it may be, that team wins that one possession. You win practice today. And man, we’ve had some fights, some literal fistfights trying to figure out who’s going to win that last possession.

[00:17:39] Mike Klinzing: When you add that up for the first time after whatever a week.  And then again, after a month, most of the time, does it match kind of your eye test of what you think you’re seeing when you’re watching it? Or has there ever been a surprise of like, Oh, this dude, like he always wins, but maybe he’s doing things that are. More subtle than somebody else. Just how does that play out?

[00:17:59] Mark Downey: Yeah, they usually it plays out, but there’s been a couple year this past year It went the other way you have a guy that you recruited that’s highly recruited You thought he was going to come in and be a be a dude for you start and we add up the wins and losses about 10, 15 days into practice and he’s lost a lot more than he’s won.

And you’re like, okay, it opened your eyes and you didn’t even realize it. You realize that he’s not winning probably as much as you thought, but. You add it up and you’re like, Oh, wow, this guy’s not winning at all. You know, we gotta, rethink some things and then you start to notice and you start to really notice, more than you did before.

That winners win winners win. Like and that guy didn’t end up, what’s crazy is that guy didn’t make it. He was gone at Christmas. Like, and I didn’t get rid of him. He kind of found his way out of the program because winners win and just didn’t have that mentality of what we needed for him to be successful.

And he kind of phased himself out. And I hate that, that’s a mistake we made in recruiting. I used to be really hard on myself when that would happen. Like I let the kid down or I didn’t do my job. But he’s got one more year left and I’m hoping and praying that he finds a spot where someone can help him and he can be coached and he can play in a system because he’s ultra talented.

But it’s crazy how that happens sometimes. He just kind of weeded himself out and phased himself out. And then the next thing you know, he came in and said, coach, I just think I’m going to move on and go somewhere else. And at that point you’re like, well. You know, good luck. Sorry it didn’t work out here.

So yeah, it’s crazy. But I’m a big believer, man. Winners win. You find a way to win and once you found that mentality it’s crazy how it happens. I think our team this year was a prime example of it. You look at our team in introductions, every game, and there are a lot of games when you look down the bench and say, man, how are we going to win this game?

Physically we’re not, we don’t look the part. And next thing you know, we were figuring out, we figured out a way to win, we defended, rebounded, made a play when we had to make a play. And you know, won two championships and played the national championship team pretty well in the NCAA tournament.

So what a fun group to coach when you find a group like that. They’re very rare. I’ve only had a couple in 17 years as a head coach and, and we’ve got a lot of them back, so hopefully we can do it again. But yeah, and maybe even go a little bit further this time. But it was a lot of fun to coach.

[00:20:59] Mike Klinzing: I think you hit that right on the head when you start talking about having a special group to coach. And it’s one of those things that it doesn’t necessarily always mean winning. I mean, winning obviously, I think helps that, but you can also have I know that I’ve experienced this. I’m sure you have and tons of coaches that we’ve talked to on the pod have talked about it where you can have a team that wins that you don’t necessarily love coaching.

Right. And you can maybe have a team that’s not quite as successful on the scoreboard in terms of wins and losses. But You can love coming to practice with them every day and they work and they do the things that they’re asked to do and they go the extra mile and all the stuff that, again, makes a team special.

And man, when you get that, it’s, it’s, it’s a special feeling as a coach that just, as you said, you don’t, you don’t get it. That’s not a guarantee that you’re going to get that every single year. So when you do get it, it’s something that you latch onto and you’re like, man, you never want, you never want those seasons to end, right?

[00:21:55] Mark Downey: No doubt. No doubt. This one, I did not want it to end. And when you’ve this is the sixth time as a head coach that I’ve had to rebuild a program or take a team that take a program that hasn’t won as much and build it into a winner. And you’re right and I think you experience it a lot more when you have been a rebuilder, because you have some guys in that first year that you come into a program and these guys give you everything they’ve got, you inherited probably half of them or more, and they’re giving you everything they can. And they’re buying into what you, what you want them to do, but you just can’t find that success.

You can’t find that win column as much as you’d like to. I try and we have a team like we do this year to really thank and talk about the guys that came before them, talk about that to our team. And then when we’re in front of the media and talking to the community members and all that stuff, we really try to thank those guys that came before and didn’t quite have the success.

And we’ll do that too. You know, it’s a conference tournament when we’re winning games and there’s three or four former players in the stands just coming to watch us play or former assistants coming to watch us play. Like when we go in and celebrate at the end of the game, like we’re motioning to those guys to come in the locker room and do it with us.

Because we built this thing from the ground up and you were a big part of it, even though you didn’t get to cut this net down and we’re really grateful for those guys. And you’re right. There’s times when you just coach your butt off and those kids do everything you ask, but you just don’t have as much success.

[00:23:39] Mike Klinzing: It is fun when you start thinking about including the guys who have helped you to build your program and how important it is to connect with those. alums. And I think the best programs do that really well and keep guys engaged in whatever way, shape or form. There’s lots of ways that you can do it. But I think that the best programs, especially when you start talking about somebody who’s been at a place for multiple years, and then you have lots of guys that have graduated that are part of your program.

And it’s just, it just becomes a family. I mean, it really does. And I think that’s one of the special things about whether it’s high school athletics, where Again, maybe you don’t have the kids for the full four years. If you’re a high school varsity coach, maybe you only see them for two and a couple of kids you might see for three or four years.

But certainly at the college level, when you have guys coming through that are with you for four years, you really get to know them. You get to, you get to love them as you said. And man, they, when they, when they come back and are a part of it, it’s, it really becomes a special thing that allows you, I think, to, To really build what, to really build a program, I always say that, look, you can, you can kind of catch lightning in a bottle and have a good group that comes through and whatever and have a year or two run because you’ve got some good players, but sustainability is, is a lot tougher.

And part of that just comes with, again, building that alumni base and getting people to buy into your program and all the things that go along with that. So there’s a lot that goes into being a successful college coach as you well know. Let’s go back in time to your decision to go into coaching. Where were you at when you knew, hey, coaching is where I want to be?

Was that something that you were thinking about while you were still playing? Was that something that didn’t hit you until, man, now I’m looking at, I got to have a career and hoops isn’t going to be a part of it, man. I got to coach or just, what was your thought process?

[00:25:21] Mark Downey: Well, my my five brothers and sisters all did different things.  And they are all uber successful. And my parents the example that my parents gave me through my five older brothers and sisters it’s quite amazing. And when I was coming through my middle sister was a physical therapist. My oldest sister was a nurse. My brothers were some sort of contractors, their own business, or my youngest brother, that’s a little bit older than me is a petroleum engineer.

And they all just have done unbelievable. So when I was coming through college, I started in physical therapy and I went to Wheeling Jesuit College to play basketball. All my other brothers and sisters went to West Virginia and I went to Wheeling Jesuit to play basketball and was a pre physical therapy major.

Well, the first two years I went through all the classes and it was really hard, but I got through it and they said, okay, well now you need to apply for physical therapy school and if you get in, basketball’s over. And I went, what? Are you kidding me? Time to change. Time to change majors. No doubt. And I said, okay, well, what can I change majors and then get into the PT program after?

And they really didn’t have anything. So I had just came off what was my best college season ever? Average 17 or 18, a game playing in a system where I really fit I shot it and they, I had the green light and they ran me off screens all day. And had a good point guard that was going to be there with me for another couple years and my major wasn’t there.

And it was so important to me at the time, I was like, well, I need to go somewhere else. So I left and went to Charleston in West Virginia in the same league and went into sports medicine where I could get a sports medicine undergrad. And then when I was done with that choose PT or medical school or whatever it may be.

I worked camps and stuff all summer during college and did that kind of thing and coached little kids, but. I never once thought about coaching. Like, it was always, what am I going to do with the medical profession when I was done? Well, by the time I went through the sports medicine deal at Charleston, I was a little burnt out.

I had great teachers and I’m still close with some of those guys, but I was just kind of burnt out on the health profession. You had to do so many freaking hours. It was crazy. And I didn’t want to really be an athletic trainer, which is what I was going to school for, but I wanted to go past that and do physical therapy or med school or something.

And I was sitting in the gym the last semester, the season was over, the last semester of my senior year, and it was an AAU tournament in our gym and my coaches were sitting up above me and coach Greg White, who was the head coach at Marshall for a while and he was my coach at Charleston worked with Jim Herrick at UCLA for a year after they won the national championship.

He was like, Mark, what do you think of that kid? And I watched him for a while and gave him my evaluation. And he said, and I kind of looked at him like, why are you asking me? You know, like who cares? And he said, well, you’re going to be doing this for a living here real soon. And I just I wanted to make you realize it.

And I was like, no way no way. So then I went home that night and I started thinking about it and I’m like, I was devastated after my last college basketball game because I knew the next day I didn’t have to get up and work out. I didn’t have to get up and go lift. I didn’t have to get up and get 500 shots up.

Like, that’s what killed me. I told you I fell in love with being alone with the basketball when I was really young. Well, when I had to give it up when I left college that was the hardest part for me. It wasn’t about putting the jersey on again. It was none of that. And I started thinking about it and I’m like, Man.

I’m really missing the workout side of it. Maybe I need to go do this the way instill the love like everybody did for me, because everybody that I was close to was either someone that taught me how to play or a teammate or I mean, basketball was everything to me. And I didn’t quite realize it till I was done playing.

And within a week, my college basketball coach email was just coming in. That’s showing my age, but email was it’s 1995. Email was just starting and within a week I had mail merged a letter to every division two, every division one coach in the country and sent out a letter to every program in the country.

And that’s what I was going to do. I called my parents and I said, I’m not going to be a physical therapist. I’m going to chase this college basketball dream. And again, I didn’t want to be a high school coach. But from that day that my college basketball coach asked me to evaluate a high school kid, an AAU kid in our college gym it bit me and it’s all I’ve wanted to do ever since.

[00:30:38] Mike Klinzing: It’s kind of funny when you really think about it. And I was kind of the same way as you, in all honesty, that when I was playing, I was. Strictly kind of focused on being a player. And yeah, I never really, I never really thought about coaching. Like I’m always kind of amazed when I talk to guys and they’re like, yeah, from the time I was in fourth grade, I knew I was going to coach.

And so even when I was playing, I was kind of looking at things from a coaching perspective and trying to analyze this and that. And I can honestly say that that while I was playing, trying to figure out what the coaches were doing, other than how it affected me and my team’s ability to win from a player perspective.

I didn’t really think about at all what those coaches were doing or how they were doing it or why they were doing it. And then to your point, I remember I got done and graduated and I went out that summer and I interviewed for jobs and I got offered a job and they’re like, well, you can start two weeks.

And it was like the middle of July and both my parents had been teachers. And so I really had never seen anybody work in July. And I’m like, wait, you want me to put on a suit and go to work in July? It’s like 90 degrees, man. I don’t want to do that. And so then I decided, Hey, I’m going to go back to school and get into coaching.

And it was a good decision to, to do all that. But yeah, it’s interesting just how. People’s paths are so different. So as you send out all those letters, and I remember, well, the year I got out, 1992, I actually tried to get into college coaching. And that was the year that they cut, everybody went from two GAs to one.

And so everybody had them staggered. So basically there was, Yeah. And it would be interesting to go back and kind of replay my life if I had been born like a year later or a year earlier. You know, maybe my life path would have been completely different. But just when you think about sending out all those letters.

How many did you get back, get responses from, and then just what was that initial job search process like for you until you get your first job?

[00:32:32] Mark Downey: Well, I got a bunch back, which was at that time, refreshing not positive you know, but I’m getting a letter that’s supposedly signed, probably stamped by, Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith and at least they got those letters and have a form letter that says, No, thanks.

We’re going a different direction. But I got a lot of them back. But I got two back that were interested in talking to me. One was Ferris State. They had a graduate assistant spot at Ferris State, Michigan. And the other one was Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, Atlantic Christian college, which had become Barton college.

And a guy by the name of Dave Davis. The best thing that could have ever happened to me as a first year coach was going to work for Dave Davis. The first thing he ever said to me on the first day of work, I walked into the office, he said, all right, we’ve got to talk before I was already hired, he already hired me.

But I drove down from Morgantown, West Virginia to Wilson, North Carolina. Had no idea what I was going to do. I think I made $3,000, maybe. I had a meal ticket to go to the CAF. I lived in the infirmary on the edge of campus in a back room that was basically a dorm room. And I had another job. I taught adult education, basically tutored adult education at the local junior college.

So I would do that from eight in the morning till about 11:30 every day, and then go eat in the caf and then go to the office and be in the office till nine or 10 at night and then do it all over again. And the first day I was there, Dave obviously I interviewed at Ferris and didn’t get it. I went down and met with Dave and it was awesome.

You know, Barton College wasn’t much at the time. They won a national championship since then, but it wasn’t a ton at the time. But I was all in it’s all I wanted to do. And on the way back from that trip on the visit down there, I stopped by Duke cause I was even being a Jordan guy, I was a Mike Krzyzewski guy.

I fell in love with Tommy Amaker and Johnny Dawkins and Mark Alarie. And the 86 team that lost to Louisville in the National Championship and never nervous Pervis Ellison. And I just fell in love with that team and became a Dookie. And then the Hurley days, I loved Bobby at the time. I have another story about Bobby, it’s funny.

Later in my coaching career with Chris Jans. But on the way back, we stopped at Duke. My girlfriend and I stopped at Duke and took a tour. You know, we just went in Cameron and walked around and the national championship banners are up there. And we walk out of Cameron and here comes Krzyzewski running down the street.

And my girlfriend’s like, Oh, you need to go say hello. And I’m like, I’m not bothering him. He’s working out and he stops right in front of Cameron and he’s finished with his run and he’s kind of hunched over and he starts stretching. So I just, Walked over and said, coach but senior in college, I’m getting into coaching, just wanted to introduce myself.

And he said, come on come on, Mark, let’s take a picture. And my girlfriend snapped a picture of us. I still have it to this day. I ended up working camp the next summer and I’d never, I went to one practice that afternoon or that’s that season and watch Duke practice one time. And I came back that summer and got to work camp at Duke and he walked in the first day of camp and walked right by me cause he couldn’t see me.

And he turned around and saw me and said, Hey Mark, how you doing? And I had met the dude one time on the side of the street after he just got done running. I don’t know my own name after I get done running, but he remembered my name and I thought, man, that’s impressive. But, get back to the Dave Davis story.

The first day on campus, I walked in the office and he sat me down and he said, Mark, I want to tell you something, and it’s something that I tell young coaches to this day. He said, if you’re doing this job for anything other than your career, Then trying to help those 15 guys in the locker room that we’re going to coach this year, trying to, if you do this for any other reason, then trying to make them better men, better players, better husbands, better fathers.

He said, if you’re doing it for any other reason, get out right now and go do something else. And that, that has stayed with me and I get emotional talking about it.

[00:37:04] Mike Klinzing: Powerful stuff. I mean, it really is.

[00:37:06] Mark Downey: Yeah. God, God put me with Dave Davis for a reason. And to this day, the two people that I call outside of my family, if I’ve got a coaching decision to make, are my college coach, Greg White, and my first boss, Dave Davis.

And I’m incredibly blessed that I have those two men in my life. I tell my GAs walk in year one, first thing I do, bring them in and say, Hey man, If you’re doing this, if you’re doing this job for anything else, wealth, fame, even winning if you’re doing it for anything else other than those dudes in that locker room, then go do something else.

Cause that’s why we’re here. That’s what we’re trying to do. I talk about it all the time. We get caught up in winning a lot, but my character coach that I have right now and my men’s group, the guy that leads my men’s group, who has become a dear friend we talk all the time, we kind of have a mantra that significance over success.

I put that on social media quite a bit. I talk about it with my staff all the time. I’m a big believer. If you can be significant in somebody’s life and teach them what it is to be a man, teach them what it is to be a good father, teach them what it is to be a, a good husband and a leader of their household that the winning will take care of itself.

It’ll come. And I’m a big proponent of that. And I believe in that 100%.

[00:38:45] Mike Klinzing: What does that look like day to day in your program today in terms of using basketball as a tool to be able to teach your players those life lessons, to teach them about being a good citizen, to teach them about being a good husband, to teach them all those things that the game does do a great job of providing opportunities to teach that, but what does it look like day to day for you?

[00:39:08] Mark Downey: It’s relational. It’s about accountability. It’s about loving these guys We try also, and I’ve heard Izzo talk about this a lot, by bringing Mateen Cleaves and Steve Smith and he didn’t mention Draymond. So I don’t know about that one, but bringing those guys back and talking to the team about what it means to go through the program and what happens after, we do that a ton.

Every time we have former players around our team, we talk to them about, okay, we went through the wars. This is why tell them why we do this. Tell them why we do this. Tell them how our former assistants, I love that our assistants that are former players. I love to bring guys back that played for us to be GAs and to be assistant coaches cause they’ve been through it and they understand it. But we try to put them in position to where we give examples and try to explain the why, why are we doing this? Why am I so hard on you? Why? I think one of the most fun things for me is I told you I’m very hard on guys and not everybody makes it.

I’m not for everybody. I’m an old school going to hold you accountable type guy. And sometimes there’s certain guys that just don’t get it. They don’t get it, and they don’t get it. And then sometimes kind of too late, but sometimes just the right time, the light bulb will come on. And all of a sudden, these guys go from fighting you, fighting you, fighting you, fighting you, to the guy you want in the trenches with you.

It went from a guy that you would never, like, he won’t listen to a thing, like, he questions everything you do, and you just keep hounding him, and keep hounding him, and keep on him. And you just don’t let up. And then, the next thing you know, he’s the guy in the huddle that’s bringing guys with him.

He’s the guy that that calls you on the phone every year for the next 10 years and tells you how much he loves you and how much he appreciates you. And there’s nothing better than that. There’s nothing better than that Mike, Michael Bester is probably my biggest example of that. He played for me at West Alabama, I was only there for one year, but that dude he fought me about as hard as anybody’s ever fought me.

And to this day, he’s a high school basketball coach in Mississippi and he just tells me how grateful he was for how hard I was on him. And I had him call a player this year and talk to a player and mentor a player that I had this year that fought us quite a bit. And it ended up helping us a ton with him and getting him over the hump.

So I think it again, it’s just an accountability thing. Loving on these guys, being very relational. We try, I’m not as great at it, but I know guys that do a lot of it. We try to meet with somebody before and after practice every day. Just an individual meeting just to let them know that we hear them.

That any concerns they may have or anything they like that’s going on or anything they might have going on. And it’s not just an academic meeting with an assistant coach or something like that. It’s a meeting with me and just letting these guys know that we care about it more than just being the starting power forward on our team.

And I think that’s what we try to do. It’s gotta be something that we live every day. I hate the word culture. I think it’s a buzzword that people use all the time. I don’t know. It’s one of those pet peeves of mine. I know it’s. You know, a lot of people will use that word, but I’m just not like a culture guy.

And I think it’s because of my career, a lot of people that have used culture and preach culture and preach culture and preach culture, their guys don’t like them very much. It’s just an experience thing with me. It’s something I went through, being around people that preach culture all the time, but that’s what it is.

It’s just a thing that we talk about every day. It’s part of our standards and how we do things. And I think that’s how we eventually get these guys to learn what it takes to do things the right way and have good character and go about life that way. And we do it, we talk about it off the floor, on the floor.

We want to do things the right way, and this is going to carry over into your life when you’re done playing basketball.

[00:43:30] Mike Klinzing: And I think that goes back to, you mentioned it earlier, when you start talking about recruiting and we were talking about it in the context of recruiting that desire to figure out how to win, right?

Right. I think it’s also, right, as a college coach, and this goes to what you said about wanting to coach at the college level versus the high school level. and have an opportunity to choose which guys become a part of your program. So tell me a little bit about your recruiting philosophy in terms of how do you identify guys that you’re really going to go after?

What are some of the things that you’re looking for when you go out and you see them? What do you look for when you’re watching them play AAU versus high school? So just kind of take me through your recruiting process and kind of what your thoughts are as you go through that?

[00:44:17] Mark Downey: Well, I think one of the best and I was blessed and grateful to work for Chris Jans at a young age.

I was 25 years old and had been at Barton College. And then I went to Marshall, my coach, Greg White got the job at Marshall. And went to Marshall, it’s funny because I tell people back then it was three assistants, actually two assistants, a restricted earnings guy, and then me, and I was in graduate school.

So I guess you could call me a graduate assistant, but I was also the administrative assistant, the video guy, the director of ops and when I left there, I got to go work for Chris Jans at Independence Community College, and he was coming off winning the national championship at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa.

And I learned the most about recruiting from Chris Jans. You know, he talks about and I’ve been around a lot of good recruiters, but he’s the best at finding the guys that fit him and we would and then when I got with him again at Bowling Green, when I was later in my career and I had already been a head coach for almost probably 10 years, longer than, yeah, 10 or 12 years and I worked for him at Bowling Green.

It was even better at that point because he had been at Wichita State. And he had been in a lot of different Illinois state and had been recruiting at a higher level. So we talked about, we want to recruit our guys. We want to recruit people we know. We want to recruit as far as coaches who coached them.

We want to recruit winners we want to go into programs that have won and Coaches that have taught them how to win and brought a level of toughness to the floor every day and that’s something that I still try to do to this day, you know somebody brought an NAIA kid across my plate yesterday and across my desk yesterday.

And he looks like a really good player. He averaged 18 a game. He was the leading scorer on his team, but his team won five games. So I’m not saying we wouldn’t take a player like that, but you start investigating them a lot harder. Because they’re coming from a program that didn’t win last year.

And there may be some other reasons why they didn’t win. But will that kid come in and fit into a we’ve got a lot back. Will he come in and fit into a winning culture that we’ve already established and be able to give up a little bit of self to figure out how to win, because there’s something to be said about that too that’s figuring out how to win when you might have to take a lesser role to figure out how to win and that takes a lot of maturity as well.

So I go back and forth a lot. I think it becomes an individual, each individual’s different because I’ve had a lot of success in the past with taking guys that are on their second or third chance because and when people would ask me about that, taking a guy that’s a little bit in the gray area or has had a little bit of a past, I’ll say, well it’d be easy for me to coach 15 guys from the prep school down the road and they all got 4.0 is that, that it’d be really easy to do that. But we want to make a difference in some lives where we can change a life. You know, so I’ve had a lot of success with those guys and, and you gotta be, and some of them have bit me too. I’ve had some guys getting some real trouble after we’ve taken a chance on them.

We try to do our due diligence and try to find winners in that regard, too. You know, sometimes a kid may, may have a bad home life or may had a bad upbringing, but man, he’s figured it out because he’s had to survive and he’s figured out how to win because he’s had to survive and those guys, those guys can be really good, too.

So I think it’s an individual. You have to look at each situation individually. But the first thing that we try to figure out, and Jans was pretty big on this too, is you’ve got to figure out their character. And that’s just research. And again, recruiting your own guys, recruiting your own guys from JUCO, recruiting your guys that you know in the high school level, and just recruiting from winning programs and guys that have been coached.

And then Jans, I used to always laugh at my assistants. I’m not sure they even know the definition of this yet, but Jans used to tell us all the time, don’t bring me shufflers. And the best way I can define a shuffler. is a guy that basically kind of shuffles around everywhere. He doesn’t really sprint back on D, he doesn’t sprint on defense.

He doesn’t run when the ball’s dead, he shuffles, he shuffles around the floor. And you know, there’s other, there’s other ways that Jans would kind of examples of shufflers. He used to tell people that played with their hair all the time. He’s like, when people start playing with their hair, they’re bored.

They’re not paying attention. Little subtle things like that would eliminate people from our recruiting board because. That’s what we are looking for. Don’t bring me shufflers

[00:49:39] Mike Klinzing: That’s a lot harder with today’s hairstyle, Mark. That’s a lot harder with today’s hairstyles.

[00:49:44] Mark Downey: They got long hair now and they start twisting it. It’s a different world. It is, but you know, I mean, it’s just don’t bring me guys that shuffle into the game. Don’t guys that get up off the bench and kind of shuffle over to the scores table and they don’t have a sense of urgency.

And that’s pretty much the biggest thing that I tell my guys. You know, shufflers don’t have a sense of urgency. They just don’t have a sense. They might be ultra talented. They might be really good when the game’s on the line, but if they’re shufflers and they don’t do it all the time, they don’t have that sense of urgency all the time, then I don’t want anything to do with them.

And you know, I used to say that about small guards, too. Don’t bring me small guards unless they’re just special in multiple ways. He goes, I don’t want a small guard that’s just good defensively. I don’t want small guards that just shoot it. If you’re going to bring me a guard, that’s under six foot tall, he better be special in just about every phase of the game.

He better be able to guard. He better be able to pass. He better be able to knock down open shots. He better be able to finish over bigger, bigger guys. He, he, he needs to be tough. Like, so he got to the point where. We didn’t recruit guys under six foot.

[00:50:50] Mike Klinzing: So That’s funny that you say that because I know that that’s a conversation that I’ve had with parents, with friends, with my son’s going to go and play division three basketball next year.

He was a senior this year. Yeah. And He’s 6’6 And I’ve been telling him for three or four years. I’m like, dude, you get so many more chances because you’re 6’6 Like you’re just, you’re going to get more, you’re going to get more people that are going to look at you. You’re going to get more people that are going to say, well, if this kid can do X or if we can get them to do Y, like the opportunity is there versus you go to an AAU tournament and the number of people six foot and under guards at any AAU tournament.

I mean, I’m sure you could attest to this. There’s a million of them. And to your point, like some of them are, yeah, they’re fine players and they have one or two of those characteristics like you just described, but man, it feels like your six foot guards. That are just kind of, eh, they’re good, but there’s nothing that stands out.

Like those guys, it feels like they’re a dime a dozen. And again, I’m not recruiting them all the time and whatever, and not seeing them on the same level that you are, but I definitely can relate to your philosophy when I go and watch a tournament, I’m like, okay, here’s. In this game alone, there’s seven guards that are six foot and under.

How do I look at any of these guys and think that one of them is, how do I project what they could potentially be at the next level? And I’m obviously not really trying to do that, but in my head, oftentimes I’m like, man, all these kids are chasing a dream. And man, if you’re a six foot guard, it’s, it’s tough.  It’s tough to be able to get there.

[00:52:25] Mark Downey: It’s really hard. It really is. And you better be a tough SOB.

[00:52:31] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. All right. Tell me, tell me about the two stints at Arkansas Tech and how that comes to pass, leaving the first time. And then obviously the experience was one that. you felt like was worth coming back to.

So just tell me about how that particular scenario played itself out.

[00:52:49] Mark Downey: Yeah, I got here in 2006 the first time and I’d been an assistant at New Orleans for Monte Towe for five years. And I went there after Jans left Independence after one year and I got the job and I was a head coach at 26 and had some success.

And then. You know, as most JUCO guys do, they leave and go division one assistant. So I went to New Orleans for five years and kind of worked up to the top assistant, but then Katrina hit and we were supposed to be really, really good. We, our fourth year there, we were played in the conference championship, had the freshman player, the, the freshman of the year lost to a really good Louisiana Lafayette team that they were really good.

But we had the most coming back, including the freshman of the year and a bunch of other guys. And Katrina hit. And we ended up, our freshman year broke his wrist three games in at Mississippi State, and we ended up being like 17 and 15 and didn’t have a great year. And man, I was just looking for something and had to get out of there.

I mean, it was just rough and Monty ended up leaving too going to NC State as an assistant that year. So I would have been out of work anyways, but one of our managers there at, New Orleans had taken a GA spot at Arkansas Tech. And he had, he was only there a year and then went to Kilgore Community College as an assistant, but that job opened and he had told me when he was a GA there, he had lived with me for a year.

I was single guy and our manager lived with me. And he was like, when he got to Tech, he was calling D2 coach, this place is a diamond in the rough. It’s a diamond in the rough. Like it’s got, we got good facilities. It’s in a nice town. And so after Katrina, the job opened up and he called me from Kilgore and said, the job’s open.

You want me to help you? And I said, yeah, I do. I’d love to. So he got me in the door and I came up and established a really good friendship with the AD and he’s retired now. Just had coffee with him the other day, but he hired me, took a chance on this young guy from New Orleans. We struggled year one.

We won 18 year two. They had never been to the NCAA tournament, never won the conference championship. Year three, we won the tournament championship, won a game in the NCAA tournament, all firsts. And then year four, we started the year 25 0. Got the number one in the country. Stayed there for like eight weeks.

And finished 30 2 that year. And hosted the NCAA Tournament. And got upset by Mike Helfer from Valdosta in the second round. It’s crazy how D2 is. You know, they were like fourth in the country and we were first. And we were playing, it’s like just that’s D2. But they knocked us off.

We had beat them by 10 or 15 a week before in the conference tournament. And then they come back and beat us in the NCAA tournament. So Charleston, my, my Greg White had gone back to Charleston after Marshall for a few years and he retired. And the president was still the same guy that was there when I was playing.

And Greg White was calling me and telling me to come home. My dad had just passed away that summer back in West Virginia. So my mom was alone kind of alone. My brother, there were a couple of brothers there, but I just felt like I needed to go home and help the family and be close to home.

And I had just gotten married and had a stepson and my wife and I had decided we’re going to go to West Virginia and went to Charleston and, and turned it around there and got it rolling. And then kind of jumped around the country. I had a new idea at Charleston. The guy that hired me died.

He got cancer and died suddenly and just a different philosophy. So. Got a job at West Alabama for a good friend of mine, Stan Williamson was the AD and we did well there. Went to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 32 years and my one year there. And then Jan’s got Bowling Green. So he got Bowling Green and called me and I went up there and we were there for one year and had a great year.

Rashawn Holmes got drafted. He plays for the Mavericks now and won 21 or 22 games and then kind of had a thing happened in a bar and Jan’s kind of got in trouble and we got fired. And I had just interviewed at Little Rock at the same time Chris Beard did. And Chris obviously got it and was the right choice, obviously.

But I interviewed for the job on campus and I came home from there on a Monday and on a Tuesday actually, and we got fired on Thursday morning. And I didn’t get the job at Little Rock, Chris did. And so then I ended up at Fort Wayne for two years. And had two great years with coach John Kaufman and learned a lot because he’s an offensive guy or analytic guy.

And really learned a lot about, and we’ve run a lot of the stuff and do a lot of the same things that Kaufman does at Fort Wayne now. And then just wanted to be a head coach again and Northeastern State came open in Oklahoma and Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Larry Gibson was there. He said, One of the only two coaches in the country to win a JUCO national title and a NCAA national title, him and Nolan Richardson.

And he had been there and coached there and he was retired there and he was helping to hire the new coach. As a matter of fact, Lenny Acuff, I saw him at the Final Four that year. And he told me to call Larry because they were looking for a coach and got me back to being a head coach and spent three years there.

And it’s a really hard job in the MIAA, but we, we got it to 18 wins my third year there, and I really thought we had an NCAA tournament team, but we didn’t finish a few games like we should have. And Tech opened and it was right at the beginning of COVID. And my stepson was now 14 years old.

And his dad was back here in Arkansas and this is where my wife was from. And we just decided to go back to Tech and kind of settle in and being a division two head coach and kind of stopped chasing the dream. And we came back to Tech and. You know, it’s been the greatest yet the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through.

We bought our dream house here. We told our kids that they were going to graduate from high school here in Russellville, Arkansas. And after we bought our dream house about two months later, my wife left. And I’ve never been through anything harder. Just becoming a parent half the time, losing that family unit and then going through COVID and trying to build a program.

That was difficult. That was extremely difficult. And we got hit by I know everybody got hit by COVID, but we got hit by COVID. We went seven and 11 our first year had multiple games canceled, played game, played multiple times without starters. We came back the second year and I thought we had a team that could win a conference title. And we had a kid by the name of Czar Perry at the point that transferred from Cal State Bakersfield. And he was, in the first 10 games of the year, he was having a conference MVP type year, 17 and a half game, half points a game, seven and a half assists a game.

I mean, he was just, he, he was killing it. And we had good players around him too. And he got COVID and our cardiologists would never release him. And he didn’t play the rest of the year. And we went from a team that could win the league to, I think we finished 11 and 17. So then we come back year three last year.

And our starting four man, tears his ACL in the first scrimmage. And I don’t know if he would have been our leading scorer, but he would have been one of our best players. Just trying to build a program, dealing with the COVID and the injuries and then going through all that personally. Man, it’s the toughest rebuild I’ve ever had.

And my guys went through that personal hardship with me. And that’s why I think this year we kind of got back to winning, last year, we got to the conference championship, but we still only won 16 games, but we finished strong and we had a lot of guys coming back. And I felt like this could be a really good year.

So we went out and recruited some non shufflers and got some pretty tough kids and brought them in and filtered them in with the guys we had coming back. And I really made it a point this year to enjoy winning more than I ever have in my entire coaching life. I’ve never been that type of guy it’s just like, okay, we won, what’s next?

And I think a lot of coaches do that. I enjoyed my team and the character on my team. I, and I just made it a point with myself. And I’ve really worked hard on myself, you know and become a better man. And I just wanted this year when we started winning, I’m like, man, I’m going to enjoy this as much as I can, I’m still going to work hard.

And we’re still going to prepare for every game like it’s our last. I really enjoyed my team this year more than I ever have, and I enjoyed the journey and I did not, and they were so good. I mean, they just had it. And I enjoyed it afterwards more. I enjoyed them individually more.

I enjoyed them as a team more collectively. And I’m glad I get to coach them again. This is the first time probably ever in my head coaching career that I did not cry or get emotional after the last game of the season. Because we did not have one senior. Now we’ve lost a couple to the transfer portal.

So I didn’t see that coming. I should have known, right. But it’s the first time ever in my coaching career. We lose to Minnesota State at their place in the NCAA tournament. And I went in the locker room and said, Hey, this we missed an opportunity today. We didn’t play great. But let’s run it back.

Let’s run it back. And from now on, from now until next October, every day, we’ve got to wake up thinking, what can we do to get back here and what can we do to make a run at a national championship? And I’m trying to do that myself. I want our guys to see the work that we’re putting in and the attitude that we have.

We’ve got a recruit on campus right now. I left dinner early tonight to come do the podcast with a recruit, he’s going to be here tomorrow and leave Friday morning. So I’m going get to be with him all day tomorrow. But we’re just trying to show those guys the same thing.

Hey we’re And it’s crazy because our guys don’t see how hard we work. They don’t see the calls that we’re on at night and the film that we’re watching on players and the miles that we’re putting on our car. And they don’t really see that. They see the work when we’re in the gym and we put together a workout and we’re putting them through a workout, but they don’t really see the behind the scenes work.

So I’m making a pact with my team that they’re going to see me work and I want them to hold me accountable to it too I’m going to get in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life. And I’m not in bad shape now, but I’m not in great shape. I’m good from now until October, whatever day it is, fifth or fourth, that we start practice next year.

I’m going to be disciplined. I’m going to eat right. I’m going to stick to this diet that I’ve put together. I’m going to work out, I’m going to work out seven days a week. I want them to see me working and it’s going to benefit me too. I’m 51 years old now, so I want to be I’ve got to worry about my health, especially in the season.

But I want them to see me in the weight room. I want them to see me riding my bike to work. I want them to see me out jogging or playing pickup at noon. I played noon ball today with the football coaches. I want them to see that and know that I’m holding myself accountable physically. And being accountable for the same focus that they are every day.

And that’s just something that I remember Keith Dambrott did it when we were at Bowling Green, he was at Akron and I remember he did it one year. And I just thought about it one night and I’m like, you know what? I want our guys to see how hard we’re working. We talk about it with our guys all the time, but they never really see it.

And I want to go above and beyond. I want them to not only know that we’re working hard to bring in the best players that we can bring in and that we’re working hard to study our films from last year and do all those things that make us better in the summer. But I want them to see me physically working at it too.

[01:05:08] Mike Klinzing: What’s the hardest part of that from a, just when you think about what you need to do from a health perspective or nutrition or diet, whatever, however you want to approach that. What’s the hardest part of you if you think about, I want to get in the best shape of my life. What’s the hardest part of doing that for you?

[01:05:24] Mark Downey: Man, the kitchen table. I love pizza. I love pizza. I like to drink soda. I don’t drink enough water. I’m trying to drink a gallon a day now. And then just the time with the workout, there’s days and I get up and take my kid to school and I’ve got stuff to do and instead of I’m basically working out five times a week, twice a day, because I want to get some kind of cardio or some kind of walk in or, or run in or something. And then I want to lift five days a week. So I take my boy to school and instead of jumping in the shower and going to work I’ll get four or five miles in or I’ll ride my bike 15 miles or 20 miles or whatever. And I’m lucky of we’re coaches, so we’re around the weight room.

So I can run in the weight room for 10 minutes while I’m sitting at my desk or I’m on a phone call, I can run in the weight room and do a circuit in 10 minutes and then go back to work. And then an hour and 10 minutes later, I can go in there and do a second circuit. And then right before practice or right before our workouts in the afternoon, I can walk in there and do my last circuit so that’s the easy part of it, but man, eating…that’s it for me. It’s all about diet. And it takes time to make healthy food too.

[01:06:53] Mike Klinzing: It does. It does. Yeah. It’s funny to hear you say that because I think one of the things that’s interesting, and I don’t know if you felt this way, but when I was playing and even when I was younger, I was. I felt like I just kind of ate to eat and it was more of like a task.

And then the older I’ve gotten, I think the more that I enjoy food, which again, obviously then leads to you potentially eating more or whatever the case might be. But it’s just, it’s interesting how your perspective shifts and just what you do and how you do it. And I think coaching is all consuming and I haven’t had I guess, a quote, real season for a while now. When, since I got out of high school coaching, I don’t know, now it’s probably getting close to, it’s probably getting close to 15 years that, that I’ve been out of it. So, but clearly when you start talking about the demands on you and your position as division two college head coach, there’s, there’s not a ton of As you said, free time built into your schedule, especially again, when you’re coaching your team and it’s in season and trying to find the time to do those things healthy and cook food and not just, Hey, I’m on my way home from practice or on my way to practice or I’m doing here, I’m running there and I’m just picking up a fast food, and it’s tough. It’s definitely a challenge. And I think part of it is just one, you have to set your mind to it. And then two, you got to figure out a way to execute it. And to your point, if you can hold yourself to that same standard that you want to hold your players to, it’s going to benefit you in the long run and how you feel and all that stuff.

And it kind of gets back to what you were talking about too about enjoying the wins, right. Is that sometimes we get so caught up in like just the day to day of what’s next. Okay, we won this game, but now we got to prepare for the next opponent. Or now I gotta get ready for the next day’s practice, or I gotta figure this out.

So how did you boots on the ground? How’d you figure out in terms of changing your mindset to enjoy winning? How did you think about that and maybe, Something that you did could be good advice for another coach out there who’s maybe struggling with that same idea of, man, the wins just don’t feel maybe as good as they used to.  How did you get yourself to enjoy those more?

[01:09:04] Mark Downey: Well, I think the biggest thing for me is maturity. Just realizing that I’ve got a 12 year old at home. I’ve got a high school senior. Those guys watching my son, my stepson, play his senior year in basketball letting myself get away to go to his games on a Friday night when we played Thursday and then Saturday.

You know I was helping coach my son and they played on Saturdays. So there were times when I would we’d have a road game three hours away and we’d do shoot around and then I’d run to my kids game and coach it and then get in the car and drive three hours and get, get to the arena an hour and a half before the game like so just.

The maturity of where I’m at in my life and my faith too has helped me just a ton. But really enjoying my sons and just being around my sons and watching them play. I mean, I have no greater joy than watching my kids play basketball. I don’t care if they play terrible. Like there’s no greater joy than watching those guys play.

And I tried to really enjoy that and not think about what was next with my team. In that regard, sometimes that’s hard on game day when you’re coaching sixth graders and you got a game four hours later that that really means something, and then just really enjoying my guys.

You know, like allowing them to enjoy it. Usually it’s like the past for me was, okay, we won. And then I’m going to walk in the locker room and I’m going to say, okay, great job guys. But you know what? We didn’t rebound it very well. We didn’t rebound it very well. If we don’t rebound it well, like this on Saturday, we’re going to get beat.

So you better bring it tomorrow. Cause you know, that’s kind of who I was. And now I take a little bit of a different approach. I mean, I still will point out what we did wrong. But we do a little bit more celebrating in the locker room. You know, it seems like everybody likes to sing and do that stuff now and throw water on each other and do all that stuff.

So I allow them to do that now a little bit more than we used to. I’m still not a proponent of doing anything on the court. I don’t like any gestures when you make a three. I don’t like any flexing, that’s just not who I am. And I really don’t like our players doing that stuff.

Maybe I’m discouraged when it comes to that. But when we get in the locker room and we’ve won a game, we need to celebrate it. We need to, but here’s the deal because we had guys that knew how to win. It was okay to celebrate those wins. Because by the time they showed up the next day to practice, they were ready to win the next one.

And that was huge. And I was so busy this season with my other sons and, you know and I’m a guy too. I’m a really hands on, like Scouting Reports. I still dig into Scouting Reports and, and my assistants help me a great deal, but I still watch a lot. I really get in I’m during the season, my health does get worn down.

But I just allowed my assistants to do a little bit more this year than they ever have done before. And they did a heck of a job. My GA did a heck of a job with scouts and, and, and calls and things of that nature. And my first assistant does a lot of personnel stuff and they do a wonderful job with it.

But I just I don’t know. I just really enjoyed my guys more. I let those guys enjoy it a little bit more and, and I they knew that when we showed up the next day for practice, it was on. But and I would talk to them about it too. You know, I would say, Hey, I’m going to enjoy this tonight.

I’m going to enjoy this. I’m not a guy that’s going to go have a beer or anything like that. That’s just not kind of, kind of me. I mean, not that I won’t drink a beer, but I’m not the guy that’s going to the bar to celebrate or anything like that. I’d also go home after games and do some other things, you know get into a show or something.

I think throughout the season, most of the year, this year, I was watching Blue Bloods. And we’d win a game and I’d have some film to do. And I’m like, you know what? I can’t wait to watch the next blue bloods episode. So I’m going to go home and watch blue bloods. And when it’s over, I’ll turn the film on and watch it a little bit, get a good night’s rest.

And then I’ll be up early in the morning and headed to a coffee shop and I’ll spend the next six or seven hours in film. And by the time 3:30 rolls around for practice, I’ll have a plan ready and we’ll go try to win. But I took the pressure off myself as much as I could. And I think the maturity of it all just allowed me.

You know, my faith and praying it through. Now when we lost, it was probably about the same Mark Downey that I’ve always been, but when we won,

[01:14:07] Mike Klinzing: Not any easier to lose, not any easier to lose.

[01:14:09] Mark Downey: No, that’s what makes me who I am. And, and I’ve tried to change that a little bit as well, but it’s not been very successful.

I’m just a guy that hates to lose. And usually when I’ve got players that hate to lose. We’ve got a chance to be pretty good.

[01:14:26] Mike Klinzing: Understood. All right. Before we get out, I want to ask you one final two part question. So part one, when you look ahead over the next year or two, what do you see as being your biggest challenge?

And then part two of the question, when you think about what you get to do day in and day out, what brings you the most joy? So your biggest challenge and then your biggest joy.

[01:14:47] Mark Downey: I think the biggest challenge is complacency. But I think we have really good guys. I think that’s a challenge.

Complacency is a challenge. And I haven’t seen it yet. We’ve had really good spring workouts. I’ve let my assistant run our workouts. I watch. I let him ride them up. I mean, he’s been with me for 10 years now, so he knows. But I let him ride up the spring. I let him put the team through workouts.

I let him make the schedule. I let him do it all. And I watch. And I think that I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen that complacency. So I’ve been really happy about that. Because after we lost to Minnesota State, and then they watched Minnesota State go win a national championship. I think it kind of gave them a confidence like, okay, we are right there we got some work to do, but we were right there and we got a lot of guys back.

And what will probably be the biggest challenge will be finding the right pieces to go with what we’ve got. We’re trying to be super picky with who we bring in. They’ve got to be able to fit in. They’ve got to bring certain skills to our program, you know. And fitting in is going to be one of them.

It really is. So we’re looking for high character guys. We’re looking for guys that are winners. We’re looking for guys that don’t necessarily, they can, but they don’t necessarily need to score to be happy. And then obviously I think one of the reasons we won this year is so we were so good defensively.

We need guys that want to give in on that end of the floor and, and leave it all out there. So just finding the right fits and being really picky at who we bring in and we want to bring guys that are hungry.

Most joy on a day to day you know, just, I think just watching our guys.  Watching them get better, watching them grow watching them grow as people. I talk about faith all the time and we had a kid that had some academic troubles first semester of this year and he was a big part of our program. And you want to talk about leadership and cultivating leaders.

Well three of my guys poured into that kid and he got baptized in early February. And I thought that was really neat that that kid was going through a lot and not only did we try to pour into him and make sure he was okay, but his teammates did. And I just seeing that, seeing that leadership, seeing guys do our point guard just went to a leadership conference last week.

He called me the night before he was headed that way and he’s like, coach, I got to give a big presentation tomorrow night at this leadership conference. And will you pray for me? And will you keep me in your thoughts? And so all day I kept pumping him up. And then when he was done that Friday night, I text him and said, how’d it go?

And he was like, man, it was unbelievable. It went way better than I thought. And just seeing those guys succeed in not only basketball, but just getting better as people and making strides as people. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the joy, man. The winning and the trophies and the cutting down the nets and the sizing up rings and doing all that stuff.

That’s the icing on the cake and that’s the fun stuff. But watching these guys grow and become men and shoot, they inspire me sometimes. And that’s the best part of it. There’s no doubt.

[01:18:13] Mike Klinzing: That’s well said, Mark. I mean, I think when you really start boiling down to coaching, that last minute of what you just talked about, where the wins are fun, the wins are important, the success on the court obviously matters, especially at the college level.

If you want to keep your job, the reality is when you look back at your coaching career, when players look back at the opportunity to play for you, those individual wins and losses all kind of melt away. And it’s more about, Hey, what was the collective experience like? And what did we accomplish together?

And how do we grow as people and are we better off or haven’t had the experience? And I think you did a really good job of kind of summing that up. Before we get out. I want to get.

[01:18:51] Mark Downey: We talk about character all the time. And one of the things that we do if we get into a tough situation late in the game, or we’ve got to get one stop, or we need there’s three and a half minutes left, we’re in the under four media, and we’re down four, and you know, every possession matters.

We just work really hard at cultivating good people, and we have a phrase that just, hey, character wins. Character wins. And we might say it seven or eight times, In a huddle, late in the game, like, character wins, believe it, character wins, believe it, and if they’re doing things the right way, and they’re working on their game, and they’re doing things the right way off the floor, their subconscious knows that they deserve it.

That they deserve it. Like, you can’t fool the mirror, right? So, we just continually preach doing things the right way, treating people the right way working hard when people aren’t looking. What do you do when coach isn’t in the gym? We talk about that all the time and our phrase is character wins and that just pops up.

I’ll walk down the bench sometimes when there’s eight seconds left and it’s a tie game and we’ve got to side out and we’ve drawn something up or we called a set and I’ll walk down the bench and I’m like, character wins, fellas, character wins. And if guys are doing things the right way and you’ve got winners in your program, they’re going to start to believe that.

And it came out this year. We won a lot of close games and we won a lot of tough games and I think our guys truly believe that character does win.

[01:20:47] Mike Klinzing: I agree more. I mean, I think ultimately if you can point to that and it’s something that is a part of your program and not just Some words that you say, but it’s something that you live by.

I think it matters. I think it matters in the scoreboard, but I think it matters in the connection that you build with your team. And it’s, again, as I said a minute ago, I think that really is what coaching ultimately is all about. It’s that connection that you make with your team. And you said it, you had a team this year that you didn’t want the season to end.

You wanted to be able to keep coaching them. That’s really what it’s all about. When you, when you catch lightning in a bottle like that, Mark, as you well know, you, you want to grab onto it for as long as you can. So before we wrap up, I want you to share how people can get in touch with you. Email, social media, website, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I will jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:21:34] Mark Downey: Sounds good. If you just look me up on Facebook or I don’t have an Instagram. I use our ATU men’s basketball. So it’s @ATUMBB. But I have control of that account, so you can get a hold of me on that account. To be honest, I don’t even know my Twitter handle, but if you just look up Mark Downey at Arkansas Tech, it’ll come up.

And then my email is mdowney@atu.edu. And we are going to start doing some clinics and trying to get into some high schools and do some things of that nature something, an idea that someone approached me about and I’m very excited about it.

Implementing a defensive system. We’re going to, we’re going to start doing some of this stuff in the Midwest and see if we can cultivate it a little bit. I think a lot of high school programs don’t, they’ve never really implemented a defensive system.

Ee want to come into a program and work with their 7th graders all the way to their high school seniors. And basically put on a clinic for their coaches. And start with guarding the ball. And get to two on two and jumping to the ball and sprinting to help and how you rotate and how you guard ball screens and how you guard handoffs and everything.

And trying to get in and do clinics like that for coaches, but use their players and implement drills to help their players learn this system. And hopefully it takes off, it’s something that has become kind of dear to me and I want to get it off the ground. And you don’t see many people coming in and doing clinics on defense.

And I think it’s something that we can run with and help out coaches and learn the game. So wanted to just give a little plug for that. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. Hopefully by the end of the summer and this fall we’ll be doing some of those.

But we’ve got some really good ideas and some really good coaches that are helping and backing it and hopefully we can move it forward. But yeah, so reach out to me. I’d love to talk about that. I’d love to talk about the defensive side of the ball. I’m not a real big analytic guy.

There’s a couple things that John Kaufman did at Fort Wayne that we use within our offense. But defense is where we make our money. And we were pretty good defensively this year. So, defense and rebounding wins. That’s kind of how we go about things.

[01:24:04] Mike Klinzing: That’s good stuff.So coaches out there, if you’re listening, reach out to Mark, find out more about what he’s going to do with the clinic side of it. And again, Mark, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule to jump out with us tonight. It really means a lot to me and to everyone in our audience.

Thank you for listening tonight and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.