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Well-known member
Taylor has adjusted to living back east
By BILL SCHWANKE of Missoulian.com
Former UM player and coach Blaine Taylor works the sidelines as head coach at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Taylor just completed his sixth season as coach of the Monarchs.
OLD DOMINION Photo
If someone had told Blaine Taylor years ago that someday he would leave Montana and end up living and working in Virginia, he would have laughed at the thought.
But Taylor did leave in 1998 after seven years as head men’s basketball coach at the University of Montana.
After three years as an assistant to another former Griz coach, Mike Montgomery, at Stanford, Taylor accepted the heading coaching job at tradition-rich Old Dominion University in - you guessed it - Virginia.
“It’s been an odd experience in that you’re so far from friends and family and all the things you’re so familiar with,” Taylor said recently, “but it’s been a very enriching and invigorating experience for me and my family to see different cultures, the different challenges in the job setting that I’ve been in, and actually (we) have had some great experiences as we’ve gone through the year.”
Taylor said he and his family will always miss Montana, and he held out the possibility that at least he and his wife, Annie, could end up back here at some point in their lives.
There was plenty at Old Dominion besides its strong basketball tradition to attract Taylor or any other prospective head coach.
“They were building a new arena,” Taylor said of his investigation into the Norfolk-based institution. “They had had NBA players. They had had great coaches, great teams. They had a really strong tradition in every sport. And yet they were a little bit in a lull.”
Taylor had experience with programs that were strong at Montana and Stanford and thought that would help him be part of building something at Old Dominion, a school that was seeing growth in its enrollment and alumni support.
But Taylor’s number-one question when looking at the ODU job was the potential for happiness for him and his family. The second question was the potential for him to succeed there.
The answer turned out to be “yes” to both questions, and off he and his wife and four daughters went.
Former UM president James Koch was just wrapping up his tenure as Old Dominion’s president when Taylor was going through the search process there. Taylor said Koch’s involvement certainly didn’t hurt his chances.
“He tried to stay very objective in the search,” Taylor said of Koch, whom he hadn’t seen for several years after he left UM for ODU. “As much as anything I think he was aware of Montana-Stanford and that those are credible places.
“As they (ODU) were doing their search my name came up,” Taylor went on. “I think he mentioned that I’d be a worthy candidate to talk to. I’m not sure that my name would have gotten in there as strong had he not said, ‘hey, this guy’s worth talking to.’”
Taylor said Koch’s fingerprints are on virtually everything at Old Dominion, a school that he said is flourishing in so many ways. And he said Koch’s successor, Roseann Runte, has picked up the baton and strongly added to Koch’s legacy there.
Never without a witty comeback, Taylor said his first adjustment to living in Virginia was having to learn how to say “y’all” and “fixin’” and the proper way to pronounce names of cities in the region.
And after years of working in the West adjusting to the eastern time zone was huge for Taylor.
“I was so used to just coming into work early in the morning and … calling anybody in the country,” Taylor recalled. “I’ve gotta wait until about noon around here to start calling the West Coast.”
From a strictly coaching standpoint Taylor said it was fun to have a fresh approach in terms of offensive and defensive schemes. While there are relatively few Division I leagues out west, Taylor said he can play schools from five different leagues and “be home in bed by midnight at my house.”
With so many different teams to compete with and so many different styles to prepare for Taylor said it’s been fun to bring Montana and Stanford basketball to the East Coast and create a style that will work there.
Whatever that style is, it seems to be working. After going 13-16 and 12-15 his first two seasons at ODU, the Monarchs have posted 93 wins against just 37 losses the past four seasons.
That includes a 28-6 mark and a Colonial Athletic Association title in 2004-05 and NCAA first-round appearances in 2004-05 and 2006-07, the latter resulting from a rare at-large bid. Taylor’s 2005-06 team made it to the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.
Taylor always has had a ready sense of humor. Sometimes it has drawn laughs; other times just groans. But he says he’s grown in that area as well.
“Everybody works within the framework of their own personality,” Taylor said. “As I’ve matured and become more experienced, I think being able to laugh at myself, laugh at circumstances, has been healthy.
“It’s made me a regular guy in the eyes of others,” Taylor went on, “and also made people comfortable that we’re in this to have some fun. This isn’t life or death.”
Taylor said he’s also had to be sensitive and careful to use humor at the right time, making sure it affects people in the right way. It’s something he’s learned over time, that sometimes it’s the things you choose not to do that make you successful.
The former Hellgate High School standout said there isn’t a better training ground for a coach, when it comes to handling pressure and high expectations, than the University of Montana.
“It’s like being in New York,” Taylor said. “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
Calling coaching at UM a big-time deal in its own setting, Taylor said dealing with all of the peripheral things like media, fundraising, booster groups and recruiting challenges plus the real expectation that athletes truly would be good students has served him and other former UM coaches extremely well.
“As I’ve gone from setting to setting, that’s what people want,” Taylor explained. “When I came here people were more interested in my Stanford background than my Montana background.
“I bristled at that because, quite honestly, I learned immensely more in my years at Montana that has served me now,” he added, “and that’s the thing that I always try to explain to people.”
Taylor’s move to Stanford was unusual from the standpoint that he left a head coaching position to become an assistant coach, albeit at a more prestigious institution.
What it allowed him to do was step out of the line of fire that comes with being a head coach and enjoy relationships with players more, experience with national recruiting, deal with a department that sponsored 33 sports with a $40 million budget and “learn so much from the other coaches.”
Stanford also put Taylor in touch with endowments, something that also has served him well at Old Dominion. Since going there in 2001 he has endowed nine of his 13 men’s basketball scholarships through a commitment of more than $2.25 million.
Stanford, he said, gave him more than he gave Stanford, but he fulfilled his commitment of three years to Montgomery almost to the day.
One thing Taylor seems to regret about the coaching profession is that it controls people in it more than they control it. He said he sometimes envies people he knows who have lived in Montana for their entire lives.
Few people know it, but when Taylor came to UM as a player in 1977 he planned to get a business degree and go to law school.
He ended up with an education degree in 1981 and was still considering law school, but the influence of people like Montgomery and fellow coaches Stew Morrill and Robin Selvig who were making lives for themselves in coaching pulled him in that direction.
“Sports keeps you young,” said Taylor, who wound up with a master’s in athletic administration. “Being around academia is something that has a lot of feel good attached to it.”
Even when he coached at Loyola Sacred Heart High School in Missoula Taylor still wasn’t thinking about being a Division I college head coach.
“I was gonna be a teacher,” Taylor explained. “I was gonna be a coach. I was gonna be around sports. I was gonna help young people.”
When he returned to UM as Stew Morrill’s assistant in 1986 part of his salary was paid by the physical education department where Taylor did some teaching. Now he’s in a profession that puts demands on his time year round just like any other big business.
“I never would have envisioned that when I was trying to make a choice as to whether I was going to be trying to talk somebody out of a parking ticket or talk somebody into buying a ticket,” Taylor quipped.
One of the best things about Taylor’s three years at Stanford was the relative anonymity he and his family enjoyed compared to the under-the-microscope, always-getting-advice-from-fans situation he had for seven seasons as head coach at Montana.
He and Annie actually could go out to dinner and not be recognized. And while he’s back under a microscope as head coach at ODU, it’s different from what he dealt with in Missoula.
ODU gets tons of television exposure, games have sold out numerous times (the Monarchs lead the league in attendance), and people definitely know who he is. He’s no longer anonymous.
“The thing I’ve really enjoyed - and I mean this in a good way - I really felt like at Montana, at times, the expectation exceeded the appreciation at times,” Taylor said. “The thing that I’ve experienced here is a tremendous appreciation level. Very little criticism.
“Just mostly, ‘Thanks for all the fun. Thanks for giving us a chance to be proud. Thanks for giving us a national awareness. Thanks for taking us to post-season play.’”
The other thing Taylor has experienced is coaching at schools that also have outstanding women’s basketball programs. Again, he surprised some people in Norfolk with how he handled the fact that women’s basketball was special at ODU.
“I think it was kind of odd to these folks … that I walked through the door and really didn’t bat an eye that women’s basketball could be really good and I was a partner,” Taylor noted. “We can both be good and be friends and support one another.”
Taylor credits UM women’s coach Robin Selvig with helping teach him that lesson, even after - as he put it - “Title IX brought the child out in a lot of us.” Taylor believes people on both sides of that issue “have grown up a little bit.”
The Lady Monarchs have won 15 straight CAA championships and over one stretch had won 120 conference games in a row. Yet Taylor was able to point out to people at ODU that Selvig had done similar things at Montana.
Asked about his most exciting wins as a coach Taylor quickly pointed to the 1991 UM championship that ended a long title drought that ran through a number of outstanding coaches.
“The tears of joy that went down the fans, players (and) coaches faces that night with a huge crowd in Dahlberg Arena,” Taylor remembered, “that will always kind of sit with me. Some of that was for Mike (Montgomery) and his years of being so close.”
The next season was Taylor’s first as head coach at his alma mater. He inherited a solid roster and the team went back to the NCAA Tournament, finishing with a 27-4 record. Taylor’s Grizzly teams would win 20 or more games five times.
As a former player who became a coach Taylor now is enjoying having former Griz point guard Travis DeCuire on his ODU coaching staff.
“Travis has a very, very bright future,” Taylor said, adding that he felt that way even when DeCuire was playing for the Grizzlies. “Very ambitious young man, very bright, very articulate, understands the game. I think he’s a guy that Montana can be very proud of having produced.”
DeCuire oversees the academic side for Taylor, who noted that - out of 64 teams in the 2007 NCAA Tournament - Old Dominion ranked third in the academic progress rate.
High school sweethearts Blaine and Annie have been married nearly 30 years. Three of their four daughters - ages 14 to 27 - live in Virginia Beach. Oldest daughter Amber lives and works in Oregon.
As for his own future, Taylor pointed to the health of the Old Dominion program and how much he and his family feel at home there. That makes it difficult for other schools to attract his interest.
“But (in) this profession you never say, ‘never,’” Taylor admitted. “There’s obviously always the next challenge around the corner. Sometimes it’s at your own place. Sometimes it’s another place, so I really can’t predict the future.”
Now in his late 40s, Taylor knows he’s at an optimum time in his profession.
“I’m just trying to make the most of it,” he said.
Taylor still has family in Montana. Both he and Annie lost their fathers to cancer. Both are buried in Montana. Taylor’s mother lives in Kalispell.
“There are some tremendous feelings that are very deep rooted with Annie and myself, but also with our kids in those formative years,” Taylor said. “Those vacations in the Flathead Valley and those summer nights up the Rattlesnake … those will always be with us.”
Click here to listen to Bill Schwanke’s complete interview with Blaine Taylor.
By BILL SCHWANKE of Missoulian.com
Former UM player and coach Blaine Taylor works the sidelines as head coach at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Taylor just completed his sixth season as coach of the Monarchs.
OLD DOMINION Photo
If someone had told Blaine Taylor years ago that someday he would leave Montana and end up living and working in Virginia, he would have laughed at the thought.
But Taylor did leave in 1998 after seven years as head men’s basketball coach at the University of Montana.
After three years as an assistant to another former Griz coach, Mike Montgomery, at Stanford, Taylor accepted the heading coaching job at tradition-rich Old Dominion University in - you guessed it - Virginia.
“It’s been an odd experience in that you’re so far from friends and family and all the things you’re so familiar with,” Taylor said recently, “but it’s been a very enriching and invigorating experience for me and my family to see different cultures, the different challenges in the job setting that I’ve been in, and actually (we) have had some great experiences as we’ve gone through the year.”
Taylor said he and his family will always miss Montana, and he held out the possibility that at least he and his wife, Annie, could end up back here at some point in their lives.
There was plenty at Old Dominion besides its strong basketball tradition to attract Taylor or any other prospective head coach.
“They were building a new arena,” Taylor said of his investigation into the Norfolk-based institution. “They had had NBA players. They had had great coaches, great teams. They had a really strong tradition in every sport. And yet they were a little bit in a lull.”
Taylor had experience with programs that were strong at Montana and Stanford and thought that would help him be part of building something at Old Dominion, a school that was seeing growth in its enrollment and alumni support.
But Taylor’s number-one question when looking at the ODU job was the potential for happiness for him and his family. The second question was the potential for him to succeed there.
The answer turned out to be “yes” to both questions, and off he and his wife and four daughters went.
Former UM president James Koch was just wrapping up his tenure as Old Dominion’s president when Taylor was going through the search process there. Taylor said Koch’s involvement certainly didn’t hurt his chances.
“He tried to stay very objective in the search,” Taylor said of Koch, whom he hadn’t seen for several years after he left UM for ODU. “As much as anything I think he was aware of Montana-Stanford and that those are credible places.
“As they (ODU) were doing their search my name came up,” Taylor went on. “I think he mentioned that I’d be a worthy candidate to talk to. I’m not sure that my name would have gotten in there as strong had he not said, ‘hey, this guy’s worth talking to.’”
Taylor said Koch’s fingerprints are on virtually everything at Old Dominion, a school that he said is flourishing in so many ways. And he said Koch’s successor, Roseann Runte, has picked up the baton and strongly added to Koch’s legacy there.
Never without a witty comeback, Taylor said his first adjustment to living in Virginia was having to learn how to say “y’all” and “fixin’” and the proper way to pronounce names of cities in the region.
And after years of working in the West adjusting to the eastern time zone was huge for Taylor.
“I was so used to just coming into work early in the morning and … calling anybody in the country,” Taylor recalled. “I’ve gotta wait until about noon around here to start calling the West Coast.”
From a strictly coaching standpoint Taylor said it was fun to have a fresh approach in terms of offensive and defensive schemes. While there are relatively few Division I leagues out west, Taylor said he can play schools from five different leagues and “be home in bed by midnight at my house.”
With so many different teams to compete with and so many different styles to prepare for Taylor said it’s been fun to bring Montana and Stanford basketball to the East Coast and create a style that will work there.
Whatever that style is, it seems to be working. After going 13-16 and 12-15 his first two seasons at ODU, the Monarchs have posted 93 wins against just 37 losses the past four seasons.
That includes a 28-6 mark and a Colonial Athletic Association title in 2004-05 and NCAA first-round appearances in 2004-05 and 2006-07, the latter resulting from a rare at-large bid. Taylor’s 2005-06 team made it to the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.
Taylor always has had a ready sense of humor. Sometimes it has drawn laughs; other times just groans. But he says he’s grown in that area as well.
“Everybody works within the framework of their own personality,” Taylor said. “As I’ve matured and become more experienced, I think being able to laugh at myself, laugh at circumstances, has been healthy.
“It’s made me a regular guy in the eyes of others,” Taylor went on, “and also made people comfortable that we’re in this to have some fun. This isn’t life or death.”
Taylor said he’s also had to be sensitive and careful to use humor at the right time, making sure it affects people in the right way. It’s something he’s learned over time, that sometimes it’s the things you choose not to do that make you successful.
The former Hellgate High School standout said there isn’t a better training ground for a coach, when it comes to handling pressure and high expectations, than the University of Montana.
“It’s like being in New York,” Taylor said. “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
Calling coaching at UM a big-time deal in its own setting, Taylor said dealing with all of the peripheral things like media, fundraising, booster groups and recruiting challenges plus the real expectation that athletes truly would be good students has served him and other former UM coaches extremely well.
“As I’ve gone from setting to setting, that’s what people want,” Taylor explained. “When I came here people were more interested in my Stanford background than my Montana background.
“I bristled at that because, quite honestly, I learned immensely more in my years at Montana that has served me now,” he added, “and that’s the thing that I always try to explain to people.”
Taylor’s move to Stanford was unusual from the standpoint that he left a head coaching position to become an assistant coach, albeit at a more prestigious institution.
What it allowed him to do was step out of the line of fire that comes with being a head coach and enjoy relationships with players more, experience with national recruiting, deal with a department that sponsored 33 sports with a $40 million budget and “learn so much from the other coaches.”
Stanford also put Taylor in touch with endowments, something that also has served him well at Old Dominion. Since going there in 2001 he has endowed nine of his 13 men’s basketball scholarships through a commitment of more than $2.25 million.
Stanford, he said, gave him more than he gave Stanford, but he fulfilled his commitment of three years to Montgomery almost to the day.
One thing Taylor seems to regret about the coaching profession is that it controls people in it more than they control it. He said he sometimes envies people he knows who have lived in Montana for their entire lives.
Few people know it, but when Taylor came to UM as a player in 1977 he planned to get a business degree and go to law school.
He ended up with an education degree in 1981 and was still considering law school, but the influence of people like Montgomery and fellow coaches Stew Morrill and Robin Selvig who were making lives for themselves in coaching pulled him in that direction.
“Sports keeps you young,” said Taylor, who wound up with a master’s in athletic administration. “Being around academia is something that has a lot of feel good attached to it.”
Even when he coached at Loyola Sacred Heart High School in Missoula Taylor still wasn’t thinking about being a Division I college head coach.
“I was gonna be a teacher,” Taylor explained. “I was gonna be a coach. I was gonna be around sports. I was gonna help young people.”
When he returned to UM as Stew Morrill’s assistant in 1986 part of his salary was paid by the physical education department where Taylor did some teaching. Now he’s in a profession that puts demands on his time year round just like any other big business.
“I never would have envisioned that when I was trying to make a choice as to whether I was going to be trying to talk somebody out of a parking ticket or talk somebody into buying a ticket,” Taylor quipped.
One of the best things about Taylor’s three years at Stanford was the relative anonymity he and his family enjoyed compared to the under-the-microscope, always-getting-advice-from-fans situation he had for seven seasons as head coach at Montana.
He and Annie actually could go out to dinner and not be recognized. And while he’s back under a microscope as head coach at ODU, it’s different from what he dealt with in Missoula.
ODU gets tons of television exposure, games have sold out numerous times (the Monarchs lead the league in attendance), and people definitely know who he is. He’s no longer anonymous.
“The thing I’ve really enjoyed - and I mean this in a good way - I really felt like at Montana, at times, the expectation exceeded the appreciation at times,” Taylor said. “The thing that I’ve experienced here is a tremendous appreciation level. Very little criticism.
“Just mostly, ‘Thanks for all the fun. Thanks for giving us a chance to be proud. Thanks for giving us a national awareness. Thanks for taking us to post-season play.’”
The other thing Taylor has experienced is coaching at schools that also have outstanding women’s basketball programs. Again, he surprised some people in Norfolk with how he handled the fact that women’s basketball was special at ODU.
“I think it was kind of odd to these folks … that I walked through the door and really didn’t bat an eye that women’s basketball could be really good and I was a partner,” Taylor noted. “We can both be good and be friends and support one another.”
Taylor credits UM women’s coach Robin Selvig with helping teach him that lesson, even after - as he put it - “Title IX brought the child out in a lot of us.” Taylor believes people on both sides of that issue “have grown up a little bit.”
The Lady Monarchs have won 15 straight CAA championships and over one stretch had won 120 conference games in a row. Yet Taylor was able to point out to people at ODU that Selvig had done similar things at Montana.
Asked about his most exciting wins as a coach Taylor quickly pointed to the 1991 UM championship that ended a long title drought that ran through a number of outstanding coaches.
“The tears of joy that went down the fans, players (and) coaches faces that night with a huge crowd in Dahlberg Arena,” Taylor remembered, “that will always kind of sit with me. Some of that was for Mike (Montgomery) and his years of being so close.”
The next season was Taylor’s first as head coach at his alma mater. He inherited a solid roster and the team went back to the NCAA Tournament, finishing with a 27-4 record. Taylor’s Grizzly teams would win 20 or more games five times.
As a former player who became a coach Taylor now is enjoying having former Griz point guard Travis DeCuire on his ODU coaching staff.
“Travis has a very, very bright future,” Taylor said, adding that he felt that way even when DeCuire was playing for the Grizzlies. “Very ambitious young man, very bright, very articulate, understands the game. I think he’s a guy that Montana can be very proud of having produced.”
DeCuire oversees the academic side for Taylor, who noted that - out of 64 teams in the 2007 NCAA Tournament - Old Dominion ranked third in the academic progress rate.
High school sweethearts Blaine and Annie have been married nearly 30 years. Three of their four daughters - ages 14 to 27 - live in Virginia Beach. Oldest daughter Amber lives and works in Oregon.
As for his own future, Taylor pointed to the health of the Old Dominion program and how much he and his family feel at home there. That makes it difficult for other schools to attract his interest.
“But (in) this profession you never say, ‘never,’” Taylor admitted. “There’s obviously always the next challenge around the corner. Sometimes it’s at your own place. Sometimes it’s another place, so I really can’t predict the future.”
Now in his late 40s, Taylor knows he’s at an optimum time in his profession.
“I’m just trying to make the most of it,” he said.
Taylor still has family in Montana. Both he and Annie lost their fathers to cancer. Both are buried in Montana. Taylor’s mother lives in Kalispell.
“There are some tremendous feelings that are very deep rooted with Annie and myself, but also with our kids in those formative years,” Taylor said. “Those vacations in the Flathead Valley and those summer nights up the Rattlesnake … those will always be with us.”
Click here to listen to Bill Schwanke’s complete interview with Blaine Taylor.
