Mike Holder Doesn’t Need to Go Far to Be Reminded of First-Time Coaching Success

Decision time for Mike Holder. It’s likely (very likely, in my opinion) that he is going to hire Brad Underwood or Ben Jacobson or Chris Beard or somebody like that to be the next basketball coach at Oklahoma State.

If he decides not to, though, and if he thinks that hiring Doug Gottlieb is a good idea (like many of us do), it should be easy to understand why.

In 1973, a 23-year-old MBA student was given the reins to what would become one of the most successful individual athletic programs in college sports history. Mike Holder became the Oklahoma State golf coach with (egads!) no previous coaching experience. And he was 23! Twenty three!

But he was smart and he was driven and he was a self-aware alpha dog and, oh yeah, Oklahoma State won 25 conference titles under his watch and eight national championships. He fundraised for and built one of the crown jewel golf courses of the midwest. All of this of course lead to helping build Boone Pickens Stadium 35 years later.

These are all real things that happened, and they might not have if OSU had said in 1973, “no, Mike, you don’t have any experience coaching. We want you to go somewhere else and do it for a while.” Do you understand the implications here? Oklahoma State might not have Boone Pickens Stadium if Mike Holder hadn’t been given a chance as a zero-experience coach in 1973.

And yes, I totally understand that comparing college golf in 1973 to college hoops in 2016 is apples to oranges. But leaders are leaders and the point is that you’re trying to hire the right person to lead an organization. No caveats. No “we’re trying to hire the right person as long as he has a certain number of wins in his previous jobs.”

Of course it’s easier to envision success for someone who has had success before. If you don’t think that, you’re delusional. Doug Gottlieb addressed this in our podcast on Sunday.

“I’m not defensive about the question of not having coached because I think it’s a fair question,” said Gottlieb. “If you’re going to be a head coach, there are going to be people who are critical of anything you do. How you respond to it speaks to what type of person you are. What type of leader you are.”

Money. But the inability of some people to pull themselves outside the tunnel vision of doing it exactly like everyone else does it and into the Fred Hoiberg comparison pool is maddening.

“You’re a point guard, you’re coaching the team,” said Gottlieb. “You have to have the same communication skills. You have to have the same ability to motivate teammates. To read teammates. You have to see the game differently. The one place I think people can understand my vision within a game is Oklahoma State because I saw things other people didn’t see and I saw them before they happened.”

Vision. The future. Seeing things before they happen. Doug Gottlieb was as good at these things as a player as any college player who has ever laced ’em up. Do they translate into coaching? I think they do. Many others don’t. The point is that if there’s someone who can do it, it’s him.

So if Mike Holder does hire Doug Gottlieb, it will be because it happened to him over 40 years ago. Is the idea of Doug Gottlieb coaching OSU in GIA far-fetched? Maybe, but so is a MBA student turned golf coach rising up to eventually have one of the great football stadiums in the United States built under his watch.

Vision. Mike Holder had it in 1973. OSU complied. Will the same thing happen in 2016? Decision time for OSU.