By Todd Bradley, DCSportsFan.com
Special to MaxPreps.com
During the 2007-08 basketball season, Gonzaga basketball coach Steve Turner did what no other coach in Gonzaga basketball history has ever done: He brought home the glory—the WCAC Championship, the City Title and the Alhambra Catholic Invitational Tournament.
Results like these happen for a reason. Turner has three: philosophy, providence and passion.
Philosophy
Turner puts it this way, tying his philosophy to his early life experiences: “Coaching is my way of giving back. I never asked for the things given to me by the coaches who gave so much to me when I was growing up…they just reached out. Who knows…maybe one of my players will end up giving back to me some day by coaching one of my own sons.”
At the core, underneath Turner’s passion for basketball and top-of-the-order competition, is his desire to want to help young boys grow into strong young men.
“I have a desire and the ability to want to help others, which at the end of the day is what Gonzaga is all about. It’s the Jesuit way.”
Steve Turner is a “hometown boy,” raised in the Four Corners area of the Maryland suburbs. Growing up he was surrounded by family—uncles and cousins, grandmothers and great grandmothers, his aunt and, especially, his mom, a single parent who saw to it that he had every opportunity possible.
“Mom did double duty. She was a mom and a dad. She never let the fact that ‘dad wasn’t in the house’ stop me from doing the things she thought I needed to do,” Turner said. “She was at my games; if she wasn’t, she made sure I could get to where I had to be.”
The Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club was another constant in his life, where Turner with his cousins and friends spent countless hours doing what he loved—sports.
It was his uncles and coaches at Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club who gave him the male role model he so much needed.
“For a guy who didn’t’ have what some people would say “the male model’ in the house, I did have male role models,” Turner said. “They were my uncles and the men who were coaches at the Boys and Girls Club. These men weren’t my father, but they treated me as though they were. They showed me the right way to be a man. They gave me a lot of great male influence. Today, as a coach, I treat the players in a similar way. I want to give them what was given to me by those men when I was a boy.”
Providence
Right after college, Turner worked on the AAU basketball circuit and coached numerous high school students. A good number were from the WCAC. Two in particular, Tom McCloskey and Patrick Mitchell, were students at Gonzaga. They’d say to him…‘you need to meet Coach Whitaker. Your coaching style is so similar.’ Turner says, “I wasn’t sure what they were talking about. At AAU we just preached hard work and commitment, commitment to classroom (AAU kids had to bring report cards). To me it sounded very similar to Gonzaga. We work with the whole person, a student athlete, with the emphasis on the student.”
In time, Turner was introduced to Whitaker. Turner started to follow Gonzaga basketball, attending every game he could get to.
“One day I realized I had even appeared in a poster of a game at Gonzaga against Carroll,” Turner said. “In the picture Pat Mitchell was boxing out Carroll’s Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, and I said to myself ‘I was at this game.' "
He looked at the poster, and there he was sitting in the second or third row.
“My introduction to Coach Whitaker turned into a friendship and over the years has become a lasting relationship. He has really been with me here at Gonzaga. I think we share in common our goals in terms of basketball, but even greater, we both like to work with kids. We both like to help mold young men…help young boys grow into young men. Coach Whitaker did this as Gonzaga’s Admissions Director, in the basketball program, and now as president of the Washington Jesuit Academy. WJA is helping inner-city kids so they can put themselves in a position to be able go to a good high school like Gonzaga, Georgetown Prep or DeMatha, and from there move on to college and go on to be successful in life.”
It was Whitaker who suggested he apply for jobs that opened up at Gonzaga, which led to an opportunity to be hired by Dick Myers. Replacing a legend like Myers, who had 29 years of coaching on his resume, takes some doing.
Turner is the first to admit how hard it is.
“It was definitely hard at the beginning. It is still is hard. Everyone loved Dick Myers, and he brought so much success to Gonzaga basketball. I knew I wanted to keep the program he had built, and I wanted to put my own philosophy in place. The first two years were the hardest. The first year we were knocked out right away. In the second year we were only a couple of free throws away from being in semifinals.”
Turner recalls the celebrity of Gonzaga and the PURPLE G.
“During the first two years, no one knew who I was, but if I walked around the grocery store wearing the Gonzaga jacket with the purple G on it, people would come up and want to talk to me. I literally had to stop wearing the jacket to the grocery store. My wife ended up getting all the groceries. I’d be talking to people about Gonzaga.”
To Turner the players are like his own kids.
“On January 29 in a game at home versus Carroll, I ruptured my Achilles when I sprinted up from the bench to reach Mike Hanagan who had gone down on a tough defensive play,” Turner said. “Mike had had a concussion already, and my first reaction was to think he might have hit his head again. As soon as I took off, my Achilles popped. Inside my head I heard a loud boom. I thought one of the coaches had just kicked me. When I looked back and saw the coach still sitting on the bench, I knew then I had ruptured my Achilles. I limped back to the bench and sat down.”
Turner got the cast off on March 21.
During the WCAC final game, Gonzaga was playing O’Connell and something Max Kenyi did before game impressed Turner. Kenyi (headed to Harvard), who was about to begin the biggest game in his high school career, came up to Turner and asked where his four-year old son was.
“He thought my 4-year old and my family might not make the game in time.”
At the end of that game, seeing the “sea of purple in the end zone” made Turner think of his own children.
“For my seventh grader to see that, he had to feel ‘this is something special.’ There is something special about Gonzaga,” Turner said. “My dream is to stay here to see my two young boys—one in seventh grade and a four year old—attend here. I’d like to be able to call Gonzaga home for a long time. I’d love to be able to retire from Gonzaga, and I just hope it’s in the cards.”
Passion
Steve Turner is passionate about basketball. Really passionate. He happens to excel at sports—baseball, soccer and basketball, to name only three.
At Eastern Middle School, Turner played soccer and got to see the world as the team competed in England, Ireland, Wales and Canada. How did he get into soccer? Through basketball.
“A father of a friend saw me play basketball and suggested I take up soccer,” Turner said.
In high school, he played basketball and soccer all four years at the old Blair High School on Wayne Avenue in Silver Spring. During freshman and sophomore years Turner also played baseball and still holds batting titles at the school. He also had the opportunity to play AAU basketball during high school.
His first two years of college were spent at Montgomery College, where he played basketball and then switched to soccer, to play on their nationally-ranked team. He finished up at Southern Connecticut State University, where he had intended to play soccer, but ended up in Division II basketball, serving as an unofficial grad assistant, working with men’s and women’s teams, helping day-to-day in practice and running the men’s basketball camp.
While in high school Turner started his coaching career, coaching basketball at the Silver Spring Boys Club during his junior and senior years.
Through another mentor, Rob Jackson, who coached on the AAU basketball circuit, Turner was able to coach AAU basketball right out of college in 1995. He helped Jackson with the Silver Spring Blue Devils, now the DC Blue Devils, working with the 17 and under and 10 and under boys.
From there he was asked to coach at St. Vincent Pallotti by Mike Glick, when Pallotti was still part of WCAC. Turner head coached JV basketball and assisted on varsity. The following year Turner went to Newport School in Kensington where he was the head middle school basketball coach and a varsity assistant. He was there for one year.
The next year he joined Gonzaga’s basketball coaching staff. And the rest is history.