Kevin Young struggled through numerous low-paying basketball jobs while also working various side gigs to make ends meet before he believed he had finally established himself as a head coach in the NBA’s developmental league in 2011.
But Young’s team was performing poorly, and he had a bad feeling. Sure enough, the Iowa Energy fired him when his wife was five months pregnant with their first child, signaling a low point in his coaching career.
Later that year, Young lined up another coaching job in Delaware. He arrived ahead of his family, and two kind Latter-day Saint missionaries helped him carry his belongings into a smelly, third-floor apartment. He knew his wife, Melissa, wouldn’t like it, and sure enough, he was in Nebraska on a road trip when she called him in tears.
Gratefully, circumstances eventually improved.
“Moving to Delaware really strengthened our marriage,” said Young, who added that the job was also instrumental in his career path. “This is a long story, because there’s so many tentacles to it, but that Iowa [firing] was a pivotal time for us.”
Those two memorable experiences were among many that Young talked about as part of his coaching journey that finally led him to the NBA, where he became the league’s highest-paid assistant, coached in the NBA finals and an All-Star Game.
At a time when some predicted he might soon be offered an NBA head coaching position, Young decided to leave his job as the Phoenix Sun’s associate head coach to become the new men’s basketball coach at Brigham Young University. He feels that is what the Lord wants for him and his family.
“A lot of a lot of things have lined up for us where we’ve had to just rely on the Lord’s timing for our family,” Young said. “He’s never really, never really let us down. Honestly, that’s how this thing happened.”
Kevin and Melissa Young, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, reflected on the series of faith-building experiences that guided them to BYU in an lengthy April 22 Deseret News article.
“We can give the NBA up,” Melissa Young told her husband when he was considering BYU’s offer. “We can. We can give up the fun, the cool — it is cool, it’s fun, it’s exciting — but we can give it up for our family. We are meant to be at BYU, for whatever reason, and we need to step into that role. We need to have faith that we can rise up to that occasion and whatever we need to do, and we need to do it.”
Read the entire article at Deseret.com.
