Travis Mays is on the road recruiting for the University of Georgia this week. However, the majority of players he talks to won’t know who he his, at least not beyond his current title of Lady Bulldogs’ assistant basketball coach.
Not at first anyway.
“They’ve got Google and Wikipedia and YouTube and all that stuff,” said Georgia coach Andy Landers, who hired Mays in May. “They figure it out.”
It’s just a matter of time before Mays’ past is unveiled.
“They don’t have a clue at first,” said Mays, looking smallish and quite scholarly in a jacket and bow tie. “They look at me and think I’m too old and I can’t play. I joke with them and tell them, ‘your coach can play.’”
That he can. Or at least could.
Mays was a college basketball superstar at Texas — he scored 44 against Georgia in the 1990 NCAA tournament — and an NBA lottery pick. After starting his career with the Sacramento Kings, who drafted him with the 14th pick, he landed with the Hawks back in the days of Dominique Wilkins and Kevin Willis. He arrived to much fanfare in a trade for Spud Webb and some draft picks before ruptured tendons derailed his promising NBA career and exiled him to a long but productive European career.
None of which would seem to set up for Mays doing what he does now. For that we can thank his oldest daughter, Cherrell.
“I probably would have never gotten this opportunity had it not been for her,” Mays said in a recent interview in his new office at the Stegeman Coliseum practice facility. “I do believe in divine intervention, that things happen for a reason.”
It would seem divinely accidental the way Mays stumbled into his blossoming career as a women’s basketball coach. He had just retired from pro basketball and was filling his idle time in 2003 by coaching a group of AAU boys from Alabama and Tennessee when an old Texas acquaintance invited him to attend a WNBA game.
Clarissa Davis was a former All-American and National Player of the Year at Texas at the same time Mays was doing his “BMW Scoring Machine” thing with the Longhorns. Davis, as it turned out, had became the COO of the San Antonio Silver Stars, a WNBA franchise, after retiring from professional basketball herself.
Quiet innocently, Mays accepted Davis’s invitation, mainly as free entertainment for his basketball-playing, preteen daughter.
But Davis was sizing up her old friend, and after determining that Mays had no impending conflicts, she asked him if he had considered coaching women.
A week later he had a whistle around his neck.
“I’d never thought about it,” he said of coaching women. “I just wanted to coach. So I look at it as the women’s game found me.”
Eight years later, Mays has never deviated from that path. After two years with the Silver Stars, Mays was harkened home to Austin where he went to work for the legendary Jody Conradt.
“That was a no-brainer,” he said. But Conradt retired three years later and Mays was left without a job.
He was set to accept a coaching position with the Austin Toros of the NBA Development League before another women’s Hall of Fame coach came calling — Van Chancellor at LSU.
For those keeping count that’s three jobs and zero resumes mailed out.
“I think your body of work sometimes speaks for itself and you end up on people’s short list,” Mays said. “I think that’s the way it’s done. You can fan out a bunch of resumes but coaches I think by and large hire on the recommendations of people they know and trust.”
That’s the way Mays got on Landers’ radar.
Once again, Mays found himself out of work when Chancellor was forced to retire at LSU. He was interviewed for the Lady Tigers’ head coaching job — he also was a finalist for the head job at Houston — but lost out to former UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell. Again, he wasn’t unemployed long.
“During the summer periods, we’re all together at all these events, all the coaches are together at the same gyms at the same times,” Landers said. “Early on I thought that Travis handled himself very well. His demeanor in and out of the gym, his rapport with other people, he was impressive. And then I met him and got to know him better once he got to LSU and realized it went past the way he carried himself. The way he communicates and the knowledge he has of women’s basketball and recruiting and coaching. He’s just an impressive person.”
Mays and Landers formed a quick bond. They both represent a minority in their chosen arena.
According to Betty Jaynes, an Atlantan and former executive director of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association in Lilburn, men represent about 30 percent of the head coaches in women’s college basketball.
That, Mays said, comes with some basic realities.
“You need to understand you’re coaching women and not men,” Mays said with a laugh. “They don’t forget anything. If it’s a man, you can yell at him and scream at him to try to get the best out of him. Once it’s done and that period is over, it’s kind of forgotten about. Young ladies will remember the week after, maybe the month after, and they don’t let you forget it.”
For the most part, though, he said coaching is coaching.
“The thing that makes it great is this is where Travis wants to be,” Landers said. “He doesn’t want to be on the men’s side. He’s expressed absolutely no interest in that in the talks we’ve had. He’s where he wants to be, doing what he wants to do, with whom he wants to do it.”
Mays now has a 4-year-old boy named Trevor and is a long way from where he thought he would be when he took a little girl to a basketball game eight years ago. That little girl, by the way, is now a 19-year-old college freshman at Texas.
“My daughter is one of the reasons I coach as hard as I do and the way I do,” Mays said. “Because I know I’m going to put my daughter in the hands of someone else. So each one of these players I coach, I treat them as if they’re my daughter.
“I tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. I give them words of advice and I always let them know this is coming from a male’s perspective, a father’s perspective and a coach’s perspective third, in that order.”
And if that doesn’t work, he can always turn to YouTube.
“When they realize what you’ve done, now you have their ear,” Mays said, grinning. “They see that you played against Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, all the sudden they start to believe. ‘OK, OK, maybe he does know what he’s talking about.’ Any avenue you can use to open up their ears is good.”
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