Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Newly minted Salt Lake City Stars coach Steve Wojciechowski has got quite the basketball resume:
- All-American
- National Defensive Player of the Year
- Duke assistant coach
- Assistant coach for Team USA's Olympic gold medal runs in 2008 and 2012
- Head coach at Marquette
Yet, what may have been the most crucial part to his journey is something most people wouldn't even consider noteworthy.
"I spent two years out of it, if you don't count the seventh- and eighth-grade teams I coached in Park City," Wojciechowski said. "I do."
Whatever success he has with the Stars or beyond, he will be able to point to those "off" years coaching his kids in the mountains above the Salt Lake City Valley.
So why Park City?
Wojciechowski has been coming to Utah for decades after marrying his wife Lindsay, who is a native of Salt Lake City; he and Lindsay even got married at Deer Valley. So when the COVID pandemic hit and he wasn't even allowed on the Marquette campus, the family opted to get a second home in Park City — a second home that turned into a more permanent one when Wojciechowski was fired at Marquette following the 2020-21 season.
"If you were to have asked me four or five years ago, I would have told you that being fired was one of the worst things that could have happened to me, professionally," he said. "But as I sit here today, it's one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it's given me a different perspective."
It's a perspective that a bunch of middle school-aged kids helped him reach.
Wojciechowski knows he doesn't necessarily look the part of a former college basketball star.
"When I walk in the room, it's not like, 'Oh yeah, that guy played basketball at Duke and was an All-American and a National Defensive Player of the Year.' No one says that. They hand me their keys and tell me to park their car," he said.
As he explains it, the game of basketball didn't choose him; he chose it.
He was a 5-foot-11 guard with a limited vertical, which is not exactly the prototype for success in a game dominated by athletic giants. Yet he earned All-American honors anyway and garnered fame with his tendency to hustle back on defense, clap his hands and then crouch and slap the floor.
"I fell in love with the game. The game didn't fall in love with me," he said "And I found joy in the game as a young person. If I'm completely transparent and honest, at the end of my coaching journey, I lost that."
There are many reasons that happened — expectations, the business side of the game, etc. — but he found that old joy again in middle school gyms in the mountains of Utah as he coached his sons Jack and Charlie and their teams.
"Coaching my kids is the joy, and sometimes in college that can be robbed," an emotional Wojciechowski said. "So to see the game through my kids' eyes again, and their friends' eyes, that was awesome. One of the things I promised my kids is that when I got back into coaching, there was always going to be joy to it. Because that's why I fell in love with the game."
He is back in coaching now — leaving the Park City youth for a professional team down Parley's Canyon — with the same joy he had as a kid, but a new perspective. And he thinks that will help him be the best coach he can be for the Stars.
"Development is not just physical and skills. Development of a player is physical, emotional and mental," he said. "And the last two years … a lot of the things that these players are going to be going through I've lived it."
