Crimson and Gold Connection; Lane Lord

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. Glad that you could join me this week for the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89-9-KRPS. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro. This week I'm joined by the head coach at the Women's Basketball team-hated Pittsburgh State University, Lane Lord. Thank you for joining me this week, Coach Lord. Well, glad to be with you and we're both surviving this weather. Earlier this year, you celebrated 10 years here at Pittsburgh State University. The Women's Basketball team here at Pittsburgh State over the last decade has had a lot of success since the arrival of Coach Lord in 2007, including breaking the University's record for a win in a season twice now at 29. And for the number of consecutive wins with 15. Both those were set in 2016 with so much success here at Pittsburgh State and prior to your hire, when you were coaching in high school and community colleges, hearing Kansas, what keeps you motivated? It's all about the kids and I think that has to be your focus. She really enjoy working with people, helping them become better people. All the things that sports brings to the life setting is why I'm in this business.

So the roots of coaching really started early with you. I had a great high school coach. I grew up in Waco, Texas and came to Kansas to go to college, but I knew probably back my freshman sophomore year at high school. He was such a great mentor to me, my basketball coach, that I wanted to do with the things that he taught me. And who was that? His name was Ken Hawley. He's still in some Texas. He's retired now. So the coaching roots were really early with you in your early 20s. You came to Kansas and you had a great experience in Wichita. And now you've been here for 10 years at Pitt State coaching. If somebody told you 20 years ago, you're going to be at a state university coaching an incredible basketball, women's basketball coach. What do you think? What do you think you would have said to them? And now the kind of success that you've had here. I never thought I'd be coaching women's basketball. I always thought I'd be a head football coach, but the game really fell in love with the women's game. It's such a different game than the men's game. It's just different, but it's still basketball.

But it just kind of evolved to this point where we had a lot of success at the high school level. And 21, 22 players go on and play college basketball. And I was at that point in my career where I had decided, am I going to be a, I got my master's to be a principal. And I had to decide, do I go be a principal or go try to make the college job and Barton County Community College gave me that opportunity to get the college experience. We had great success there as well. And that, you know, parlayed into this job. And this is a dream job for me. It's the best conference in the country and NCAA division two. You get to coach against unbelievable coaches every night. Great talent. As Coach Anderson says, we call this D1 and a half. I mean, the level is so good. We can beat most of the, in the women's basketball, the low to mid major schools, where we're just as talented. And what makes this special, this place here in Pittsburgh is the community. You know, there'll be two, three thousand people at a women's basketball game. And you just can't get that around the country, even at the division one level, unless you're at the highest BCS level.

So we're very fortunate here. Our fans and our community, what they do for our women's basketball team is just, you know, we never want to take that for granted because it's just a special place. So for somebody that maybe watches men's basketball TV, they've come into a pit state men's game. What are some of the fundamental differences between the women's and the men's game? Well, we can't, you know, we don't dunk. So that's the number one thing. For us, the motivating parts of the game are taking a charge or making a big three pointer. The biggest differences is, you know, the rules are a little bit different from the men's game. Number one, we play four quarters. The men play two halves, which allows you for different situations in a game. You have more, you know, you have more chances for an end of the quarter, end of the game situation in the men's game is just to happen in the end of the game where we've got quarter at the end of each quarter. And then, you know, the 10 second rule as in women's basketball was different from men's that that is now even doubt the shot clock is different.

We play with 30 second shot clock. The men was at 35 seconds. I think the biggest difference is is I think the women's game is more like the men's game was 30 years ago. There's more passing. There's more because we don't have the dumps. We don't have the athletic players like the men's side does, but I think it's a clean game. It's a fun game. It's a pure game. And it's really fun to coach. Sounds like there's more strategy overall. I think there is a lot of strategy. I think the coaching. I mean, there's great coaches on the men's side as well, but I think on the women's side, there's a lot more strategy. During the off season over the women's basketball schedule, you also run basketball camps here at Pitt State. Children entering the third grade can attend the camps all the way through young women in high school. How did the establishment of those camps take place here at Pitt State and what are the emphasize? Well, we're trying to grow the game through the youth. And, you know, we feel like if, you know, when we start them off in these third through eighth grade camps, if they enjoy their experience, I can't. You know, it's going to they're going to come to our games. Number one, and that's the developed that community relation, but number two also.

They get to be around these young women on our team that are great students, great athletes. We had a team GPA of 3.7 last year, which is unheard of, but we've got really good role models for these young gals. And I believe that, you know, that that helps those young kids. It helps our players. And it helps our crowds. And then we also run what we call a team camp for high school players. And that's our number one recruiter. So we have 13 players on our team this year, 12 played in our, our high school team camps. So instead of going all around the country, watching the EU and doing all that, we get to recruit right from our own, our own gym per se. We had 149 high schools at our team camp last year. That's the largest team camp in the United States, division one, division two. And they're all right here in Pittsburgh, Kansas. So you've taken recruiting and turned it on its head. They come to you. That's right. What a great idea. We're very fortunate. We have the facilities. We can run four gyms here at the weed. We call it the Garfield weed gymnasium here. We have a rec center that we have four gyms in and then our community.

We use Pittsburgh high school, front and back high school. Pittsburgh cold in high school. We use all the gyms in the town. And when schools get here, we run a shuttle service. We get everybody from gym to gym and back to the dorms. They stay the night in our dorms. So that helps our dorms. It helps our, so ducks are our food service people. And it's just kind of like a little business. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. It's a lot of fun, but really for us, it's for Coach David and my system has been with me all 11 years and Addy are other assistant. It's, it's the lifeline of our program because this is, it's all about recruiting. And you know, if there's 150 high schools, you figure eight to 10 players for team. So you're looking over 1,500 kids. If I can't find five kids a year or four kids a year, then I'm not doing my job. And so this is the biggest recruiter we have. It's grown from 16 teams in year one nine years ago to 150 teams now. This week on the Crimson and Gold connection. I've been speaking with Lane Lord, head coach of the Women's Basketball team and here at Pittsburgh State University.

Thank you coach Lord for joining me this week. I had a blast and I hope we can do it again soon. For Crimson and Gold connection Wednesdays at 850 and Fridays at 350.