A lot has changed in his life since he was rolling out the water bucket, folding the towels and tossing out the basketballs at practice for the University of Washington men’s team.
In the last year alone, Mike Score got a job as an assistant coach with one of the top college programs in the country. He bought a house. He got engaged. He helped coach the team into the Top 20. He works every day with arguably the finest player in college basketball.
Oh yes, and he no longer has to take his meals at McDonald’s when he goes on recruiting trips.
Life is good with the Utah Utes in Salt Lake City.
“I’m 15 minutes from the office, it’s a great city, the weather’s great, the city’s really clean, the people love their basketball,” Score said, sounding more like a Chamber of Commerce spokesman than a basketball coach.
He has to pinch himself every once in a while as a reminder that he is no longer in Iowa. That was two jobs ago, when he was an assistant at Southeastern Community College in his first coaching gig right out of the UW.
“Yeah, I laugh frequently,” the 32-year-old Everett native said recently from his new home. “I’ll be sitting here and start laughing. It’s kind of comical at some point. It’s fun. It’s not easy. You work a lot of hours. But it’s a game. At some point, you’ve got to stop and realize that.”
Hey, he could be practicing law. Which is more fun? Arguing a case in court or getting your team ready for the NCAA Tournament? He’ll take the X’s and O’s any day.
Even back when he was pulling down the nonmunificent sum of $450 a month and living in a dorm in his first coaching job, Score knew he had chosen the right profession. He worked his tail off, traveling all over the Midwest to recruit players, sometimes going into some pretty rough neighborhoods, but before he left Iowa four years later, Southeastern had won a national junior-college championship with the kids he brought in.
He didn’t have much of a recruiting budget to work with so he often stayed with friends and took many a meal at the golden arches. “I ate a lot of Value Meals,” he said.
He’s upgraded his travel style since then. And his recruiting territory has expanded considerably.
He’s the Utes’ international recruiter. And his boss says he’s done a bang-up job.
“He’s been great,” said Utah head coach Ray Giacoletti, who was an assistant under Bob Bender at the UW while Score was a student there. “He’s the ultimate worker. We’ve put him in charge of recruiting in Europe and Australia. He’s really done a good job with that.”
But Score – who earned the nickname “Scoreboard” while working for the Bender staff – has earned kudos for more than just his recruiting skills. He has also become a well-rounded coach, Giacoletti says, in “scouting opponents, understanding how to deal with kids, working with the ‘bigs.’”
One of the big men he works with might be the best player in the land – 7-foot sophomore Andrew Bogut of Australia.
“I’ve never had a player like Andrew Bogut,” Giacoletti said. “It’s very unique to have somebody like him. He has a chance to be Player of the Year in college basketball.”
Giacoletti had to do a little recruiting himself to get Mr. Bogut to remain a Ute this year. That was the first order of business when Giacoletti got the Utah job last March. Bogut had some lucrative offers to play professional basketball in Europe and Giacoletti made a quick trip to Australia to try to talk him into coming back for his sophomore season.
“Coach was in Australia less time than it took him to get there,” Score said. “We didn’t know whether he (Bogut) was coming back or not. He was feeling us out and we didn’t want to put pressure on him.”
Giacoletti must have said the magic words because Bogut returned and has been magnificent, averaging 20.7 points and 12.2 rebounds a game to power the Utes to a 27-5 record and a No. 18 ranking in the final Associated Press poll. They won the Mountain West Conference with a 13-1 record.
Just more of the same kind of accomplishments the Utes have been piling up for years. Only in the previous 15 years, they did it under the direction of Rick Majerus, who resigned after 20 games last season because of health concerns. The Utes won 323 games with Majerus at the helm and made 10 NCAA Tournament appearances.
Needless to say, a very tough act to follow. But Giacoletti and his staff have done a superb job of upholding the Utah tradition. Now they want to see if they can do something that has only been done once in school history: win an NCAA Tournament. (The Utes open tournament play against University of Texas-El Paso on Thursday in Tucson.)
Score has already known the heady feeling that goes with winning a national title. He got his five years ago at the age of 28.
Six days after Southeastern won that title, Score accepted a job as an assistant coach at Eastern Washington University. The man making the offer: the new head coach, Ray Giacoletti, who had spent the previous three years at North Dakota State.
Four years later, the Eagles qualified for the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history, an achievement that still warms the heart of Mike Score.
“It’s going to take an awfully special thing to ever top that four-year run we had at Eastern,” he said, alluding to the fact that the Eagles also went to the National Invitation Tournament the year before they went to the NCAA. “That group of seniors was unbelievable.”
Less than 24 hours after the Eagles lost in a first-round game of the NCAA Tournament, Utah was on the phone setting up an interview with Giacoletti.
When the offer was finally made, Giacoletti came into Score’s office and said, “We’re going.”
Score’s reaction: “Wow. How ‘bout that.”
From student manager to assistant coach at a major Division I school in eight years. Wow, indeed.
Bender and Giacoletti knew of Score’s desire to get into coaching and encouraged him to take the job at Southeastern. An old friend of theirs, Joe O’Brien, was the head coach.
O’Brien interviewed Score during a recruiting trip to Seattle. “He was in town recruiting Quincy Wilder,” Score recalled. “My interview was to pick up O’Brien at the airport and drive him to Quincy Wilder’s house. I sat out in the car 1 1/2 hours and then we went to dinner. A month and a half later, I had worn him out (with phone calls). I don’t know if he had a job for me or not, but he created a spot. He didn’t have any money to offer, but I didn’t care. I said we’ll figure it out.”
O’Brien put him in charge of a dorm and paid him $450 a month. The coach also gave him a meal card that had come available when he kicked a player off the team.
O’Brien gave him a car and a credit card and said the only time he could come home for a game was if he had a player with him.
“My first month in Burlington, coach O’Brien gave me a high school and college directory and said, ‘I need 10 guys by the end of the year,’” Score said. “I was thrown into the recruiting pool and it was either sink or swim. I was forced to do it or go home and I didn’t want to go home. Call it pride, call it spite, there are a lot of terms you could throw at it. I didn’t want to say I failed, so I figured it out.”
Did he ever.
His father says Mike has always been resolute. “Very much so,” Richard Score said. “He can be very focused.”
Mike used to hang out in the coaches’ offices so much that Bender and Giacoletti wondered if he ever went to class. Apparently so. He earned two degrees, one in political science, the other in business.
He considered law school, and was taking steps to get admitted when the opportunity in Iowa presented itself.
“Coach Bender told me I needed to go,” Score said.
From those humble beginnings, he has become a world traveler in pursuit of basketball talent.
Last year, he went to Spain, Finland and Australia to look at players, and a trip back to Europe is planned for this spring. “We’re trying to get involved in South America,” he said, “and China’s a (potential recruiting) spot in the next five years.”
He doesn’t have a lot of time to be a tourist but what little he does have he tries to use wisely. In Saragossa, Spain, he toured the Old Town on a hot July day. “I flew into Helsinki at 8:30 at night and it doesn’t get dark until 2 in the morning, so I drove around the city at midnight.”
Now you understand why Mike Score sometimes bursts out laughing while sitting in a room by himself.
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