Butler coach Chris Holtmann embraces tough decisions, tough jobs

INDIANAPOLIS — Slowly, painfully, the five minutes passed in silence.

Chris Holtmann stood in front of his Gardner-Webb team, more than three years into his tenure there, the words stubbornly refusing to leave his lips.

"I got tongue-tied," Holtmann says now. "You talk about an awkward silence."

Eventually, the news came out. Holtmann was leaving his head coaching gig at Gardner-Webb to become an assistant coach at Butler, an unusual move in anyone's coaching trajectory. But Butler's Butler, Holtmann thought, and the Bulldogs were heading into the first season in the Big East.

He'd met with then-brand-new Butler head coach Brandon Miller over a late-night meal after a summer recruiting event, where the possibility had emerged — a possibility that was quite surprising.

"I had pulled out of another head coaching job a couple of weeks earlier and said, 'I'm set, I'm not going to leave Gardner-Webb,' " Holtmann says. "It was a massive rebuilding situation. We were kind of able to get it turned quicker than I thought, but I wanted to see that thing through with our best team coming back. But Butler's Butler. It was the hardest professional decision of my life. … You really invest in a place."

The place invests in you, too, which is why Gardner-Webb athletic director Chuck Burch remains close to Holtmann to this day. That's also why there were those five minutes of choked-up silence.

"That illustrated what a difficult decision that was," Burch says. "I know for him to leave them, it was a hard thing to do."

Holtmann felt it was also the right thing to do, at least in terms of career advancement. He wanted to be a head coach in a power conference someday. He viewed an assistant coaching position within the Big East as the pathway to that.

He just didn't know how quickly that opportunity would come.

On Oct. 2, after its first full season in the Big East, Butler announced that Miller was taking a leave of absence for medical reasons. Mere weeks before the start of this season, Holtmann was thrust into the head coaching role — with an interim tag. But if anyone was prepared to handle a challenging and unexpected situation like that, it's Holtmann.

***

That's what life is like among the lowest rungs of the college coaching ladder, at least when you're starting out. Every coach with a path as winding and uncertain as Holtmann's has a similar story.

His begins at his alma mater, Taylor University, an NAIA school. He'd wanted so badly to get into coaching, and for his former coach and NAIA Hall of Famer Paul Patterson. Holtmann says he made less than $20,000 a year.

"In order for me to get that job I had to be a hall director, we called them mods — they were trailers,' Holtmann says. "I lived in a trailer right by the gym, ate at the cafeteria. I had to go to RA meetings that I had no interest in. Everybody there knew I had no interest in it. … I'd sit there and literally diagram plays during our meetings."

That bothered one of his fellow hall directors at the time, who took her job quite seriously, "which was bizarre to me," Holtmann says. "All these people were really passionate about student development. They would look at me like, 'What are you doing here?' It was my break. I'm thankful that, I'm sure things happened in the trailers, but nothing that would embarrass me at too high a level.

"After one year of being the world's worst hall director, they found another job for me."

He laughs. His wife was that other hall director. Without that side job, he'd have likely never met her.

From 1999 to 2010, Holtmann's assistant coaching career took him from Taylor (NAIA), to Gardner-Webb (Big South) and eventually to Ohio University (MAC).

What Holtmann remembers most about his early years as an assistant are the terrible diet, racing to and from graduate school classes at Ball State and endless nights on the road recruiting. Even later in his career at Ohio University, where he coached under former Taylor teammate John Groce, the two spent countless hours through the pitch-black night to and from recruits' homes. One night, on a particularly sleepy drive from Chatham, Va., back to Athens, Ohio, only one thing kept Holtmann awake. "(Groce) sang all of Michael Jackson's greatest hits," Holtmann says, laughing.

"There are all different ways to get to those head coaching positions at the Division I level," says Charleston Southern coach Barclay Radebaugh, who coached against Holtmann in the Big South.

"It is really nice to see the guys who have come up the hard way. Being a GA, then a lower-level assistant, not making any money, having to drive your own car recruiting, stay at bad hotels, eat fast food. The guys who come up that way are able to learn every aspect of the program. You have so many responsibilities. When you're an assistant at a lower level school, mid-major, you're not just a recruiter. You're not just an assistant coach. You're often the equipment manager, the travel manager, the academic liaison.

"You wear so many different hats at the lower level. It's given Chris an understanding of how to run a total program. He has a good understanding of the academic part, the budget part, the different aspects of being a Division I head coach at that level. It also teaches you the value of the people who now work with (you)."

When Gardner-Webb was in the market for a new head coach in 2010, Burch knew he'd interview multiple candidates. But he also knew he had a certain former assistant in mind — Holtmann. "We knew we had a measuring stick we could compare everybody to," Burch says.

Still, Holtmann was subjected to the same scrutiny and interview process as everyone else — and that's where he blew everyone away. Burch remembers, quite vividly, Holtmann's meeting with the players during his interview.

"Ohio University had just beaten (then-No. 3 seed) Georgetown, and he did the scout for that game," Burch says. "He came in and he brought the sheet of the scouting report for Georgetown and he threw it up on the wall and said, 'This is what we were doing.' That got all the kids' attention quickly. Then he told them his plan, vision for the program."

During three seasons at Gardner-Webb, Holtmann turned around a struggling program that won just eight games the year before he got there. By his third season, Gardner-Webb went 21-13, finished second overall in the Big South and earned Holtmann the Big South Coach of the Year award.

Then came Miller's offer, and an agonizing decision. Then, Holtmann moved to Butler.

***

A little more than a year had passed by the time Holtmann was asked to take the reins of the program on the heels of Miller's sudden absence. Miller has not been heard from publicly since, and Butler athletic director Barry Collier has been consistently evasive when asked if he expects Miller to return.

"It was sudden for all of us," Holtmann says. "We had some indication that maybe he wasn't doing great, but not for an extended period of time. We were surprised when he asked for a leave of absence. It was a surprise to our staff, our guys, all of us. Even though we knew he was struggling a little bit, it was still a shock. I think most people who know Brandon know he loves to coach and loves Butler. It was a shock."

Holtmann says his contact with Miller since Miller left has been "somewhat limited." Players have remained concerned since hearing the news in early October.

"I'm hopeful that he's improving, but I don't know if that's the case one way or another," Holtmann says.

Says senior guard Alex Barlow: "Obviously, he's going through something tough. We want him to get better. That was the first thought in everybody's minds. 'Is he going to be OK? Is he going to beat whatever he's going through?' "

Quickly, though, the Butler players adapted. They admired that their new coach — old coach, really, because they already knew him for a year — had had success as a head coach before. They'd been through transitions before and would get through another, from Brad Stevens to Miller to Holtmann, from the Horizon League to the Atlantic 10 to the Big East. Holtmann says recruiting hasn't suffered, despite the uncertainty that comes along with his interim label.

"I try not to think too long-term about the implications of everything because that puts too much pressure on our staff," he says.

"I do feel like a huge responsibility to be a very good steward of the program right now. I feel that sense of responsibility because I'm close with guys who coached here in the past. I'm close with guys who played here. I feel an obligation to them to do it as well as we can and hopefully make them proud. That's probably my strongest feeling. To think too much more long-term, it'd be too pressure-packed. I'm not saying I won't go down that road at times, but I try not to."

Basketball-wise, there were small tweaks. During the team's first few practices this fall, he and the staff filmed players' reactions to bad calls and turnovers.

"You don't realize it as a player, 'Hey, you kind of hang your head a bit, you kind of get mad,' " Barlow says. By practice 5, 6, 7, you have guys picking each other up. 'Let's move on. Dont worry about that.' That's something I'd never thought of until he showed it to us. Then it's like, 'Hey, that's really good.' You can show your players instead of telling them, stop reacting that way, stop pouting."

The Bulldogs bought in, and are now off to a surprising 8-1 start, which includes a win against then-No. 6 North Carolina in the Bahamas. That's no shock to those who know Holtmann and his coaching best. Burch says he saw the roots of that upset back in the Gardner-Webb days, when Holtmann's teams would hang tough in guarantee games against high-major programs. Radebaugh saw a lot of similarities, as he watched that game with his players on a bus on their way to a Thanksgiving tournament game.

"It was a lot of fun watching Butler play because it looked like the old Gardner-Webb teams," Radebaugh says. "The hallmark of Chris's teams was their physical and mental toughness. Butler exhibited tremendous physical and mental toughness against a talented North Carolina team. The second thing we quickly noticed was how well they executed. Butler executed its game plan perfectly.

"The third thing that was very familiar was Chris's calmness on the sideline. As usual, Chris was very poised. He's a great tactician because he's able to keep himself poised. That's something that not all coaches can do.

"It's a lot of fun for us in the Big South to see one of our guys who came through the Big South be successful at that high-major level. … I'm really happy for him and really proud of him."