Hey, if you’re familiar with my Dad Frederick Aura (AKA Coach Fed), you may also know a little about me. Because of my Dad, I grew up playing and loving basketball. Youth ball, high school ball, college ball at Providence, an NBA career of sorts, and becoming an assistant coach, first for Dad at Cal Poly and then at Ole Miss. All this gave me the name recognition that led to Grambling State University contacting me about coaching there. We had some extended conversations. They want to get a coach who can turn the program around (and wouldn't cost them TOO much). I was upfront about being excited by the challenge but told them I'd be looking at this as a starting point for me as a college head coach. So my intent would be to get the program successful (i.e., getting to a point where it was winning more games than it was losing and was on solid ground to continue to do so in the future), but would be likely to move on at that point. They were agreeable, so to many peoples’ surprise (mine included) I’m now the head coach of the Grambling Tigers at the age of 31.
Yeah, it’s young to be a Division 1 head coach, but Grambling’s basketball program has historically been pretty bad. Sports-wise, football definitely is much more associated with Grambling than basketball. Willis Reed is probably the most well-known basketball player who played for the Tigers, but he played in the 1960’s and today’s recruits know nothing about him. The next 2 best players coming out of Grambling: Jimmy Jones (1968) and Bob Hopkins (1957). I guess that sort of reveals that basketball at Grambling has long been on hard times.
But I’m excited to be here. Hey, Grambling is one of the best-known HBCU’s. My salary is good, at least it is for living in Grambling, Louisiana. I’d never lived in the South until going to Oxford, Mississippi as an assistant coach at Ole Miss, but I’ve got used to the weather and like living down here. I didn’t grow up eating much soul food, but I’ve become an aficionado. The population of Grambling is a little over 5000 of which 84% are black. So this is the first place I’ve ever lived where I’m part of the majority racially (since even Oxford, MS was under 30% black). Homes and rent are cheap. Medium household annual income is less than $30K, so my salary will edge that up some. Grambling is a nice, very small town…quiet and a place where you can get to know people real fast.
And the basketball team? Well it’s a team, but that’s about where it ends. There definitely are no stars on it. No big scorers or strong rebounders and when I talked about defense, I think I saw some players looking around wondering where d’ fence WAS. So it’s not surprising our basketball prestige level is almost nonexistent (4) and even worse than the Southwest Athletic Conference’s overall low prestige level (7). By the time I got here, it was too late to pick up any transfer players. Therefore we have to go this first season with the group the old coach left me with. So it’s up to me and my assistants to improve their skills and teamwork. I like my assistant coaches, but there’s a reason they’re coaching for poverty salaries: their skill levels are…how should I say this?...minimal at best. Even at their low salary levels, our remaining budget for recruiting is miniscule and we need money to go after 3 recruits this year who can upgrade our team. So I’m going to skimp on our training, amenities and wellness budget…and hope it doesn’t bite us in the butt before I can pump it up in upcoming years.
But hell, I’m not complaining. You have to start someplace…and Grambling is my beginning of what I hope will be a successful head coaching career.
After looking over our roster and assessing their skills and how they played by looking at a lot of game vids from last season, I asked our AD to try to schedule weak pre-conference opponents to give us a chance to have some level of success and begin building our guys confidence. The AD did a great job of doing exactly that. Now it’s up to me and the team to come up with ways to win as many of those games as possible.
