Despite the boatload of spot-up jumpers Tommy Lloyd sprayed across the Pacific Northwest, including one 52-point outburst for Walla Walla Community College, shooting the basketball has actually proven just a small part of his game.
For the product of a blue-collar upbringing in Kelso, Washington, basketball has been more of a conduit, spun around the globe, to lifelong friendships, to family, to leadership and, now, to being Arizona’s new head coach.
“My playing story, this will be really quick,” Lloyd said Thursday, after he was introduced in a news conference at McKale Center. “Small town high school basketball. Had some success…”
It took less than two minutes for Lloyd to finish.
New Arizona basketball coach Tommy Lloyd sat down with the Star to discuss why he believes he's the right guy for Arizona, his plans for the roster and more.
He developed a love for the game while playing with his older brother and his friends around Kelso. Lloyd played five years under coach Jeff Reinland — the first three at Kelso High School and two more at Walla Walla CC, where Lloyd drew his first attention from what was then a relatively obscure program at Gonzaga.
“I played pretty good (at Walla Walla) my first year,” Lloyd said. “Had some low, low-level D-I interest, including Gonzaga. And they ended up taking a better player.”
The Zags took him later, of course, but we’ll get back to that.
Lloyd instead went off to Southern Colorado (now CSU Pueblo) for his junior season to play under one of Reinland’s former coaches, then headed back to Walla Walla to finish his degree at Whitman College.
He figured that was it pretty much it for basketball. Except it wasn’t.
Lloyd just didn’t know it right away.
“It didn’t work. I didn’t play great,” Lloyd said of his Southern Colorado experience. “I learned a lot. I met my wife. Transferred back to Whitman, so things were meant to be, right? At the time I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll be a doctor. Whitman’s a great academic school.’
“So I rolled my sleeves up, majored in biology, figured out how much smarter all those other kids were than me and said, ‘I probably I can’t cure cancer. I’m going to coach.’”
Reinland saw it coming, since the days Lloyd had become a savvy, hard-working star and leader for his Kelso High School teams, a player he wisely recruited to follow him to Walla Walla.
“He was super-dedicated player,” said Reinland, who is now in his 27th year as Walla Walla’s head coach. “Whatever he lacked in athletic ability, he really made up for with intensity and hard work. Never scored under 20 a game. Very good basketball player, very high IQ. Very stubborn player, very hard nosed. Very good catch-and-shoot guy. I think Tommy could get a shot off against anybody.”
Along the way, Reinland also noticed how Lloyd studied the game, not only on how to elude defenders himself, but also on how to make his teammates better.
Reinland began to see a coach develop before his eyes, and in his ears.
“After a game we lost, I was coming down the stairs, and I heard this guy chewing the team out,” Reinland said. “It sounded just like me and I had this weird out-of-body thing. It was like, ‘That can’t be me. I’m standing out here.’
“It was Tommy. He was saying the exact things I was going to be saying.”
By the time Lloyd realized that coaching was his future, plodding through those biology classes at Whitman, he darted off to Germany for semi-pro ball. Back in Washington, Reinland called then-Gonzaga coach Dan Monson.
Reinland and Monson had already had a long history, their mothers having grown up together in small-town Pomeroy, Washington. Dan’s father, Don, had once considered recruiting Reinland while he was the head coach at Idaho.
Reinland and Dan Monson grew closer during the recruitment of a Walla Walla center named Jeremy Eason, who went on to become the starting center for Gonzaga’s breakthrough 1999 Elite Eight team.
“He really helped me with not only finding Jeremy but to help get him eligible,” said Dan Monson, now the coach at Long Beach State.
“So to kind of return the favor he said, ‘Hey, can you help this kid get into coaching? Can he be a graduate assistant for you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’”
The only problem was Lloyd was playing professionally in Germany at the time. He told Monson he was having too much fun playing the game and making connections. Monson told him that there was a spot waiting at Gonzaga whenever he returned home.
By then, Lloyd already had a well-established thirst for international cultures. His older brother had been an exchange student in Sweden while their parents, Dale and Jackie, decided to reciprocate over and over by hosting other students.
Tommy Lloyd didn’t become an exchange student himself — not with Reinland asking him to stay and keep playing for Kelso High — but the ones Dale and Jackie hosted taught Lloyd about other cultures.
Lloyd learned more first-hand after friends helped him find what he called “low, low-level semi-pro” playing opportunities in Australia and Germany.
When Lloyd finished playing in Germany, he and his wife, Chanelle, secured a pair of round-the-world tickets and took off for six months.
“We were living in a backpack,” Lloyd said. “We were doing the ol’ Europe-on-$40-a-day trip.”
When the money ran out, connections helped that, too. Nearly broke, the Lloyds landed in Brisbane, Australia, and ran into some friends who owned a hotel. Their managers had just quit on them and they needed help.
Tommy and Chanelle stayed for about a month.
“We ran the hotel and literally it was awesome,” Lloyd said. “I mean, I had no idea how to run a hotel and hospitality, but I’m checking people in, I’m making poached eggs, taking breakfast (orders), I’m the bartender at night. It was an awesome adventure.”
They never lost touch. The Lloyds’ Aussie friends purchased last-minute tickets to fly all the way to Phoenix to watch the 2017 Final Four, another pinnacle Gonzaga had reached thanks to the years Lloyd had put in under head coach Mark Few.
That part of Lloyd’s story is pretty well-documented: The assistant coach turned his understanding of international culture into a recruiting niche, helping the Zags make up for their lack of backyard talent by annually pulling in talent such as Rui Hachimura (Japan) and Domantas Sabonis (Lithuania) from all corners of the globe.
Along the way, Lloyd gained player development and talent evaluation skills that have drawn praise.
“The culture hasn’t changed in that program, the development of the players hasn’t changed,” Monson says. “It’s just they’re starting with a different caliber of player, and a lot of that is due to Tommy. There’s been a lot of good coaches at Gonzaga and a lot of good evaluators but Tommy’s as good as any of them.”
Funny thing is, Monson never actually did work with Lloyd. After Gonzaga’s 1998-99 run, Monson was hired away by Minnesota, and spent seven-plus seasons with the Golden Gophers before landing at Long Beach State.
Monson kept open the door for Lloyd on his way out, however, asking Few if he could honor a promise to the aspiring coach Reinland had recommended a year earlier.
Not knowing Lloyd personally, but owing Reinland that favor, Monson offered a sales pitch,
“Reinland was a real Christian kid,” Monson said. “So I said (of Lloyd), ‘He’s a nice Christian kid and he won’t cause you any problems and I know he comes from good family’ and all that.
“I got a call from Mark about Tommy two weeks later. He said, ‘This guy’s good. He’s gonna be good. He’s got a lot of contacts overseas. He’s a real go-getter. But I’m not so sure about that Christian thing.’”
Monson asked what Few meant.
“Well, every other word out of his mouth is not so Christian,” Few said, according to Monson.
Monson chuckled. Few couldn’t be reached for this story, but Monson said Gonzaga staffers still joke that “We’re not too sure Coach Monson’s evaluation was good.”
Over time, Monson and Lloyd grew to share a few laughs, too. Monson has remained connected to Gonzaga since he left, and was even invited to join the company of former Gonzaga players at the 2017 Final Four despite the fact that he was at Long Beach State.
Few insisted Monson bring along his kids, too.
“I said, ‘Mark, my kids weren’t born when I was at Gonzaga,’” Monson said. “He said, ‘Well, they’re born into this family.’ That shows you why I know Tommy so well, because we’ve been part of the same family for 22 years.
“That’s how Mark has run it and I know that’s how Tommy feels. I’d do anything for Tommy Lloyd. When I brought him into that program I didn’t know much about him, but it was that family connection…. We laugh because it was kind of fate. (Reinland) helps us with a player, our moms know each other and we looked at Tommy a little bit as a player.”
Gonzaga made another Final Four this spring, going undefeated until losing to Baylor in the national championship game.
Lloyd, again, had been an instrumental part of it all. He had even been contractually named the next Gonzaga head coach if Few ever left, until Arizona hired him away on Wednesday.
That was when it became time for Lloyd to build a new basketball family around his own.
Tommy Lloyd’s wife Chanelle, left, daughters Maria Alexis, Sophia Marie and son Liam listen to a question during Thursday’s news conference. Liam plays basketball at Grand Canyon.
While Lloyd said Thursday he wanted to united all eras of Arizona basketball into “one great program” during his McKale introduction, his family sat in front of him at McKale Center.
Chanelle and their two daughters are moving with him to Tucson, while son Liam will continue as a player at Grand Canyon.
“I want him to have his own experiences,” Tommy Lloyd said.
“I think that’s super important, rather than being under my wing. And who knows what happens in the future? Maybe, hopefully, he’s able to go play in Europe and have some good life experiences and if I’m still coaching maybe he can come and help me out.
“But I’ve always wanted him to do his own thing. Develop his own path.”
Just like Tommy Lloyd did, with an assist from the game he loves.
