"Relentless" Lutz drives Cowboy Basketball forward

This story first appeared in the August 2024 edition of POSSE Magazine.

Steve Lutz was a high school freshman the first time he chose basketball.

Growing up on the east side of San Antonio, the youngest of six kids in a Catholic family, he had played every sport. Track. Baseball. Basketball. Competition was his favorite thing so he kept doing it all.

But one spring day while playing baseball for San Antonio East Central High School, he hit a shot to left field. He was going to leg it out for at least a double, but as he rounded first, his cleat got stuck.

He was wearing interchangeable cleats – metal one day, plastic the next – that screwed in and out.

"Well, like any other 15-year-old kid," Lutz said, "I probably didn't do it correctly."

His cleat stuck, but his foot kept moving. His ankle broke. Several months later, after missing the summer AAU basketball season and falling behind his teammates, Lutz realized he didn't want any other sport to get in the way of basketball. He was done with baseball.

Never mind that he was better at baseball. Or that his dad had played some summer pro baseball and had a heart for the sport.

"My dad was so mad at me," Lutz said, "he didn't talk to me for like two weeks."

The new Oklahoma State men's basketball coach chuckled as he sat, arm slung across the back of a couch, in his Gallagher-Iba Arena office talking with me one afternoon this summer.

"Baseball's so slow, right?" Lutz said. "I was a pitcher, I was third base, I was a catcher, but what do you get on third base? You get three balls a game?"

"Maybe," I responded.

(Something you learn quickly about Lutz is that when he asks questions, they often aren't rhetorical.)

"It was just too slow for me," Lutz continued. "I just got bored."

That broken ankle caused an epiphany: Lutz didn't want to spend any more time on something he didn't love nearly as much as basketball.

It wouldn't be the last time he chose the sport.

As Lutz prepares for his first season as the Cowboys head coach – and his first as a Power Four head coach – he faces a daunting task. Rebuild a once-proud program that has just one NCAA Tournament win in nine years. Retool a roster that returns only three players. Reengage a fan base that has largely deserted Gallagher-Iba Arena, leaving it more reserved than rowdy. And do it all in a conference widely regarded as college basketball's toughest.

No pressure.

Lutz is undaunted.

"First thing is, it's happened in the past," he said. "The best predictor of the future is the past, right? So you've just got to figure out a way to emulate a little bit of what Coach (Eddie) Sutton did, right?"

"Sure," I agree.

"And how did Coach Sutton do it?" Lutz said. "He had some really good players, but he also had some guys that were tough and would fight you and they played really good defense, and they played the right way."

That's how Lutz plans to do it, too, though his philosophies for how to play really good defense and really good offense are different than Eddie Sutton's. But the toughness and the teamwork that Sutton's squads had? Those are non-negotiable for Lutz.

He wants guys who want to succeed above all else, and they'll give the effort it takes to get there. That, after all, is what Steve Lutz has always done.

OTHER DUTIES AS ASSIGNED

The second time Steve Lutz chose basketball he was majoring in business at Texas Lutheran, a small private university in Seguin, just outside San Antonio.

He'd had a solid career at San Antonio East Central High School, but recruiters weren't all that interested.

Lutz couldn't understand why.

"I think that I've been overlooked, right?" he remembered with a wry smile.

He decided to show all those recruiters how wrong they'd been by going to Ranger Junior College. Instead, he quickly realized he was the one who'd been wrong.

He couldn't keep up athletically or physically.

"I was lucky Texas Lutheran still had a scholarship," he said.

Lutz joined the team and enrolled in the business school, thinking he'd eventually go into sales. You needed to be competitive and able to build relationships, two things he leaned into.

But after his first accounting class, his adviser called Lutz to his office.

"Hey, Steve, I know you worked at this pretty hard," Lutz remembers the adviser saying.

It was true: Lutz had studied and worked and gotten tutoring. But he only managed a C.

"And you understand that there's managerial, there's strategic …" the adviser said, rattling off a long list of more advanced accounting classes that Lutz would have to take. "There's like five more that are twice as hard.

"Do you want to spend that much time of your college career doing this?"

Hard pass.

As Lutz started thinking about what he wanted to spend time studying in college, then doing after college, some of the same faces kept popping into his mind. His coaches at Texas Lutheran. His coaches from high school. Even his coaches from some of his Catholic Youth Organization teams.

Lutz decided he wanted to be a coach, too.

The truth is, he was already doing some of the things that a young coach might. Not that he was doing them on purpose. It was just his personality.

"When it was time to have pick-up, I made the pick-up teams," Lutz said. "When it was time on the weekend to have open gym, I told the guys when we're going to have open gym.

"Friday and Saturday nights when things maybe in college get awry, I made sure everybody got out of there and I kept the peace, so to speak."

His senior year, he was a team captain.

Still, he wasn't a standout, much less a star. He didn't make headlines, and truthfully, those were rare anyway for Texas Lutheran. He knew he wouldn't get his first coaching job after college because of clout or even name recognition.

So did the man who gave Lutz his first job.

"Hey, Steve," Danny Kaspar once joked with him, "you played three years at Texas Lutheran, and when you came to apply for my grad assistant, I didn't know who the hell you were."

Kaspar was coaching at Incarnate Word in San Antonio, but Lutz, who had spent all but a few months of his life in the San Antonio area, was unknown to Kaspar. Worse, when Lutz reached out about that graduate assistant job, Kaspar had already filled it.

Guy by the name of Chris Beard, who's been the head coach at Texas Tech and Texas and is now at Ole Miss.

"I already got somebody," Kaspar remembers telling Lutz, "and they only give me money for one GA spot."

But a week or two later, Lutz returned to Kaspar's office. Lutz had talked to a few other schools in and around San Antonio—he planned to live at home while he worked as a GA and took classes for his master's degree—but he kept coming back to the feeling he got from Kaspar about how he ran his program.

"It was business," Lutz said.

He knew working for other programs and coaches might be more fun than working for Kaspar at Incarnate Word.

"Man, you had a lot of fun in college," he thought to himself. "You either need to figure this out or not."

Lutz had a proposal for Kaspar.

"Coach, what if I just volunteer?" Lutz said.

"I can let you do that," Kaspar told him. "But Steve, understand that if you're going to do that, you're going to be like a walk-on. A walk-on gets no scholarship money, but has to do everything the scholarship guys do.

"If you're going to take this job, I don't want to hear, 'Well, Coach, I came in late and you're on me, but I don't get any money.' I'm not going to hear that."

The first day Lutz came to work, he didn't call recruits or watch video or help with practice. Instead, he and Beard were given paint and brushes and told to go paint the locker room.

"Both Beard and Lutz looked at me like I'm crazy," Kaspar said.

But they did it.

Beard, of course, was getting paid. Lutz wasn't. But he just kept working.

"There's a lot of young men that think they want to coach college," Kaspar said. "They don't understand the time, the work, the effort that goes into it."

Kaspar could see that Lutz understood. He proved it by always showing up, always working hard.

After a month, Kaspar rewarded Lutz with a $200 monthly stipend, though Lutz remembers it being a $2,000 yearly stipend with a slightly different monthly paycheck.

"$186.13," he said, rattling off the exact number nearly 30 years later.

The pay was minimal. Glitz? Glamour? Nonexistent. Lutz loved it.

THE CIRCUIT

As much as Steve Lutz embraced being a volunteer-turned-grad-assistant at Incarnate Word, he knew he couldn't stay in the position forever.

Not if he ever wanted to move out of his parents' house.

And slowly but surely, Lutz started moving up.

Beard left for Abilene Christian the next year, and Lutz took over the vacated grad assistant spot. Then the next year, Kaspar's lead assistant coach moved to Texas A&M-Kingsville, and Lutz became a full assistant. Salary: $20,000.

"I'm lovin' life," Lutz said.

He even had enough money to buy a car, a Ford Explorer.

"And the payments are $406.84 a month," he said with a smile.

While the salary increase was no small thing, Lutz knew he needed to continue to climb to expand his knowledge. Kaspar had taught him all about planning and strategy, but what about recruiting and competing and budgeting and all the other things that had to be done at the highest levels of college basketball?

Lutz decided to move to Garden City Community College in Kansas. At the junior college level, coaches are always recruiting, and players are always being recruited.

"So I expanded my network 10 times in 10 months," Lutz said.

Jeremy Cox, who had met Lutz a few years earlier when they were assistants in the San Antonio area, wanted Lutz on his staff when he took over as head coach at Garden City. That's because Cox knew he'd never be able to find anyone in college coaching who worked harder than Lutz.

"He's a relentless, ferocious worker," Cox said.

Cox rewinds to a night Garden City played a game three hours away in Coffeyville. The team got back from Coffeyville late, but early the next morning, Lutz was on his way to North Carolina.

"Drove out there that day," Cox recalled, "and two days later, he was back in Garden City with a kid."

A recruit, actually. Because Garden City's recruiting budget was small, flying in recruits wasn't an option. Someone often had to go get them, and Lutz never shied away from the duty.

The same went for recruiting.

Cox remembers going after a recruit from Manhattan, Kansas, about four hours from Garden City. Whenever he played a game, Lutz would be there to watch.

Often the recruit's games were on Tuesdays and Fridays.

"He'd be back that night or early the next morning," Cox said of Lutz.

That was because Garden City played on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

"The entire season, he never rented a hotel room, never stayed in a hotel room, just lived in a car, worked in a car, didn't have a cell phone, stopped on the side of the road and talked on the pay phone and kept moving and never complained," Cox said. "That was just the way it was, and that's just the way he has been his entire career."

Lutz kept grinding as an assistant for the next two decades. He went to Stephen F. Austin for six seasons—reuniting with Kaspar—then SMU for four, Creighton for seven, and Purdue for four.

Lutz learned lots at all those stops, but more than anything, he refined his basketball vision.

In other words: "When you get to choose how you're going to play," Lutz said, "that's my druthers."

And his druthers are aggressive defense and up-tempo offense. His defensive philosophy will be familiar to Cowboy fans with heartstrings attached to Henry Iba and Eddie Sutton, but Lutz's offense will be something different.

Lutz's first three seasons as a head coach—two at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, one at Western Kentucky—those three teams averaged 78.0 points. Two of them scored over 80 points a game.

In the past 20 years, OSU has had only four teams average more than 78.0 points a game. And the Cowboys had way more teams during that stretch average in the '60s (nine) than in the '80s (two).

Lutz's style preference has nothing to do with his personality (baseball was too slow, remember?) or even his background. His high school coach, Stan Bonewitz, loved up-tempo offense and averaged over 100 points a game many seasons. Creighton under Greg McDermott plays fast, too.

Rather, Lutz believes in playing fast because of the math.

"If you can get a 75-possession game versus a 63-possession game, you've got 12 more opportunities to survive mistakes and 12 more opportunities to make a three," he said. "You're just giving yourself more opportunity."

Maybe better opportunities, too.

"When you really look at basketball, your best opportunity to score is before the defense gets set, right?" Lutz said. "And let's just be honest: in this league, there's some really, really good coaches. So if you're going to play in a chess match with them in the half-court, and you don't have better talent or equal talent, you're gonna have a hard time. So the more you can play in transition, the more you can play before things get set, you should have a better success rate. To me, that's kind of the premise of it all."

THE RIGHT CHOICE:

Steve Lutz has always chosen basketball even though it hasn't always been easy.

Sure, his love for the game and his passion for coaching have never waned, but still, there have been difficulties. Last year, for example, Lutz and his wife, Shannon, decided he would move to Western Kentucky when he got the job there while she and their two youngest kids stayed behind in Corpus Christi.

Their middle child, daughter McKenna, was soon to be a senior in high school, and they didn't want to uproot her before that year, which would've been her third high school in four years.

It was tough, but they believed it was the right thing to do.

Lutz believes it was absolutely the right decision, but man, was it difficult.

Lutz's dream job, after all, is stay-at-home dad.

"Heck, yeah," he said. "I love to tell my wife that all the time: 'You can make all the money in the world; I'll stay at home, have dinner every night, get the yard mowed, go pick up the kids.' I would have been fine with it."

He still finds ways to be there as much as possible when his kids have big events, games, or assemblies. He involves them as much as he can, too; oldest daughter, Caroline, used to pick out his ties before games, for instance, while son, Jackson, was there for a bunch of morning workouts this last summer.

It isn't perfect.

"He's made a lot of sacrifices just like anyone does in their career," Lutz's older brother, Mike, said. "You have that dream and you just pursue it."

Steve Lutz did just that. He chose basketball, then worked to make it the right choice.

Oklahoma State University Athletics

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