![\"SPRING16goes-aall-in\"](\"http:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/SPRING16goes-aall-in.jpg\")
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After 38 years of coaching basketball, Kip Drown, 59, is starting from scratch. Again.<\/p>\n
He certainly didn\u2019t need a fresh start. He has amassed a stellar career that any coach would envy. Overall, his college women\u2019s basketball teams are 463-327 \u2014 a record Drown built by taking struggling programs and turning them around.<\/p>\n
He did it most remarkably at Grand Canyon University, where the struggling \u2018Lopes had won only four games by the time he arrived in 2001. In just four seasons, Drown built a team that went 16-12 and earned a bid to the NCAA Division II Tournament, a feat that won him the California Collegiate Athletic Association Coach of the Year in 2004.<\/p>\n
Most recently, Drown rebuilt the program at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he led the struggling ThunderWolves to a 195-100 record, won the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Championship four times and earned a spot in the NCAA Division II Tournament seven times \u2014 the last appearance in March of 2015. He\u2019s the winningest women\u2019s basketball coach in the university\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
And so, while other coaches in his shoes might be thinking about settling down and looking at life after basketball, Drown has chosen to start from scratch again at Georgia Southern, a Division I team that went 5-24 last year \u2014 last place in the Sun Belt \u2014 and is picked to finish last again this year.<\/p>\n
A mathematician might call it a gamble. Drown, however, calls it an opportunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got off the phone the first time with Tom Kleinlein [Georgia Southern director of athletics] I was energized,\u201d he said. \u201cThe idea of taking over a Division I program that was coming off some down years was a challenge that really fired me up. I have always embraced the opportunity to take over programs that were struggling and turn them around, but the fact that this opportunity was at a D-I University was just too great an opportunity to turn down.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Georgia Southern, Drown says he will call upon the core principles that have brought him success at every level so far. Winning, he said, requires going \u201cAALL\u201d in. \u201cAALL\u201d stands for ability, attitude, labor and love, and for Drown, it\u2019s the strategy for success on the court, in the classroom and in life.
\n\u201cI tell kids if you do those four things: if you will maximize your ability; if you will have a great attitude \u2014 starting with a team attitude; if you will have a great work ethic \u2014 be what I call an \u2018extra-miler,\u2019 don\u2019t just do what\u2019s expected of you, but go beyond what is expected; and then if you will have a love and a passion for what you do, you\u2019re going to be successful in this life.\u201d<\/p>\n
In practice, AALL means being relentless, a word that Drown loves so much he posted it in the locker room. It means pushing through good times and bad times and pounding away everyday on the little things: those fundamentals which add up to big things in the end.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere really is no magic formula,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re just constantly trying to teach them to do the fundamental things correctly. You do that with good people with good character. I\u2019m a big believer that good kids and good people will find ways to get good things to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for Drown, AALL is about so much more than just winning basketball games. He\u2019s building a family, a reality he\u2019s coined in the team\u2019s motto, \u201cfamily always, team first.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTeams are kind of year-to-year, but you have to have that team-first attitude,\u201d he said. \u201cBut family \u2014 they\u2019re going to be Eagles all their lives. Twenty years from now I want them to look back and say, \u2018That was the best time of my life playing basketball at Georgia Southern.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we win a Sun Belt title or we win a national title and they look back and say, \u2018Man, I was miserable,\u2019 then we\u2019ve done something wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early season results have been encouraging with junior guard Angel McGowan being named the women’s basketball Student-Athlete of the Week by the Sun Belt Conference as well as College Sports Madness. There\u2019s still a long season ahead, with talented Sun Belt Conference opponents to face. Drown, however, says he\u2019s confident.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to keep getting better every day, and we\u2019re going to turn this thing around,\u201d he said. \u201cI have no doubt about it. It\u2019s too good a place. There\u2019s too much tradition here and too many good things about it \u2014 and we\u2019re going to get it turned around.\u201d \u2014 Doy Cave<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kip Drown Talks Rebuilding<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3119,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-2954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","tag-spring-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}