Matt Lynch’s first season as a head coach will not end with a trip to March Madness or NCAA glory. Instead, he will finish with something better: the satisfaction of building up a program from nothing, and changing lives in the process.
It’s fair to say Lynch took on the worst job in college basketball, if not all of college sports. He accepted the vacant position at University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, a junior college in a rural town about an hour west of Charleston.
The program had nothing in place, literally: no players, budget or even running water in the locker room. The team didn’t play last season, after cycling through four head coaches in eight months.
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It’s been 15 months since Lynch accepted the job in December 2022, becoming the first out gay head coach in men’s college basketball history. A basketball lifer, Lynch has wanted to coach since he was drawing up plays in church league.
At USC Salkehatchie–“Salk” for short–he’s in charge of the play calls, along with virtually everything else.
“If I was going to get a head coaching job, I knew it was going to be at a place that needed to be built,” Lynch told the New York Times, which conducted multiple interviews with him over the last year. “All I ever wanted was an opportunity. The way I looked at it was this may be a bad job, but it’s my bad job. You’ve got to make the big time where you are.”
Lynch received his first break in 2017, when he joined North Carolina Wilmington as a video coordinator. He lasted in the idyllic college town for three seasons, departing the school right before the start of COVID.
Locked down and without a job, Lynch started to reflect on his life. With a proclivity to bury his personal feelings and focus on work, Lynch engaged in true introspection. Though his family knew he was gay, few others did.
That changed in April 2020, when he penned his coming out essay. The piece went viral, prompting Lynch to appear on The Tamron Hall Show and be featured on Forbes‘ “30 under 30.”
With a dearth of out gay role models in men’s sports, Lynch said he was determined to serve as an example.
“I think it’s important for me to be publicly out,” he wrote. “Not only for me and my mental health, but for anyone else out there like me.”
While Lynch previously thought being gay and coaching basketball was incongruous, his fears were shortly put to rest. The reaction to his announcement was overwhelming; and within a few months, he returned to UNC Wilmington as an assistant for the women’s team.
After coming out, Lynch’s friends and family instantly noticed his newfound confidence.
“I have just this light about me when I walk into a room,” he said in a 2021 interview. “I lift the mood of the entire room. That was a direct quote of what my sister told me just a couple of weeks ago. From a personal standpoint, I just feel happy.”
Three years later, Lynch is still carrying those good feelings, along with a renewed sense of accomplishment. When he coached his first game with USC Salkehatchie, he didn’t know what to expect.
Now, he’s finished up his rookie campaign with a winning record (17-13). Winners of three straight, the Indians are hot heading into this week’s conference tournament.
To field a team, Lynch scoured the globe, working his contacts and watching endless hours of tape. The end result is one of the most diverse rosters in men’s college hoops. There are five players from Australia, four from South Carolina, two from England, one from Germany, one from Costa Rica and one from Virginia.
They all live together in a seven-bedroom apartment a mile from campus.
Matt Lynch is the only out gay head coach of a men’s college basketball program at any level.
Suffice to say, the revamped Indians are family; and as a result, support one another. Lynch came out to his players when he hosted them at his house in Wilmington for a summer retreat, and the topic has seldom come up since.
Still, Lynch hopes to see a day when LGBTQ+ folx in men’s sports don’t feel obligated to announce their sexuality.
“My issue addressing it had nothing to do with any fear of coming out,” he told the NYT. “None of my guys said, ‘Hi, my name is … and I’m gay. Or straight.’ I don’t know why, internally, I feel like I have to tell people. I struggle with that.”
With a population of 5,544, conservative Waterboro is a far ways from liberal Wilmington. There is a church on almost every corner, and the poverty rate exceeds 20%.
But Lynch feels completely at ease. “The truth of it is there hasn’t been one incident with malicious intent,” he said.
It helps that his players respect him, and buy into his philosophy of self-sacrifice.
“He’s not afraid to open himself up to us, which is a big positive,” said Darcy Pares, a guard from Australia. “We might not like him some days at practice, we might not like him when he wakes us up early to go to the weight room, but we know he’s doing it because he really cares about us.”
With duties far beyond coaching basketball, Lynch renovated the entire locker room, and his mother and sister helped, too. He estimates he spent up to $4,000 out of his own pocket preparing for the season.
With a fresh carpet, new paint and improved leather sofa, the locker room now features pictures of every player and coach, along with the flags of each player’s home country.
In other words, it’s home.
“My internal battles with my sexuality took me years to figure out, and it’s still something I am attempting to figure out,” Lynch told Outsports. “But it does amaze me how something that I once tried so hard to change has now become such an ‘average’ part of my daily life.”
With a history-making season under his belt, Lynch’s daily life is pretty spectacular.
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