David Cota: Welcome back to The Vault by FNBO, where we unlock stories that matter. I'm your host David Cota, and today our conversation is going to be about legacy and leadership and basketball, and our guest has a unique perspective on all three.

Alan Huss has gone from being a Creighton student-athlete to assistant coach to the head coach at Division One High Point University, where during his time there he led the team to a 56-15 record, their first ever NCAA tournament appearance, and was named in back-to-back seasons as the Big South Coach of the Year. And now he's come back to where it all started — Creighton University. A 2002 graduate of Creighton, Coach Huss is the 17th head coach of the men's basketball program at Creighton University and the first Creighton alum since Tom Apke coached Creighton in the late 1970s. We're looking forward to the conversation today. Coach Huss, welcome. Thank you for being here with us today.

Coach Huss: I appreciate you having me.

David Cota: Yeah, absolutely. I've heard you refer to the Creighton head coaching job as a dream job for you. Now that you're in that chair, has it sunk in?

Coach Huss: Probably not. When you're a college basketball coach, extra time to kind of sit around and zoom out and really think about where you are — maybe even appreciate the moment — isn't always there. I'm quite certain that at some point here this fall, I don't know if it's going to be when we play a big game, I don't know it's going to be a a certain moment in a game, but it's going to be some moment when I'm sitting around and I realize that I'm in a dream job and have a chance to zoom out and think about how fortunate I am. But right now, it's more just day to day, trying to move from task to task and be efficient. So, I know that's probably not a pretty answer, but that's the truth.

David Cota: Coming back as the head coach and also as an alum, does that add another layer of responsibility to the chair that you're in?

Coach Huss: Yeah, I've said this to a number of people and this is the best way I can say it. My wife was a military brat. My dad worked in ag business and we moved all over the place. So, we both found Omaha and Creighton for different reasons, but for both of us it's kind of our adopted home. She was born here and her dad went here, grandparents went here, so she knew a little bit about Creighton. I knew nothing about Creighton, nothing about Omaha, nothing about the state of Nebraska. I was drawn here because of the basketball program. I think if you gave either one of us a choice, we could live anywhere in the world — I know this to be fact — we'd live here. So, you come back and we've got this adopted home, and if it doesn't go well, we don't have an adopted home anymore. So, you know, you throw all that in and I don't know that it makes me work any harder at it, but there's certainly an added level of pressure, of expectation, of we want to get it right because it means more than just the average job does.

David Cota: Yeah, it's personal on a level that may not be the case in, you know, other jobs. The path back to Creighton led you in a two-year stint to be the head coach at High Point University, you had tremendous success there. Congratulations - back-to-back Big South Coach of the Year that's very well deserved. What did that experience teach you and how did it prepare you, or draw you even in a stronger way, back to Creighton?

Coach Huss: I think you have to first talk about how much Mac empowered me at Creighton as an assistant coach and then associate head coach — that prepared me for that opportunity at High Point. I think that's why we were able to hit the ground running, aside from tremendous support. The people around the job don't get enough credit. The coach gets too much credit, too much credit either way for success or failure. But I think it was, it was ripe for success, and I think the beautiful thing about being in the Big South — with all due respect to it as opposed to the Big East — is I was able to stub my toe a few times early, uh make some mistakes. Uh, there are so many things that I, where I stubbed my toe or I you know just learned a hard lesson, had we done them in the Big East, maybe we wouldn't have been able to recover. But we were at High Point, and we could.

David Cota: And then you came back into also unique role — I mean, associate head coach and named head coach in waiting. I was so impressed last year by the way you and Coach McDermott managed that process. What did that role or what did that position as well offer you as a vantage point into the program as you were thinking about, okay, I'm going to be sitting in that lead chair again — it's simply a matter of time?

Coach Huss: There certainly wasn't an instruction manual on that particular arrangement. I'm thankful for that arrangement because I know I gained more insight. When I was here before, I always knew that Mac did so many things that I didn't necessarily see every day and didn't appreciate. Until I came back with that different perspective — knowing that I was going to move into his chair — Where I had to really keep one eye on him all the time, because he just did, especially after a decade or so of doing the job. I think even if he had written the manual himself, he'd have left a number of things out, because I think by habit he was doing so many things. Coming back with that perspective helped me as I moved over.

I also think personally it was an awesome exercise in staying present — trying to honor sending Mac out the right way while also understanding that I had this incredibly huge space that I had to move into. So, you know what, you've got to stay present. You've got to dominate the position you're in currently, and maybe it's the most difficult thing to do. I mean just general human nature makes you always think about what's next it want to make you move forward. But, what an awesome lesson, because in high-level college athletics, that's the lesson we're trying to get our student-athletes to understand all the time. Be present, enjoy the process right now. I know you're thinking about what's next — the money, the opportunities of professional basketball, of whatever it is that's next in your life — and the difficulties of just of kind of day to day that we put these guys through, uh physically, mentally, socially, all the things that they have to juggle during this phase. But what an awesome lesson for me or reminder for me that being present is still the most important thing. And the interesting thing now is trying to, you know, share that message.

David Cota: You played for Coach Altman and coached obviously a number of years with Coach McDermott — two tremendous leaders, basketball coaches, and just great quality people. How have they shaped your view on leadership, and how do you think about leadership as a head basketball coach?

Coach Huss: Yeah, I mean leadership is what the job is. It's not um, it's not so much X's and O's. It's Jimmy's or Johnny's and Joe's, and maybe more importantly, getting those Jimmy's and Joe's to be on the same page — especially with all the external factors involved in transfer portaling and consistently changing rosters, the financial considerations, all the things they have to juggle now. Getting those guys on the same page is the – that's the most challenging piece of this entire puzzle. It's not necessarily teaching them how to dribble, pass, and shoot — most of them can already do that at a pretty high level. And the difference between last place in the Big East and first place in the Big East isn't skill level, most of the time. It's all the other things. The buy-in is ultimately comes down to leadership. It comes down to trying to get your players to lead themselves by modeling the leadership that style you want them to adopt yourself, and probably equally important, getting your staff to do it.

Back to your question though— I think the interesting thing and I think a great lesson Coach Altman gave me years ago was: be yourself. You know, there's one Coach Mac and I think Coach gave me this, he followed Lon Kruger at Kansas State, and I think he would tell you that was probably the worst stop of his coaching career. He would be the first to tell you that trying to follow Coach Kruger — Coach Kruger doesn't raise his voice and he has this incredible way of motivating people by just kind of giving them a look. Coach Altman's pretty intense and I think he would tell you he got away from himself a little bit in that step, but after coaching a year at Marshall, he came back into that space at Creighton, found his voice —was fiery and tough and demanding, and also loving. I mean like we all just, we all loved playing for him, uh would do anything for him. So, he found his voice there. And I think he told me that — I don't even know if he remembers telling me that — he told me that when I got my first big high school opportunity and I thought that was a really impactful message, because I think if I had just followed Coach Mac I think trying to replicate his demeanor, especially for me, would have been really challenging on floor.

Now that being said, there's lessons to learn. And I think looking at some of the commonalities even though on the floor and with staffs the way they ran things is so unbelievably different, you know, the commonalities were that they were elite organizers — of themselves, of people, of the program — and probably even more important was just the way they treated human beings. I think those two commonalities are maybe the most important thing to take away.

David Cota: That approach of being yourself and yet be open to learn and continue to develop, that applies to, quite honestly, you know, any leadership role, any career track, any industry. It's a great journey and it's a great story. You mentioned the importance of team chemistry and connection — almost more important than skill. Do you recruit for that? Are you and your staff looking for, um, indicators of how a player is going to integrate into a team, um, their disposition and their sentiment around a willingness to be coached? Is that something you screen for?

Coach Huss: We used to have a couple of years — sometimes, in some cases, three and four years — to gather the uh, you know to gather the reconnaissance necessary to understand what we were getting ourselves into when it came to recruiting. And, there was an old saying in recruiting that, you know, you take the wrong player, and you're stuck with them. You take the right player, you can survive. You know, you can always move on and go get another player, but you take the wrong one and you're stuck with all those things you don't want. And, we had a long time to figure out what was right and what was wrong for our program.

Creighton, in particular, takes a specific type of family and kid. We are small, private, Jesuit, Catholic, Midwest, in-person class — that's pretty unique in major college athletics. And so, that in itself is a little bit limiting, but because it limits us a little bit in who we can recruit, it also makes the people we get to campus, typically easier to coach, quicker to buy in, and more apt to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And as I mentioned, we don't have two years anymore. But we can figure out easily how skilled they are, but do they have each of these other things? And as I mentioned, I think we have an advantage in getting people to buy in because of what we are as a school, but it's still challenging to find that last piece — are they going to be those things plus be competitive to where we need them to be to push our organization forward?

David Cota: Yeah. When you think about what players need from you and your staff today, how is that different, or what is different in terms of what the players need from you and your staff today compared to what you and your teammates needed from Coach Altman?

Coach Huss: I think that's the most interesting thing. I don't think kids have changed. All the things around them have. The pressure has gone up — 10X, maybe more — because of the financial considerations and the short period of time, now four or five years where they can earn a great head start on life. Um, so I think managing that pressure is the first piece. The only other thing that's changed is just what we have to teach them. Kids today now have all grown up with a smartphone. Now, the staff is getting younger and so a lot of the staff has grown up with a smartphone as well. Because of that, they communicate differently than our generation. Most of us prefer face-to-face conversations, and most of the kids that we coach prefer a DM or a text. Uh, and so getting them to be comfortable and be vulnerable enough as communicators is probably the most challenging thing — whether that be a hard conversation that they want to have, most of them haven't had a hard conversation. They do it via text. That piece of it is not the way successful organizations are built. And so, trying to retrain them to communicate.

Aside from that, kids need love. Kids want to know you care about them — none of that has changed. Uh, you know, some of them probably need a little bit of counseling on what to do with some of their money.

David Cota: I imagine. I imagine that's a whole other dynamic, certainly. Yeah.

Coach Huss: The twenty bucks we got on the road for per diem was a little easier to manage that what they get now.

David Cota: It's a little different in today's, ah today's game. I've heard you talk about joy as well and joy being a characteristic that you want reflected in your team. How do you ensure that there's a joyful spirit still among the team?

Coach Huss: I think we try every day to make sure that they are thankful. I mean, thankfulness is the key ingredient to joy. And, having a genuine appreciation and thankfulness present every day for all the human beings that give to allow you to have the opportunity you have — that is something that is a, that is a staple of kind of our everyday attack with our basketball program. And we certainly hope that when we do get on the floor, that shows. That we are playing with a passion and a joy that everyone that's present can appreciate.

David Cota: Yeah, yeah. That's really well said. Ten years from now, twenty years from now, when players are looking back at their time at Creighton and playing with the teammates they have and for you and your coaches — what do you want them to remember?

Coach Huss: I think you just said it. Relationships, um, all the people you meet because of basketball and because of the university — that have nothing formally, uh, they're not at all formally associated with the program. Those are the relationships that you take away, and the moments you take away, both within your team and just as you're messing around in a dorm, as you're in a classroom. Uh, that's the beautiful part of college athletics. You remember very, very little of the games themselves. Of course, there are some key moments — championships won and those sorts of things — but it's the moments and the relationships that the kids will remember forever. And, even a lot of it is just making fun of the stupid things that I say or the other coaches say, finding humor in those moments and the, you know, silly, unrealistic things we sometimes ask them to do. Thinking back on them and it's just — that's the, that's fun of it. That's what I remember from my playing days, and I certainly hope that's what they remember as they move forward in their lives.

David Cota: How do you want your team to interact with the community and/or be a reflection of this place — Omaha and Creighton University — that they play in and play for?

Coach Huss: We spend a lot of time talking about it. We know, like we don't have a large alumni base — I mean it's just not a difficult equation. We don't graduate 10,000 students a year. We have to not only make our alums proud, but we have to make the city of Omaha proud. In order to do that, we have to connect. It's the playing with joy, like I said. And I think what's been a, maybe the key ingredient to success over the last two regimes — starting with Coach Altman's, then moving into Coach Mac's — is we've always played with an unselfishness.

David Cota: Yeah, absolutely.

Coach Huss: And I think that resonates with the city of Omaha. And I think, again, we talked about the transformation of this place. But the word that comes to mind when I think about Omaha, like why has this place grown, why have the community leaders gotten behind this place, it's unselfishness. And so I think, whether you're a Creighton alum or whether you're just a casual fan that's grown to love the success and the program, the way the student-athletes represent the university and the town — I think everyone can appreciate that unselfishness. It's been such a key ingredient for really three decades now.

David Cota: Yeah. Well, you mentioned alumni support. My co-host, also host of many Vault episodes, Amelis, has been wanting to jump into the conversation, and I think we should invite her in, don't you?

Coach Huss: Let's do it.

David Cota: Yeah, Amelis, do you want to join us and jump into the conversation here?

Amelis Long: Well, David, thank you so much for the solid here. Coach Huss, thank you so much for letting an alumni and a super fan come and join you. Um, I think I'll take off the hat for a little bit, but we'll put it here in case you want to borrow it later.

Coach Huss: I think I might wear it to practice today.

Amelis Long: Excellent — you do that! I love it.

Well Coach, as I was listening to your conversation with David, you mentioned Omaha and Creighton being your adoptive home, and that really resonated with me and I think resonates with many alumni who aren't from Omaha. And I remember the reason I even toured Creighton was watching an NCAA tournament game — my history teacher as a junior in high school turned it on the TV and said this was the most important thing we needed to do this day. So, talk to me about why Creighton. I know you said it was the basketball program, but there's something about Creighton. Why, why did you pick it?

Coach Huss: My official visit here — uh, the people stood out. It was personal. I went to a large public high school in North Kansas City High. Um, and when I got here, I wasn't certain exactly what I wanted, but when I met the coaching staff, administrators, the guys on the team, and just the general students that we met, it was very clear. I didn't make it four or five hours, I knew that this was where I wanted to be and those were the guys I wanted to be around, the staff I wanted to be around. And just, I t was just clear. I watched the way people treated this place, and it felt like home from the jump.

Amelis Long: I, I think a lot of us can feel, uh empathize and feel that same story.

So, you started, you coach at the CHI — but back in our day when we were on campus, it was the Civic Center. So, take us back and describe the atmosphere and energy that the Civic Center was.

Coach Huss: I mean the Civic was uh, it was awful, um before I got there. They had renovated it just prior to my freshman year, and so it was, I think they had, they had made it solid. The only problem was we didn't have the fan base yet. And so, especially my freshman year-

Amelis Long: I wasn't there yet. So, I was coming.

Coach Huss: My freshman year, um I can remember we played a game at 11 o'clock in the morning against Grambling, and there was a hockey game, a UNO hockey game that night. They didn't even take down the — like if you ran too far on the south end of the floor, you just ran onto the ice. They just put a rug for us to walk to the locker room. And it didn't affect the crowd because we had, I don't know, probably a thousand people there. But by the end of my time there, we started to draw a little bit. I mean I still - Rodney Buford was, you know, a super talented player who in a lot of ways got Creighton basketball going. And Rodney Buford's senior night, we played in a snowstorm against Wichita State in front of 2,800, 2,900 people. Just watching it go from what that was to what it is now — and obviously Kyle Korver's, you know, junior and senior year, he helped elevate it to another level, that group — and then it just kind of kept going. And it's just been – again, it's stranger than fiction. I said it earlier, like if you would have told us at that point that we were going to play against the schools we play against in this league and play in the Big East, it would have been laughable. So, yeah, I don't even have words, I don't think, to describe the transformation.

Amelis Long: Yeah, and now you walk into CHI and it's a sellout crowd and it's an incredible energy. So, talk to us about your favorite moment at the CHI as part of the coaching staff.

Coach Huss: When we beat Villanova at home — and Mitch Ballock made the shot in front of our bench. We were down four with about a minute to go or so, and Max stayed poised and the team stayed poised and they had a big turnover, Mitch made a big three that kind of put the game away. I think that's the loudest I've ever heard CHI in my time. Of course, I was gone during the Doug years, that I think most would tell you were the best it's ever been – the building. I missed those. Winning the Big East championship — a game against Seton Hall — was so much fun. We were playing really bad basketball earlier that year and then we just went on a crazy run. The team really came together. That team was so much fun to coach. Um you know, that group was awesome. But there have been so many, I can't even great moments — I can probably name – probably 25 or 30 more. I hope we have a few more to come.

Amelis Long: You're moving into this new head coach position — what are you most excited to - which team are you most excited to take on this fall?

Coach Huss: Whoever's next. Right now, we've got to get ready for Kansas City — that's our first real game. We've got a couple of exhibitions to do it. We've got about 30 opportunities at big-time games this year, and whoever's next will be the favorite one. And I hope we can figure out a way to win our fair share.

Amelis Long: What can we as fans do to help you and the squad?

Coach Huss: Come and be loud and be disruptive, and continue to do what they've always done — support us.

Amelis Long: How far can you see at CHI? So, if I'm in section 231, will you be able to see me in my hat?

Coach Huss: If you have that hat on, I think I can see you in the top row at 231.

Amelis Long: Okay, Excellent — I'll be there and looking forward to it, so.

Coach Huss, thank you so much for — well first for allowing me, a fan and alumni, to pop in and interrupt your great conversation with David, I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for joining us on The Vault. It's been a true pleasure.

Coach Huss: Appreciate you having me. Go Blue Jays!

Amelis Long: yeah. Go Jays for sure!

Thank you all so much for watching another wonderful episode of The Vault. On behalf of David and I, we'll see you next time.