Tom Holmoe didn’t say it, but the implication was clear.
He took a gamble with his last hire to lead the women’s basketball program. With BYU moving to the Big 12 and recruiting needing a level up, he plucked a former AAU coach out of Idaho to lead the Cougars into a new age.
Amber Whiting had never coached at the college level, not even as an assistant, but Holmoe figured in a world where traditional resumes don’t matter, why not take a big swing? An AAU coach can at least recruit, right?
“Coaching is very difficult in this day and age. There are a lot of responsibilities that haven’t been seen in the past,” Holmoe said recently. “And many of our coaches, in all sports, are doing things that are really outside what they are trained to do. There are no pathways that people have trod to get to this point.”
But it flopped.
Less than three years later, Whiting was out in Provo. She went 4-14 in the Big 12 last year, never had a winning season and was bounced in the first round of the Big 12 tournament by fellow newcomer UCF.
Now, Holmoe has taken corrective action, hiring Lee Cummard to take over the women’s basketball program.
His thesis was right. With NIL, the transfer portal and revenue sharing, traditional resumes for college coaches don’t matter as much. But his conclusion was different this time.
Instead of going with somebody with no college experience, this time he doubled down on BYU experience. He went with comfort. In a world with no rules, he bet on what he knew.
“We are super stoked to have one of our own who has been a champion here at BYU in the past and will be a champion in the future,” Holmoe said as he introduced Cummard last week. “… This is one of the reasons why I think Lee is the right coach at the right time for here at BYU.”
Cummard, a former BYU star on the men’s team, didn’t back away from this assertion. He leaned into it, hard.
“None of those [past coaches] played here. I really feel like that is an advantage to me,” he said. “The whole BYU experience — I might die on that hill — but I want people to want to be here. To want to represent BYU on the front of the jersey. That’s how I’ll be the most different.”
With that, BYU has its new leader of the women’s basketball program.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brigham Young guard Lee Cummard (30) exits the game in the final minutes of BYU’s loss to Texas A&M in the first round of NCAA men’s basketball tournament in Philadelphia in 2009.
It doesn’t get much more BYU than Cummard. He played for Dave Rose in the 2000s, winning co-Mountain West player of the year in 2008. After he was done playing overseas, he came back to Rose’s staff as a graduate assistant and moved up to coach.
When Rose stepped aside, he shuffled to Jeff Judkins’ staff on the women’s team. And he spent the last three years as Whiting’s associate head coach. Yes, those same three seasons when BYU went 45-51 and the offense committed 17 turnovers a night.
Cummard was the architect of that offense.
But with this hire, Holmoe made it clear. Even if Cummard shared responsibility for the program’s deterioration, its restoration rested on getting back to the “BYU way” that Cummard talked so much about — that came from a lifetime spent in BYU’s hallways.
“Going to be really stingy about the culture, or the BYU way of doing things,” Cummard said. “I would imagine it looks a lot like how I played. Scrappy, tough, work ethic is there.”
And in recruiting, that seems to mean rejecting the new order of the sport. Cummard said he wouldn’t pitch recruits on money but on the university overall.
He said the pitch he uses today won’t change much from when he played at BYU — before NIL existed.
(Paul Fraughton | Salt Lake Tribune) BYU guard Lee Cummard (30) drives the ball around the defense of North Florida at the Marriott Center in 2008.
“The recruiting process doesn’t change that much. Great university, with great people surrounding you the entire time you are going to be her,” he said. “You are going to evolve as a person and as a player. And I promise you, you will be a better shooter for sure.”
He talked about showing people interested in money the door.
“The people chasing money, we kind of just [push them off]. You’re a great talent, but you know,” he said. “The administration has been really supportive in that area. And we are grateful for that. We have approached it more to the people that want to be here, be a part of something bigger than themselves.”
Whether this change in approach works in the long term remains to be seen.
It’s hard not to juxtapose this approach to the one Holmoe took just a year ago when he hired Kevin Young to lead men’s basketball. There, BYU doubled down on the outside hire, with no college experience and a ton of resources. It got the Cougars to the Sweet 16 and the No. 1 recruit in the country.
Cummard, as an alum, watched how Young’s hire worked out. He was thrilled with the direction of the program. But even he admitted, his way would be different.
“I was really proud of how they represented us,” he said. “We’ll do it our own way with great people.”
Already, Cummard has had two huge wins: star guard Delany Gibb and standout Kailey Woolston have both decided to stay with the program rather than transfer.