Winningly on the Lute: From the Mountains to the Prairies, Lute Olson wins everywhere. (Person to Person).

COACH: We know you were born on a farm just outside Mayville, ND. How did you get started playing basketball?

OLSON: I moved into Mayville when I was six after my dad passed away, and I started playing basketball in grade school.

You wouldn't normally associate North Dakota with basketball. But if you surveyed the entire state you'd probably discover that basketball was even more popular than football. Though some of the smaller schools would play six or eight-man football, every school had a basketball team.

COACH: As a senior, you led Grand Forks Central High to the state basketball championship in 1952. What do you remember about that season?

OLSON: I had moved to Grand Forks in 1951. It was the largest school in the state and they had good basketball teams. The group I joined had played together for a number of years and were already very good.

At 6-4, I was the post-up guy on a pretty quick, small team. We weren't favored to win anything but we beat a couple of good schools to win the championship.

COACH: What prompted you to attend Augsburg College (MN)?

OLSON: I had grown up in a smaller town and I had an opportunity to attend larger colleges like the U. of North Dakota. But I felt more comfortable in a smaller environment, similar to the one I grew up in.

Augsburg offered that environment and the chance to play three sports.

COACH: Up to that point, were there any coaches who had a special impact on you?

OLSON: My basketball coach at Grand Forks Central had been an all-conference player at the U. of North Dakota, and I was influenced by him the most.

When I got to college and my horizons expanded, I also learned a lot from both my coach and other coaches in the league. I ended up deriving a philosophy and a coaching style from a broad variety of sources.

COACH: When did you begin to consider a career in coaching?

OLSON: I decided I wanted to become a basketball coach in my sophomore year of high school.

I knew by then that I wanted to go to college, get my teaching degree, and coach high school basketball.

COACH: How did you get your first coaching job in 1956?

OLSON: I had the best job offers in football, but basketball was my first love. I coached football and baseball as an assistant, but basketball was the sport for me.

My first job was coaching at Mahnomen High School in Minnesota in 1956. I spent five years coaching high school basketball in Minnesota before moving to Southern California in 1961.

COACH: What brought you to California?

COACH: My wife's uncle was an assistant principal in the Anaheim school district and at that time California had been recruiting in the Midwest because of their teaching shortage. He had tried getting me to come out there right out of college, but my wife and I hadn't been ready for that kind of move.

By 1961, we had three kids and wanted to get out of the snow and cold in Minnesota, so I took a job as an assistant basketball coach in Anaheim. That was the only time I worked as an assistant, and by the next year I had found a head-coaching job at a new high school nearby.

COACH: After 12 years in the high school ranks, you took a job at Long Beach City College. Who made the overture to you?

OLSON: I had been coaching at Rena High School in Huntington Beach, CA, with really good success, becoming one of the better programs in Southern California.

I decided in the spring of my fifth year there that I was ready for the junior-college level.

I applied to Long Beach City College and I was offered a job there that August.

It was an easy transition, my wife, Bobbi, and I were able to stay in our home and commute to work. I had my master's degree in educational psychology with a certificate in counseling. In addition to coaching basketball, I was the counselor to about 400 athletes at Long Beach City.

COACH: Did you have to change anything to coach on the collegiate level? What kind of offense and defense did you use and was it of your own design?

OLSON: The biggest change I had to make in going from high school to college was the recruiting part of it.

As far as my style of play was concerned, I didn't change anything. My philosophy has always been to play uptempo and to pressure defensively at least to half-court. By that time, those principles were pretty well imbedded in me.

John Wooden was at UCLA and having his great run. Jerry Tarkanian was at Long Beach State and Bob Boyd was having great success at USC, so I'd say that most of my philosophies were coming from those coaches.

Each year I'd take my high school team to practices at all three of those colleges. When I moved to Long Beach City College I spoke at Coach Wooden's UCLA clinic and had dinner with him. Our relationship started then and has continued through the years.

COACH: You led LBCC to the state championship four times, then took over as head coach at Long Beach State in 1973. You spent one season there, going 24-2, before landing your first major head coaching job at Iowa in 1974. Were you approached by the Iowa people or did you have to campaign for the position?

OLSON: We had been to state finals three out the four years I was at Long Beach City College, I then replaced Jerry Tarkanian at Long Beach State for that one great year. But we weren't able to go into the playoffs because of the probation that was handed down because of previous violations.

Iowa, at that point, had been 10th in the league and they were looking to make a change. Their coach was Dick Schultz, who later became the head of the NCAA, and I came in with a sizable rebuilding job to do.

COACH: In nine years at Iowa, you compiled a record of 167-91 and made it to the Final Four in 1980. What made your Hawkeye teams so successful?

OLSON: We got things turned around the second season. I brought two players from Long Beach City College that I had recruited there as freshmen. They played there during their sophomore year while I was at Long Beach State and they came out to Iowa with me, along with a center from a California junior college.

We were 10-16 my first season there, but by our second year our record was 19-10 and we had things pretty much turned around.

We basically used the philosophies that we had developed along the way. The biggest thing we had learned was that if you have good people, they will find a way to win.

It wasn't a case of having McDonald's All-Americans or anything like that. We had great team chemistry and were able to do it with good kids who were willing to play hard as a team.

COACH: In 1983, you took over an Arizona team that went 4-24 the previous season, raised it to 11-17 in your first season and then 21-10 the following season. How did you turn the Arizona program around?

OLSON: We really turned it around by the second half of that first year when we had the second-best record in the Pac-10 over the last nine games.

The following year, we started the run of consecutive NCAA tournaments that is now at 17.

COACH: In 18 years at Arizona you have amassed a 447-133 record for a fabulous winning percentage of .771. You have also made four Final Fours and won a national championship in 1997. What has been the secret of your success?

OLSON: I basically went the same route I did with Iowa. We brought in a substantial recruiting class. Of the top seven guys on the team, five of them were brought in that first season.

We also picked up a guy named Steve Kerr who didn't have a scholarship opportunity anywhere else.

I hadn't seen him play until the end of July, after he had graduated from high school. We had a hardworking group that managed to have a good second half of the season.

The following year, all of those guys were back and that's when we began our run.

COACH: Have you found it necessary to change your game to keep winning at Arizona?

OLSON: Not really. We played the uptempo style that we have always lived and played by.

Our center, the first two years I was here, was Pete Williams at 6-7, 195 pounds. He was playing against seven-footers, so we had to use more of a match-up zone in those years because of our size.

But I don't think there has been a change of philosophy. Because of our proximity to California, I used it as my recruiting base. As we became better known, I was able to expand that recruiting area.

But we had a fellow from town here who ended up developing into a pretty good player - that was Sean Elliott. Once he came and started, we won the Pac-10 title in 1986. We were able to start recruiting nationally with the exposure that he and Steve Kerr gave us.

COACH: To go back to 1997. Though you have had a number of teams that were ranked #1 in the country, your national championship team placed 5th in the Pac-10 and you were a #4 seed in the tournament, but beat three #1 seeds to win the title.

How did that miracle come about?

OLSON: That Pac-10 finish is a little misleading because when we went on the road for our last two games against Stanford and Cal we still had a chance to win the league title. But we dropped two one-pointers that weekend and we dropped back to fifth.

It wasn't a case of not being a good team during the course of the year. Miles Simon (NCAA Tournament MVP) had been ineligible the first semester and that affected us, but we were a good team.

Coming off that weekend we had to regroup for the tournament. I told the guys that in those two closing Pac-10 losses, they had played as well as they had anytime during the year and that those two losses would help us, not hurt us, in the tournament. I believe the guys took that negative and turned it into a positive.

COACH: Few coaches have been affected as much as you by the early departure of superstars to the NBA. You lost three star underclassmen from the 2001 team that made it all the way to the national title game. Were you philosphic, mad, or depressed about all this?

OLSON: It's not anything you to get upset about. It's going to happen and you have to live with it. In all of the years at Arizona, we had only two guys come out early.

One of them was Brian Williams, who had gone to Maryland and red-shirted a year, so that when he left for the NBA he had been in college for four years. The other one was Mike Bibby who left after his sophomore year.

It's a problem that all of us at the top level have to face. It affects the top programs most. You have to try to regroup and recruit as many good players as you can.

It used to be that we would recruit a point guard every two years, recruit a three-man every two years, and try to get a combo-type shooting guard every year in between. That way we could graduate our program, but that's no longer possible.

You just have to hope that you can recruit well enough, as Duke has done. They've got great players sitting behind great players.

In our case, we did not feel that we were going to lose both wing players last year. But it changed recruiting substantially.