Coaching with character
Building and leading a winning basketball program with Coach Travis Steele
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Published
Coaching with character
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Published
I'm hopeful that when people watch our teams here, and we have several good coaches in our athletic department, that people have a sense of pride, not only that we win, but we're winning the right way, with culture, with great people.
Coach Travis Steele
President Greg Crawford
You're the first coach.
Coach Travis Steele
Wow.
President Greg Crawford
I know.
Coach Travis Steele
This is exciting. This is a cool little area.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I think we should get a MAC referee in here too.
Coach Travis Steele
Right?
President Greg Crawford
Hello. I'm Greg Crawford, president of Miami University, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Athletics play a unique role in higher education, shaping student growth, community engagement, and leadership in ways that extend far beyond the court or playing field. Joining today is Travis Steele, Miami's head men's basketball coach with experience from high school to Division I, Coach Steele has built a program centered on culture, leadership, student success, and more. We will explore how athletics can prepare students for a life beyond sports, the lessons of leadership and teamwork, and the ways athletic programs contribute to the broader mission of higher education. Welcome to the podcast, Coach Steele!
Coach Travis Steele
I'm really excited to be here today.
President Greg Crawford
Let's start with a little bit of an introduction. Tell us a little bit about your educational background, how you began in coaching, and how long you've been at Miami?
Coach Travis Steele
Well, I started back at Danville High School, which is a small town right outside of Indianapolis, and then I attended Butler University, right in Indianapolis. Got my undergraduate from there, majored in business, but I kind of always knew I wanted to coach basketball. You said, I've coached at high school level. I've coached at the junior college level, Division I level, for several years. And my brother, who's actually now, I hate to even say it, he's the head coach at Akron, one of one of the other teams in our league, in a lot of ways, I was kind of his shadow growing up. You know, he's about 11 years older than I am, so I knew I wanted to coach and help give back and help young people. And this is a way that we felt like that I could really impact the world.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that's fantastic. I just curious on your business degree. You went into business, and maybe you always did want to go into coaching, but what kind of element of that degree in business helped you coach?
Coach Travis Steele
I think everything number one, ability to communicate, sales, marketing. A lot of the classes that I took I still use on a day to day basis, because in a lot of ways, I always kind of view myself as like the CEO of the men's basketball program. Oh yeah, you kind of oversee all the managers, all the players, all our staff, how I can create a culture and a vision for our program. So and my education experience at Butler has been instrumental in kind of in my career.
President Greg Crawford
How do you see athletics, and basketball in particular, contributing to the larger mission of higher ed beyond the court?
Coach Travis Steele
I think number one, you know, given students an incredible experience here, giving them something to be excited about and rally around. You know, hopefully we're winning and and packing Millet and making it a really tough place to play, so they'll have memories for them, with them for the rest of their lives. And then same thing with all the alumni. How can we connect some of them being excited hopefully we're playing into March into the NCAA Tournament, where you're filling us out on that March Madness bracket Miami, hopefully advancing deep into the NCAA tournament. I think that can create a lot of pride and connection to our university.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. It really does build spirit and camaraderie, you know, when they students get to go and cheer on the team, and when you have the bigger crowds at Millet, you know? And knowing that in the past, we've haven't had some big crowds, but this year we had some big ones. You were winning. We had One Miami Day, etc. How does that feel when you got a packed house full of faculty, staff, and all kinds of students?
President Greg Crawford
It feels unbelievable. I mean, it makes a huge difference. It's like the six man almost. It's like the pulse of the arena. Like it just you feel the arena, feel the energy in it. And I know this, our players feel that and this. And we were undefeated in MAC play last year at home for the first time in a long time, and it's because of our honestly, our student attendance, our faculty showing up at games and making it a tough place to play.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, I love to see that that level of excitement and spirit around campus. So currently in today's world, higher education is being questioned in so many ways which we have never seen before, from its cost to its relevance. What role do you see athletics playing in restoring confidence in the broader mission of the university?
Coach Travis Steele
It's a great question. You know, I think I'm hopeful that when people watch our teams here, we have several good coaches in our athletic department that people have a sense of pride, not only that we win, but we're winning the right way, with culture, with great people. I know love and honor is a huge saying here, but people that love one another and have a great honor for just everything that we do, honor all those that came before us. There's more than just winning right, winning the right way, I think is very, very, very important.
President Greg Crawford
That's well said. So let's follow up on that culture comment. So what does building culture really mean to you? What does it mean to your players, and how does that translate into preparing young people for a life after basketball?
Coach Travis Steele
This has been my number one focus since I've came here. You know, we use our core values, kind of as our North Star, so to speak. Obviously, we teach them to our players, what who we are and what they what they mean, but then we have to make them come to life. And that's probably the most difficult part, right? Is what I call, kind of our culture guardrails and but I think it all starts with just evaluating who fits, right? I think because we're allowed to recruit our our student athletes, unlike some high schools you kind of have who you have, you know, here we get to recruit our guys. And always say we recruit people, not players, you know. So they have to fit our core values. And our four core values are very simple. Number one, compete at every moment. Number two, carry your brother. Number three, embody undeniable confidence. And number four, strive for more. And when we go out and watch these players, I think anybody can evaluate, hey, this guy's really good at basketball. He's talented, but sometimes we get blinded by that talent, and we just take a talent grab. Well, usually that doesn't work out. It's got to be a little bit more detailed of like and purposeful to say, 'Hey, listen, they fit our four core, values who we are,' and that helps them come to life naturally. Now we also do our culture guardrails, which I said earlier, is like, how do we hold ourselves accountable to making these four core values come to life and and that's it there. Nothing makes me more proud, quite honestly, when I see them come to life naturally and organically.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, all that I love your core values. I didn't know about those. That's great.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, fantastic. So your team, you have all kinds of moving parts. Then essentially, you're the CEO of this organization, with other coaches, assistant coaches, strength coaches, all the players. You got family members coming. You got parents. You have a lot to deal with. How do you define leadership in that kind of role as a CEO, and how has your leadership style evolved throughout your coaching career?
Coach Travis Steele
Think as I've gotten older, you just think about others. You know, I always have an open door. I don't it doesn't matter what I'm doing. If a player, I want the players to come into my office. I want our staff to come into my office. But it's just being focused on others. How can I help them, right, ultimately be the best version of themselves? Now, part of that is accountability piece, right? How am I holding them accountable on a day to day basis, everybody within our within the men's basketball organization, and keep everybody heading in the right, in the same direction, pulling it this in the same direction, can be very difficult in this landscape, especially with the transfer portal and just all that's going on in college athletics makes it more difficult.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, for sure. And let me talk about the CEO role again. You know, Miami makes great leaders, whether it's industry you know, elected government officials, entrepreneurs, Cradle of Coaches, military officers, we really do a great job at creating leaders here. We take them and we shape them and we graduate them. And I always talk about students, about sometimes in your career going along, and a leadership moment will just plop in your lap, and you may not be ready for it, and it may come sooner than you think. But can you tell us a little bit about when that first leadership moment hit you, that first coaching job, and what was it like when you bear the weight of being a head coach?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, so my first head coaching experience was at Xavier University, and moving sliding over six inches, they always say is a huge deal going from assistant coach to head coach, because now you're you're not no longer making a suggestion, you're making the decision, right? And that was a big adjustment for me. And I'll be quite honest, I don't know if I was quite ready for that. I don't know if anybody is, until you just get thrown into it.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So you're kind of learning how to fly the plane mid air,
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So to speak, which is difficult. So I made several mistakes. I think you learned through your experiences.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And, and, and I still make a ton of mistakes every day, but I just try to learn from them, and I try to own them with our guys. When I do make the mistakes, I want them to know that, listen, I'm not perfect, but I own things, and I want to get better, but the leadership, and you said this about Miami, I think one of the things that really excited me about joining this fraternity that we have, this university, was just the people.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
I mean, it's incredible. The alumni base and the things that people are doing that came from Miami, it's as good as any place in the country.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, absolutely.
Coach Travis Steele
The brand is unbelievable.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
And I'm just blessed just to be a part of it now. But you're part of the Miami brand, my family and I, so which we're really excited about.
President Greg Crawford
Well, we all, you know, one of the elements of leadership too, is people often ask, what's so special about it at Miami? What creates these leaders? And you talk to them, CEOs and our graduates, and it's all kinds of things -- a broad education, love and honor comes up quite often, he Greek system I was part of and led there first, the community element, being in a small town, etc. But I think there's one element of Miami, which is students first, and whether it's faculty or staff, they greet students with this big, bright smile. We know our mission, we know our purpose, and we are intensely focused on those students, so we prioritize them, and they know we care about them. And we see that in your program too, how much you care for your student athletes. And so we're grateful, because that's a part of the student first environment that we created here.
Coach Travis Steele
And you see the benefits that everybody else students get from it. It's incredible.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
So you've worked with some of the most respected coaches in the country in college basketball. What's one lesson about leadership that you've carried from them, and how have you made that your own here at Miami?
Coach Travis Steele
You know, after every game, win or loss, you can't be too emotional. You have to be very careful what you say in that locker room. I got that from Kelvin Sampson. I worked for him several years ago at Indiana University, and he would have it almost scripted exactly what he was going to say win or loss after every game. And because you can get very frustrated, right? We all want to win.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Well, we want to win every game, but there is a bigger picture, and you got to take emotion out of the equation. And it's amazing. When you go back and watch the film, you actually may see some different things, and you don't want to misspeak to your team, as far as you know, is what you thought the problems were with the game, until you actually watch that film. So I think just not taking emotion out of the equation with leadership helps you make better decisions.
President Greg Crawford
So tell me this halftime could have all kinds of circumstances.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
You could be behind, you could be ahead, and maybe this, maybe the players are goofing off in the locker room.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
They got it in their back pocket.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
You know, there's all kinds of places you can be at halftime. How do you decide what to tell them. I mean, are you thinking about that during the first half, or are you? Do you make it up as you on the fly or?
Coach Travis Steele
So yeah, it's a good question. You kind of read the room a little bit. So I usually go in with a plan, but then I can, you know, you adjust very quickly. We try to break the game down into what we call four minute rounds, right? There's 10 of them in the game, 40 minutes for us, and we try to treat each round as its own game.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, interesting.
Coach Travis Steele
So that a way to keep breaking into smaller parts. So you have a winner. So every time we go to our media timeouts, we'll say, 'hey, we were one and oh, we won that round.' And you know, then we'll move on to the next one that maybe we're one on one now, and at halftime, I'll usually tell them, hey, we're three and two in the rounds, or whatever. We are two and three. You know, we have to focus on these next four minute segment, especially coming out of the half's really big.
President Greg Crawford
Yes, yes.
Coach Travis Steele
Right? Because that can that's a big momentum breaker. The end of the halves and beginning of halves are incredibly important.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I'm gonna start using that strategy. I like it.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Well, you've become a mentor to your players in addition to being their coach. So how do you approach mentoring young athletes, and what do you hope your influence teaches them beyond basketball?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, I'm blessed to be around our guys. They create so much joy and happiness for me. I'm so excited to be around them every day. You know, I think number one, can I help prepare them for life after basketball? They everybody thinks they're going to play in the NBA,
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Until they don't.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And then what's their plan? Our job is here at Miami, is you're getting a great education, and then we're going to help prepare you for the real world, to be a man, to be able to overcome adversity. And that's one of the great things about sports, is you get to you get to work with a team, right? And then you have to play a role. You have to star in your role, and then you also have to be able to overcome that adversity piece. And a thing I love about basketball is that it's a little bit different than even like a football. Football, if you throw an interception, you get to go over on the sideline, talk to the coaches for a little bit, maybe talk to the guy up in the box who's seeing stuff. Basketball, if you turn the ball over, you got to go next play yesterday, because otherwise we're giving up a layup or dunk at the other end. And just, I think it ties into life. You know, we're all gonna we all face adversity every single day. It's what is our response to that will dictate a lot of how successful we are. And so we try to train our guys on those responses. And then you get to see it live happen during the game. And I love when you see other teammates try to rally around there, and maybe a teammate that's struggling and going through it in the moment, man, honestly, that makes me feel so proud, yeah, that I don't have to do our players are doing like when you have Peter Suder or Evan Ipsaro or Eian Elmer, who are three captains now doing that, man, that's way louder than me.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, for sure. Let's first follow up on that team comment, because leadership isn't just about one person. It's not about one player, but it's about your team and the effort in playing together. So how do you cultivate. That shared leadership amongst your players, so that everyone has a role in guiding that team during a game.
Coach Travis Steele
So number one, we vote our captains from from our their teammates. Oh, great. So Eian and Peter and Evan were voted as captains, but everybody is responding. Make it very clear to our team, everybody's responsible for leadership. I don't care if you're a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. I don't care if you average 20 a game or two points per game, everybody's responsible for it, and you got to number one, lead by example. Some guys are a little bit more, are a lot louder, use their voice more, but everybody can lead by example, and that's your job, you know. So invest in one another and help each other pull each other through the one thing that I think I've done a better job of here, as far as developing leaders within our program than I did maybe at Xavier's. I give those guys more ownership. I let them have a say. I let Peter, Eian, and Evan. I let them have a say in a lot of the things that we do. And it's amazing, their commitment level to skyrockets when they feel like they have that ownership.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, what do you tell them about the importance of, you know, being all in as a team member?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, and it's in. I always say everybody's all in until the first game when playing times divvied out, right? Everybody's excited,
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Right. And then it's all of a sudden like, oh man, well, I'm only gonna play one minute or two minutes a game, or I'm not playing at all. Am I still excited and invested in my teammates and in the core values, right? That's a true test of it. And like, I give a great example of Dan Luers last year, Dan was a fifth year player, barely played, was voted as a captain by his teammates. Never changed, yeah, and he was a critical, he was critical to our success of our team last year. He may have not got like, all the accolades is all the points and in minutes, but man, did he have a huge, huge impact on our program. That's why we brought him back as a graduate assistant is because I was so impressed with him. I was blown away, just with his his disposition.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's great. I didn't know he was back.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. Thank God. He can still play. A little bit too.
President Greg Crawford
Fantastic. Well, you know, balancing athletics and academics is not easy. We know how much time student athletes put into it, and then also how much time they put into the classroom to be successful there. How do you help your players stay grounded with their academic goals while also chasing their athletic dreams?
Coach Travis Steele
We make it very clear on the front end, before a young man comes here that, listen, this is the best of both worlds. You're getting an incredible education, and you can get a great athletic experience here as well. And we want them to pursue both. And to do that, it takes a great commitment, great focus. You have to time management is huge, right? Because we got practice, and then you got conditioning, and then you got to go study hall, and then you got class. Got a lot of different things going on. So we try to help them, really teach them with the time management piece. And my goal is to kind of move them on from when they're freshmen to sophomores to juniors to where hopefully they're not in study hall anymore, yeah, because nobody's going to hold their hand once they get to the real world, right? So now I can put them right back into study hall if I feel like they're going the other direction, if it's not working, but hopefully we're we're building up our young men to be self sustainable, yeah, that they can sustain themselves by themselves, and don't need to be held their hand.
President Greg Crawford
When you think about the pressures on these student athletes, they're intense, and they're immense, for sure. So how do you and your staff lead in ways that support your players mental health and also help them develop more resilience at the same time?
Coach Travis Steele
I think number one, just having a great pulse of where your players are at, mindset wise, have an understanding of what they're going through. They're not just basketball players to your point. They're going through things, whether their girlfriend breaks up with them, or something's happening back at home with mom or dad. And there's a million different things that impact our guys and and having a great pulse on that's really important. Our assistant coaches, Khristian Smith, Jonathan Holmes, Ben Botts and Carl Richburg do an incredible job of we try to touch our guys, have a conversation with every one of our players before we practice, because I need to know kind of where they are. And some days, listen, the guy may have struggled on a test, and I like to know that before I go into practice, so I can put my arm around him a little bit, say, It's okay, as long as we worked hard and we control, focused on the things that we can control, it's okay, all right. We'll learn from this, and we'll get better. And I think otherwise, you start getting on guys and you don't know what's going through their mind, and you could tell they're a little bit off. The old way of coaching would be, you'd start getting on them harder. And I don't think that's really the right thing to do. Sometimes that can hurt you more than help you.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So just having a great pulse, I think, is really, really important in that regard.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's great. It's great that you talk to your players, because there's all kinds of things.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
They got school and everything else going on. And, you know, we all have bad days.
Coach Travis Steele
We all have bad days. We all do.
President Greg Crawford
Sometimes we can interpret things the way people react to you in the wrong way because they're having a bad day.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
We're glad you do that. It's great.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah. Well, analytics and. Of science are changing the approach just everything that we do, and certainly in athletics and how we play the game. How do you balance a data driven decision making with that of the human side of leadership and relationships?
Coach Travis Steele
It's hard. It's complicated. I think number one, it's made basketball and all sports a lot more efficient. It's a battle of efficiency. So we look at data from as far as who's good playing like when they're out on the floor playing together. So whether it's two teammates or three teammates, we'll see what, who's not good playing together, or maybe this lineups not as good taking care of the ball versus rebounding in certain situations, how we operate at the end of halves, offensively and how we operate the end of games may be very different from how we operate the other 38 minutes of the game. So there's a, we use a lot of analytics, a lot. I'm big into it. Now, I also always say, listen, if I go with my gut feel I will do that at times as well. Because, you know, analytics tell you a lot, but I still do think that there's a place for the eye test and the gut. But again, numbers do not lie, so usually I try to make sure the analytics match up with my eye.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And that tells me that that what I'm seeing is correct, yeah.
President Greg Crawford
And how just curious, when you look back at your first, maybe your first assistant coaching job, and then you look forward to today. How much has data changed? Is that?
Coach Travis Steele
A lot? Yeah, I can't even it's it's done a 180.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah?
Coach Travis Steele
I mean, when I first started coaching, date myself all the way back to Ohio State, there was none of this that, no talks of like a lineup, projections, guys, defensive leverage, offensive leverage, all the different things. It's really, really changed, and it's made the sport better.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, because there's so much data that you have.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
It's glare.
Coach Travis Steele
And you can get too much. I think sometimes you can look into it too deep. So I think you got to figure out what, what kind of like, which ones you kind of like, which ones you're going to use consistently, because, to your point, there's just so much out there.
President Greg Crawford
And we had on campus, when we opened up the McVey data sciences building, we had famous Billy Bean here.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Who has the Oakland A's GM, and who was a full on data, and he would talk about data would take emotion out of the game. Does that do the same for you or not?
Coach Travis Steele
It does.
President Greg Crawford
It does?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, it does. And you know, we use some of our students here at Miami to do our they do a lot of our analytical data for us, which has been awesome.
President Greg Crawford
Like, what a great internship, huh?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. And, I mean, it's been off the charts. I mean, the amount of work. And they get us to us right after every game. I'll have it on my desk within probably two hours of the game. I'll have it all my desk as far as kind of how the game went. And again. It just helps you match up again, your eye test with the numbers, and it helps guide us.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's fantastic. That's a great experience for our students that are want to get in that field.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. It's been great for us.
President Greg Crawford
You've taken a unique approach focusing more on the high school athletes to recruit to Miami. And all of us know, and all of our listeners know the transfer portal. We've heard it time and time again. And in fact, when you watch, you know TV and games, whether it's football or basketball or whatever it is, they you hear about all the players where they transferred from, and there's very few that are now spending all the four years at the same university tell us why this recruiting in high school is important to you, and that's a major strategy for you as a coach, and your culture and and why you do it that way?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, I think number one, it's the uniqueness of Miami. This is an elite academic school. I think that helps keeps young men here and young ladies here, people that fit Miami. But I also think that, you know why everybody else has kind of been zigging, we've been zagging a little bit. And I think being different is good. And lot of people were afraid we've been the only school in the Mac at least from men's basketball standpoint, that's taken multiple freshmen and played multiple freshmen every year since I've been here. And I think everybody else was like, Well, hey, that's not going to work. Yeah, that's what all these other coaches thought, and which is fine, but again, it can work at Miami. It may not be able to work somewhere else, but Miami's unique, just the campus, the social life here, the connection to the university, the academics, it's a unique place. So people love this place. And so I knew I felt like we could build through high school and use that kind of as our main source, and then use the transfer portal kind of as a supplemental source of recruitment for us. And I think that helps, kind of with our culture, Bill, maintain it, because it's super important if you have to change your whole team every year. I mean, culture is going to be really difficult. You're just going to try to win with talent. And can that be done? Yeah, it's done. But I think the best way here at Miami specifically is to win with culture. And to be able to do that, you need continuity.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, just this is not about you. A coach or not about Miami, but I just it's something on the national level. I'd love to get your perspective on. But you know, what you hear out there is that when new coaches take on a head coaching role, they no longer have three or four years to pull this together. But the expectation from, you know, the fans and alumni base, etc, is to use the transfer portal and, you know, start winning. And, you know, year one, yeah, but I think that is somewhat true. But I'd love to get your perspective on it.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, it was funny. I told David sailor, this our athletic director, who does a phenomenal job. I told him, right when I met with him after I took the job, and I said, David, this is gonna take till year three. I just want to be crystal clear with you, I'm going to go the long term route. You're not going to see a ton of growth the first year. Just stay with me. I said, year three, you'll have a chance to win this thing. And I said, then we'll be, from then on, there, we'll be at the very top of the league, and hopefully more than top of league. We want to be, you know, nationally, a top 25 program in the country and and, but to your point, with the transfer portal, you are able to flip your roster very, very quickly nowadays and and so it used to be when you transfer a young man or young lady would have to sit out. Well now you get that immediate eligibility, so you can flip your roster very quickly, so there is more pressure to do it now. Yes, we want results now and but I also think if you even look at like, the NFL, NBA, even the professional, the ones that give the coaches a little bit of time, it's amazing what ends up happening, yeah, but we all want it now, like I do too. I want to win, like, year one. I want we won. I think it was 11 games. It was the longest year I've ever had coaching. But it was fun though. I had a great group of guys, and they were coachable, but like, we wanted to win now, I wanted to win then just but we also didn't want to ever, short, take any shortcuts to hurt us in that long term.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, I love that strategy with recruiting, because it is important for Miami. It's a very different place, very unique and distinctive in so many ways. But that also reflects itself in trying to capture these students coming in from high school and keep them here for four years so we can cheer them on. So you've said that learning to build teams is key to success in any field. What lessons from building a basketball team do you think apply directly to students, faculty and professionals outside of athletics.
Coach Travis Steele
I think if you can build a team of basketball players and to all work together, I think you can build a team in anything business, faculty with students in anything outside of athletics, you know, I think number one, getting pieces of the puzzle that fit together, from personality standpoint, strengths and weaknesses standpoint, we all have strengths and weaknesses. I got a lot of weaknesses, but I've done a great job of building a staff around me. I have great awareness of who I am, and I've been able to hire guys around me that can kind of fill those gaps that maybe I don't bring to the table. And same thing with the players, you know, like Peter Suder is a is an awesome basketball player, but he's not a perfect basketball player. Nobody is, not even LeBron James or Michael Jordan. You know, you got to find guys around those guys that can fill the gaps for them, and then get guys to understand their roles, buy into their roles, and star in their roles, which is very, very difficult to do.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, so basketball has the power to bring a community together, and we've seen that at Millet, very exciting year that you and the team had. How do you see your program strengthening the Miami and the Oxford community? And why is that so important to you? As a leader, we want to
Coach Travis Steele
give the community and our students and our faculty something very, very, very proud of. We want to win, and we're going to win a lot of games. But we're winning with the right guys. And it's not just winning, it's the brand, the style of basketball. We talked about, the teamwork like so offensively, you know, we're really big on passing the ball. We're the number one team in our league in assists per game, but we also play really fast, so it means our guys play the right way. They they're connected. Same thing defensively. Are We Connected? On that end, playing as hard as we can, leaving it all out there, and then also being extremely, extremely connected, right? Because I think that resonates with our faculty, the community here in Oxford, the students, when you can get behind people that are doing it the right way?
President Greg Crawford
Well, that's great. So you have a basketball graduate goes off, works in the real world 510, years from now, what do you hope that he learned from the experience here at Miami, and also your mentorship as a coach?
Coach Travis Steele
Hopefully living out the core values you know, we want to compete in everything that we do. You know, just competition. You know, breeds. It makes people become the best version of themselves. And number one, you're competing with yourself. That's always tell these guys, not just you're competing against the other team or your teammates. In practice, you're competing against yourself. The teamwork element, you know, we call it, carry your brother, you know, being invested in others. Man, that's the key to having. Happiness is thinking of others more and yourself less, you know, embodying undeniable confidence. And that's part of that is I explained to them, everybody wants confidence, but that's earned through embracing the process. And you got to be mentally tough to be confident, because we're all going to it's like, for example, if Ian Elmer misses two threes in a row that next time he's open, he's got to shoot it. He can't hesitate, and he's earned that right with all the work that he's put in and then constantly striving for more. Like I said, I sometimes you'll win a couple games and you always get worried with our team, well, then we're going to get humbled very quickly. Take your foot off the pedal just a little bit. Think it's natural human tendency, and it's we all talk about adversity a lot, but it's good to talk about prosperity too. That's when you got to push the pedal all the way down and live life every single day to its fullest. So hopefully they'll take a lot of those lessons with them once they leave Miami, and I'll hope you know, help them impact the world moving forward.
President Greg Crawford
Just a couple of personal questions for you. So how's it like to play against your brother? Is it different? No any other coach, or is it a different game for you? Your mom, we we heard her speak and be interviewed before
Coach Travis Steele
I would say, for my mom, it's very, very our mom, it's very difficult. Yeah, she is absolutely torn. Yes, I would say it's no different when the game starts, when the ball's tipped me, it's on. I mean, he's playing to win. We're playing to win. Obviously, you know, they've been pretty good, and they've been very good in the league for a long time, Akron and so it makes the rivalry that much better, right? But there's a lot of bragging rights. We're absolutely gonna go on for the next year. So we got to make sure we beat them this year, absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
So last question, so, what are you most excited about this year with your team? Well, yeah, great season last year.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, you know, I get it. Just excited to go on this journey with our guys. I can't tell you guys that words don't do it justice. How good of guys we have. It makes it so fun the journey. And I think we all are all caught up in the result. I love the journey, the day to day grind, the practices, the film, the ups and downs. I get excited for the downs too, even those parts, because that's when you get better. That's when you lean into it. It's what I told our guys after we lost to hacker and the in the Mac tournament game, champion championship game is a tough way to lose. Felt like we deserved to win, but we didn't win. But those moments are what make you who you are, and you have a choice to figure out, how bad do you really want this? And it's allowed us to have a great offseason, kind of moving into the season. And I'm just excited to go on this journey with the guys. The guys make it a lot of fun. They really do. We got a great group.
President Greg Crawford
And your first-years, your freshman coming in, who should we keep our eye on?
Coach Travis Steele
Woo that's a good we got, we got five of them.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, my goodness, I didn't realize you have so many.
Coach Travis Steele
We have five. And I would tell you they all can they're all very good. If I had to say one, I'm gonna say maybe. Tyler Robbins, he's a 610, 611, young man out of Upper St Clair, yeah, in Pittsburgh, really skilled, and he's big and he's long, so he's got a chance to be a really good player.
President Greg Crawford
Well, great. Well, Coach Steele, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great to hear all your thoughts and philosophies on values and leadership, and thank you for doing such a great job with our student athletes and being a part of our campus and then the culture that we cherish so much here of love and honor.
Coach Travis Steele
Thank you for having me on. We appreciate everything you do, President Crawford for Miami.
President Greg Crawford
Well, thank you. That was great.
Coach Travis Steele
Boom.
President Greg Crawford
Oh my gosh. That was awesome.
Coach Travis Steele
Not bad.
President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of in such a place, from Miami University. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found you.
You're the first coach.
Coach Travis Steele
Wow.
President Greg Crawford
I know.
Coach Travis Steele
This is exciting. This is a cool little area.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I think we should get a MAC referee in here too.
Coach Travis Steele
Right?
President Greg Crawford
Hello. I'm Greg Crawford, president of Miami University, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Athletics play a unique role in higher education, shaping student growth, community engagement, and leadership in ways that extend far beyond the court or playing field. Joining today is Travis Steele, Miami's head men's basketball coach with experience from high school to Division I, Coach Steele has built a program centered on culture, leadership, student success, and more. We will explore how athletics can prepare students for a life beyond sports, the lessons of leadership and teamwork, and the ways athletic programs contribute to the broader mission of higher education. Welcome to the podcast, Coach Steele!
Coach Travis Steele
I'm really excited to be here today.
President Greg Crawford
Let's start with a little bit of an introduction. Tell us a little bit about your educational background, how you began in coaching, and how long you've been at Miami?
Coach Travis Steele
Well, I started back at Danville High School, which is a small town right outside of Indianapolis, and then I attended Butler University, right in Indianapolis. Got my undergraduate from there, majored in business, but I kind of always knew I wanted to coach basketball. You said, I've coached at high school level. I've coached at the junior college level, Division I level, for several years. And my brother, who's actually now, I hate to even say it, he's the head coach at Akron, one of one of the other teams in our league, in a lot of ways, I was kind of his shadow growing up. You know, he's about 11 years older than I am, so I knew I wanted to coach and help give back and help young people. And this is a way that we felt like that I could really impact the world.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that's fantastic. I just curious on your business degree. You went into business, and maybe you always did want to go into coaching, but what kind of element of that degree in business helped you coach?
Coach Travis Steele
I think everything number one, ability to communicate, sales, marketing. A lot of the classes that I took I still use on a day to day basis, because in a lot of ways, I always kind of view myself as like the CEO of the men's basketball program. Oh yeah, you kind of oversee all the managers, all the players, all our staff, how I can create a culture and a vision for our program. So and my education experience at Butler has been instrumental in kind of in my career.
President Greg Crawford
How do you see athletics, and basketball in particular, contributing to the larger mission of higher ed beyond the court?
Coach Travis Steele
I think number one, you know, given students an incredible experience here, giving them something to be excited about and rally around. You know, hopefully we're winning and and packing Millet and making it a really tough place to play, so they'll have memories for them, with them for the rest of their lives. And then same thing with all the alumni. How can we connect some of them being excited hopefully we're playing into March into the NCAA Tournament, where you're filling us out on that March Madness bracket Miami, hopefully advancing deep into the NCAA tournament. I think that can create a lot of pride and connection to our university.
President Greg Crawford
That's great. It really does build spirit and camaraderie, you know, when they students get to go and cheer on the team, and when you have the bigger crowds at Millet, you know? And knowing that in the past, we've haven't had some big crowds, but this year we had some big ones. You were winning. We had One Miami Day, etc. How does that feel when you got a packed house full of faculty, staff, and all kinds of students?
President Greg Crawford
It feels unbelievable. I mean, it makes a huge difference. It's like the six man almost. It's like the pulse of the arena. Like it just you feel the arena, feel the energy in it. And I know this, our players feel that and this. And we were undefeated in MAC play last year at home for the first time in a long time, and it's because of our honestly, our student attendance, our faculty showing up at games and making it a tough place to play.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, I love to see that that level of excitement and spirit around campus. So currently in today's world, higher education is being questioned in so many ways which we have never seen before, from its cost to its relevance. What role do you see athletics playing in restoring confidence in the broader mission of the university?
Coach Travis Steele
It's a great question. You know, I think I'm hopeful that when people watch our teams here, we have several good coaches in our athletic department that people have a sense of pride, not only that we win, but we're winning the right way, with culture, with great people. I know love and honor is a huge saying here, but people that love one another and have a great honor for just everything that we do, honor all those that came before us. There's more than just winning right, winning the right way, I think is very, very, very important.
President Greg Crawford
That's well said. So let's follow up on that culture comment. So what does building culture really mean to you? What does it mean to your players, and how does that translate into preparing young people for a life after basketball?
Coach Travis Steele
This has been my number one focus since I've came here. You know, we use our core values, kind of as our North Star, so to speak. Obviously, we teach them to our players, what who we are and what they what they mean, but then we have to make them come to life. And that's probably the most difficult part, right? Is what I call, kind of our culture guardrails and but I think it all starts with just evaluating who fits, right? I think because we're allowed to recruit our our student athletes, unlike some high schools you kind of have who you have, you know, here we get to recruit our guys. And always say we recruit people, not players, you know. So they have to fit our core values. And our four core values are very simple. Number one, compete at every moment. Number two, carry your brother. Number three, embody undeniable confidence. And number four, strive for more. And when we go out and watch these players, I think anybody can evaluate, hey, this guy's really good at basketball. He's talented, but sometimes we get blinded by that talent, and we just take a talent grab. Well, usually that doesn't work out. It's got to be a little bit more detailed of like and purposeful to say, 'Hey, listen, they fit our four core, values who we are,' and that helps them come to life naturally. Now we also do our culture guardrails, which I said earlier, is like, how do we hold ourselves accountable to making these four core values come to life and and that's it there. Nothing makes me more proud, quite honestly, when I see them come to life naturally and organically.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, all that I love your core values. I didn't know about those. That's great.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, fantastic. So your team, you have all kinds of moving parts. Then essentially, you're the CEO of this organization, with other coaches, assistant coaches, strength coaches, all the players. You got family members coming. You got parents. You have a lot to deal with. How do you define leadership in that kind of role as a CEO, and how has your leadership style evolved throughout your coaching career?
Coach Travis Steele
Think as I've gotten older, you just think about others. You know, I always have an open door. I don't it doesn't matter what I'm doing. If a player, I want the players to come into my office. I want our staff to come into my office. But it's just being focused on others. How can I help them, right, ultimately be the best version of themselves? Now, part of that is accountability piece, right? How am I holding them accountable on a day to day basis, everybody within our within the men's basketball organization, and keep everybody heading in the right, in the same direction, pulling it this in the same direction, can be very difficult in this landscape, especially with the transfer portal and just all that's going on in college athletics makes it more difficult.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, for sure. And let me talk about the CEO role again. You know, Miami makes great leaders, whether it's industry you know, elected government officials, entrepreneurs, Cradle of Coaches, military officers, we really do a great job at creating leaders here. We take them and we shape them and we graduate them. And I always talk about students, about sometimes in your career going along, and a leadership moment will just plop in your lap, and you may not be ready for it, and it may come sooner than you think. But can you tell us a little bit about when that first leadership moment hit you, that first coaching job, and what was it like when you bear the weight of being a head coach?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, so my first head coaching experience was at Xavier University, and moving sliding over six inches, they always say is a huge deal going from assistant coach to head coach, because now you're you're not no longer making a suggestion, you're making the decision, right? And that was a big adjustment for me. And I'll be quite honest, I don't know if I was quite ready for that. I don't know if anybody is, until you just get thrown into it.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So you're kind of learning how to fly the plane mid air,
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So to speak, which is difficult. So I made several mistakes. I think you learned through your experiences.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And, and, and I still make a ton of mistakes every day, but I just try to learn from them, and I try to own them with our guys. When I do make the mistakes, I want them to know that, listen, I'm not perfect, but I own things, and I want to get better, but the leadership, and you said this about Miami, I think one of the things that really excited me about joining this fraternity that we have, this university, was just the people.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
I mean, it's incredible. The alumni base and the things that people are doing that came from Miami, it's as good as any place in the country.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, absolutely.
Coach Travis Steele
The brand is unbelievable.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
And I'm just blessed just to be a part of it now. But you're part of the Miami brand, my family and I, so which we're really excited about.
President Greg Crawford
Well, we all, you know, one of the elements of leadership too, is people often ask, what's so special about it at Miami? What creates these leaders? And you talk to them, CEOs and our graduates, and it's all kinds of things -- a broad education, love and honor comes up quite often, he Greek system I was part of and led there first, the community element, being in a small town, etc. But I think there's one element of Miami, which is students first, and whether it's faculty or staff, they greet students with this big, bright smile. We know our mission, we know our purpose, and we are intensely focused on those students, so we prioritize them, and they know we care about them. And we see that in your program too, how much you care for your student athletes. And so we're grateful, because that's a part of the student first environment that we created here.
Coach Travis Steele
And you see the benefits that everybody else students get from it. It's incredible.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
So you've worked with some of the most respected coaches in the country in college basketball. What's one lesson about leadership that you've carried from them, and how have you made that your own here at Miami?
Coach Travis Steele
You know, after every game, win or loss, you can't be too emotional. You have to be very careful what you say in that locker room. I got that from Kelvin Sampson. I worked for him several years ago at Indiana University, and he would have it almost scripted exactly what he was going to say win or loss after every game. And because you can get very frustrated, right? We all want to win.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Well, we want to win every game, but there is a bigger picture, and you got to take emotion out of the equation. And it's amazing. When you go back and watch the film, you actually may see some different things, and you don't want to misspeak to your team, as far as you know, is what you thought the problems were with the game, until you actually watch that film. So I think just not taking emotion out of the equation with leadership helps you make better decisions.
President Greg Crawford
So tell me this halftime could have all kinds of circumstances.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
You could be behind, you could be ahead, and maybe this, maybe the players are goofing off in the locker room.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
They got it in their back pocket.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
You know, there's all kinds of places you can be at halftime. How do you decide what to tell them. I mean, are you thinking about that during the first half, or are you? Do you make it up as you on the fly or?
Coach Travis Steele
So yeah, it's a good question. You kind of read the room a little bit. So I usually go in with a plan, but then I can, you know, you adjust very quickly. We try to break the game down into what we call four minute rounds, right? There's 10 of them in the game, 40 minutes for us, and we try to treat each round as its own game.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, interesting.
Coach Travis Steele
So that a way to keep breaking into smaller parts. So you have a winner. So every time we go to our media timeouts, we'll say, 'hey, we were one and oh, we won that round.' And you know, then we'll move on to the next one that maybe we're one on one now, and at halftime, I'll usually tell them, hey, we're three and two in the rounds, or whatever. We are two and three. You know, we have to focus on these next four minute segment, especially coming out of the half's really big.
President Greg Crawford
Yes, yes.
Coach Travis Steele
Right? Because that can that's a big momentum breaker. The end of the halves and beginning of halves are incredibly important.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I'm gonna start using that strategy. I like it.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Well, you've become a mentor to your players in addition to being their coach. So how do you approach mentoring young athletes, and what do you hope your influence teaches them beyond basketball?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, I'm blessed to be around our guys. They create so much joy and happiness for me. I'm so excited to be around them every day. You know, I think number one, can I help prepare them for life after basketball? They everybody thinks they're going to play in the NBA,
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Until they don't.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And then what's their plan? Our job is here at Miami, is you're getting a great education, and then we're going to help prepare you for the real world, to be a man, to be able to overcome adversity. And that's one of the great things about sports, is you get to you get to work with a team, right? And then you have to play a role. You have to star in your role, and then you also have to be able to overcome that adversity piece. And a thing I love about basketball is that it's a little bit different than even like a football. Football, if you throw an interception, you get to go over on the sideline, talk to the coaches for a little bit, maybe talk to the guy up in the box who's seeing stuff. Basketball, if you turn the ball over, you got to go next play yesterday, because otherwise we're giving up a layup or dunk at the other end. And just, I think it ties into life. You know, we're all gonna we all face adversity every single day. It's what is our response to that will dictate a lot of how successful we are. And so we try to train our guys on those responses. And then you get to see it live happen during the game. And I love when you see other teammates try to rally around there, and maybe a teammate that's struggling and going through it in the moment, man, honestly, that makes me feel so proud, yeah, that I don't have to do our players are doing like when you have Peter Suder or Evan Ipsaro or Eian Elmer, who are three captains now doing that, man, that's way louder than me.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, for sure. Let's first follow up on that team comment, because leadership isn't just about one person. It's not about one player, but it's about your team and the effort in playing together. So how do you cultivate. That shared leadership amongst your players, so that everyone has a role in guiding that team during a game.
Coach Travis Steele
So number one, we vote our captains from from our their teammates. Oh, great. So Eian and Peter and Evan were voted as captains, but everybody is responding. Make it very clear to our team, everybody's responsible for leadership. I don't care if you're a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. I don't care if you average 20 a game or two points per game, everybody's responsible for it, and you got to number one, lead by example. Some guys are a little bit more, are a lot louder, use their voice more, but everybody can lead by example, and that's your job, you know. So invest in one another and help each other pull each other through the one thing that I think I've done a better job of here, as far as developing leaders within our program than I did maybe at Xavier's. I give those guys more ownership. I let them have a say. I let Peter, Eian, and Evan. I let them have a say in a lot of the things that we do. And it's amazing, their commitment level to skyrockets when they feel like they have that ownership.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, what do you tell them about the importance of, you know, being all in as a team member?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, and it's in. I always say everybody's all in until the first game when playing times divvied out, right? Everybody's excited,
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
Right. And then it's all of a sudden like, oh man, well, I'm only gonna play one minute or two minutes a game, or I'm not playing at all. Am I still excited and invested in my teammates and in the core values, right? That's a true test of it. And like, I give a great example of Dan Luers last year, Dan was a fifth year player, barely played, was voted as a captain by his teammates. Never changed, yeah, and he was a critical, he was critical to our success of our team last year. He may have not got like, all the accolades is all the points and in minutes, but man, did he have a huge, huge impact on our program. That's why we brought him back as a graduate assistant is because I was so impressed with him. I was blown away, just with his his disposition.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's great. I didn't know he was back.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. Thank God. He can still play. A little bit too.
President Greg Crawford
Fantastic. Well, you know, balancing athletics and academics is not easy. We know how much time student athletes put into it, and then also how much time they put into the classroom to be successful there. How do you help your players stay grounded with their academic goals while also chasing their athletic dreams?
Coach Travis Steele
We make it very clear on the front end, before a young man comes here that, listen, this is the best of both worlds. You're getting an incredible education, and you can get a great athletic experience here as well. And we want them to pursue both. And to do that, it takes a great commitment, great focus. You have to time management is huge, right? Because we got practice, and then you got conditioning, and then you got to go study hall, and then you got class. Got a lot of different things going on. So we try to help them, really teach them with the time management piece. And my goal is to kind of move them on from when they're freshmen to sophomores to juniors to where hopefully they're not in study hall anymore, yeah, because nobody's going to hold their hand once they get to the real world, right? So now I can put them right back into study hall if I feel like they're going the other direction, if it's not working, but hopefully we're we're building up our young men to be self sustainable, yeah, that they can sustain themselves by themselves, and don't need to be held their hand.
President Greg Crawford
When you think about the pressures on these student athletes, they're intense, and they're immense, for sure. So how do you and your staff lead in ways that support your players mental health and also help them develop more resilience at the same time?
Coach Travis Steele
I think number one, just having a great pulse of where your players are at, mindset wise, have an understanding of what they're going through. They're not just basketball players to your point. They're going through things, whether their girlfriend breaks up with them, or something's happening back at home with mom or dad. And there's a million different things that impact our guys and and having a great pulse on that's really important. Our assistant coaches, Khristian Smith, Jonathan Holmes, Ben Botts and Carl Richburg do an incredible job of we try to touch our guys, have a conversation with every one of our players before we practice, because I need to know kind of where they are. And some days, listen, the guy may have struggled on a test, and I like to know that before I go into practice, so I can put my arm around him a little bit, say, It's okay, as long as we worked hard and we control, focused on the things that we can control, it's okay, all right. We'll learn from this, and we'll get better. And I think otherwise, you start getting on guys and you don't know what's going through their mind, and you could tell they're a little bit off. The old way of coaching would be, you'd start getting on them harder. And I don't think that's really the right thing to do. Sometimes that can hurt you more than help you.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
So just having a great pulse, I think, is really, really important in that regard.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's great. It's great that you talk to your players, because there's all kinds of things.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
They got school and everything else going on. And, you know, we all have bad days.
Coach Travis Steele
We all have bad days. We all do.
President Greg Crawford
Sometimes we can interpret things the way people react to you in the wrong way because they're having a bad day.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
We're glad you do that. It's great.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah. Well, analytics and. Of science are changing the approach just everything that we do, and certainly in athletics and how we play the game. How do you balance a data driven decision making with that of the human side of leadership and relationships?
Coach Travis Steele
It's hard. It's complicated. I think number one, it's made basketball and all sports a lot more efficient. It's a battle of efficiency. So we look at data from as far as who's good playing like when they're out on the floor playing together. So whether it's two teammates or three teammates, we'll see what, who's not good playing together, or maybe this lineups not as good taking care of the ball versus rebounding in certain situations, how we operate at the end of halves, offensively and how we operate the end of games may be very different from how we operate the other 38 minutes of the game. So there's a, we use a lot of analytics, a lot. I'm big into it. Now, I also always say, listen, if I go with my gut feel I will do that at times as well. Because, you know, analytics tell you a lot, but I still do think that there's a place for the eye test and the gut. But again, numbers do not lie, so usually I try to make sure the analytics match up with my eye.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah.
Coach Travis Steele
And that tells me that that what I'm seeing is correct, yeah.
President Greg Crawford
And how just curious, when you look back at your first, maybe your first assistant coaching job, and then you look forward to today. How much has data changed? Is that?
Coach Travis Steele
A lot? Yeah, I can't even it's it's done a 180.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah?
Coach Travis Steele
I mean, when I first started coaching, date myself all the way back to Ohio State, there was none of this that, no talks of like a lineup, projections, guys, defensive leverage, offensive leverage, all the different things. It's really, really changed, and it's made the sport better.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, because there's so much data that you have.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
It's glare.
Coach Travis Steele
And you can get too much. I think sometimes you can look into it too deep. So I think you got to figure out what, what kind of like, which ones you kind of like, which ones you're going to use consistently, because, to your point, there's just so much out there.
President Greg Crawford
And we had on campus, when we opened up the McVey data sciences building, we had famous Billy Bean here.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah.
President Greg Crawford
Who has the Oakland A's GM, and who was a full on data, and he would talk about data would take emotion out of the game. Does that do the same for you or not?
Coach Travis Steele
It does.
President Greg Crawford
It does?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, it does. And you know, we use some of our students here at Miami to do our they do a lot of our analytical data for us, which has been awesome.
President Greg Crawford
Like, what a great internship, huh?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. And, I mean, it's been off the charts. I mean, the amount of work. And they get us to us right after every game. I'll have it on my desk within probably two hours of the game. I'll have it all my desk as far as kind of how the game went. And again. It just helps you match up again, your eye test with the numbers, and it helps guide us.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's fantastic. That's a great experience for our students that are want to get in that field.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah. It's been great for us.
President Greg Crawford
You've taken a unique approach focusing more on the high school athletes to recruit to Miami. And all of us know, and all of our listeners know the transfer portal. We've heard it time and time again. And in fact, when you watch, you know TV and games, whether it's football or basketball or whatever it is, they you hear about all the players where they transferred from, and there's very few that are now spending all the four years at the same university tell us why this recruiting in high school is important to you, and that's a major strategy for you as a coach, and your culture and and why you do it that way?
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, I think number one, it's the uniqueness of Miami. This is an elite academic school. I think that helps keeps young men here and young ladies here, people that fit Miami. But I also think that, you know why everybody else has kind of been zigging, we've been zagging a little bit. And I think being different is good. And lot of people were afraid we've been the only school in the Mac at least from men's basketball standpoint, that's taken multiple freshmen and played multiple freshmen every year since I've been here. And I think everybody else was like, Well, hey, that's not going to work. Yeah, that's what all these other coaches thought, and which is fine, but again, it can work at Miami. It may not be able to work somewhere else, but Miami's unique, just the campus, the social life here, the connection to the university, the academics, it's a unique place. So people love this place. And so I knew I felt like we could build through high school and use that kind of as our main source, and then use the transfer portal kind of as a supplemental source of recruitment for us. And I think that helps, kind of with our culture, Bill, maintain it, because it's super important if you have to change your whole team every year. I mean, culture is going to be really difficult. You're just going to try to win with talent. And can that be done? Yeah, it's done. But I think the best way here at Miami specifically is to win with culture. And to be able to do that, you need continuity.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, just this is not about you. A coach or not about Miami, but I just it's something on the national level. I'd love to get your perspective on. But you know, what you hear out there is that when new coaches take on a head coaching role, they no longer have three or four years to pull this together. But the expectation from, you know, the fans and alumni base, etc, is to use the transfer portal and, you know, start winning. And, you know, year one, yeah, but I think that is somewhat true. But I'd love to get your perspective on it.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, it was funny. I told David sailor, this our athletic director, who does a phenomenal job. I told him, right when I met with him after I took the job, and I said, David, this is gonna take till year three. I just want to be crystal clear with you, I'm going to go the long term route. You're not going to see a ton of growth the first year. Just stay with me. I said, year three, you'll have a chance to win this thing. And I said, then we'll be, from then on, there, we'll be at the very top of the league, and hopefully more than top of league. We want to be, you know, nationally, a top 25 program in the country and and, but to your point, with the transfer portal, you are able to flip your roster very, very quickly nowadays and and so it used to be when you transfer a young man or young lady would have to sit out. Well now you get that immediate eligibility, so you can flip your roster very quickly, so there is more pressure to do it now. Yes, we want results now and but I also think if you even look at like, the NFL, NBA, even the professional, the ones that give the coaches a little bit of time, it's amazing what ends up happening, yeah, but we all want it now, like I do too. I want to win, like, year one. I want we won. I think it was 11 games. It was the longest year I've ever had coaching. But it was fun though. I had a great group of guys, and they were coachable, but like, we wanted to win now, I wanted to win then just but we also didn't want to ever, short, take any shortcuts to hurt us in that long term.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, no, I love that strategy with recruiting, because it is important for Miami. It's a very different place, very unique and distinctive in so many ways. But that also reflects itself in trying to capture these students coming in from high school and keep them here for four years so we can cheer them on. So you've said that learning to build teams is key to success in any field. What lessons from building a basketball team do you think apply directly to students, faculty and professionals outside of athletics.
Coach Travis Steele
I think if you can build a team of basketball players and to all work together, I think you can build a team in anything business, faculty with students in anything outside of athletics, you know, I think number one, getting pieces of the puzzle that fit together, from personality standpoint, strengths and weaknesses standpoint, we all have strengths and weaknesses. I got a lot of weaknesses, but I've done a great job of building a staff around me. I have great awareness of who I am, and I've been able to hire guys around me that can kind of fill those gaps that maybe I don't bring to the table. And same thing with the players, you know, like Peter Suder is a is an awesome basketball player, but he's not a perfect basketball player. Nobody is, not even LeBron James or Michael Jordan. You know, you got to find guys around those guys that can fill the gaps for them, and then get guys to understand their roles, buy into their roles, and star in their roles, which is very, very difficult to do.
President Greg Crawford
Yeah, so basketball has the power to bring a community together, and we've seen that at Millet, very exciting year that you and the team had. How do you see your program strengthening the Miami and the Oxford community? And why is that so important to you? As a leader, we want to
Coach Travis Steele
give the community and our students and our faculty something very, very, very proud of. We want to win, and we're going to win a lot of games. But we're winning with the right guys. And it's not just winning, it's the brand, the style of basketball. We talked about, the teamwork like so offensively, you know, we're really big on passing the ball. We're the number one team in our league in assists per game, but we also play really fast, so it means our guys play the right way. They they're connected. Same thing defensively. Are We Connected? On that end, playing as hard as we can, leaving it all out there, and then also being extremely, extremely connected, right? Because I think that resonates with our faculty, the community here in Oxford, the students, when you can get behind people that are doing it the right way?
President Greg Crawford
Well, that's great. So you have a basketball graduate goes off, works in the real world 510, years from now, what do you hope that he learned from the experience here at Miami, and also your mentorship as a coach?
Coach Travis Steele
Hopefully living out the core values you know, we want to compete in everything that we do. You know, just competition. You know, breeds. It makes people become the best version of themselves. And number one, you're competing with yourself. That's always tell these guys, not just you're competing against the other team or your teammates. In practice, you're competing against yourself. The teamwork element, you know, we call it, carry your brother, you know, being invested in others. Man, that's the key to having. Happiness is thinking of others more and yourself less, you know, embodying undeniable confidence. And that's part of that is I explained to them, everybody wants confidence, but that's earned through embracing the process. And you got to be mentally tough to be confident, because we're all going to it's like, for example, if Ian Elmer misses two threes in a row that next time he's open, he's got to shoot it. He can't hesitate, and he's earned that right with all the work that he's put in and then constantly striving for more. Like I said, I sometimes you'll win a couple games and you always get worried with our team, well, then we're going to get humbled very quickly. Take your foot off the pedal just a little bit. Think it's natural human tendency, and it's we all talk about adversity a lot, but it's good to talk about prosperity too. That's when you got to push the pedal all the way down and live life every single day to its fullest. So hopefully they'll take a lot of those lessons with them once they leave Miami, and I'll hope you know, help them impact the world moving forward.
President Greg Crawford
Just a couple of personal questions for you. So how's it like to play against your brother? Is it different? No any other coach, or is it a different game for you? Your mom, we we heard her speak and be interviewed before
Coach Travis Steele
I would say, for my mom, it's very, very our mom, it's very difficult. Yeah, she is absolutely torn. Yes, I would say it's no different when the game starts, when the ball's tipped me, it's on. I mean, he's playing to win. We're playing to win. Obviously, you know, they've been pretty good, and they've been very good in the league for a long time, Akron and so it makes the rivalry that much better, right? But there's a lot of bragging rights. We're absolutely gonna go on for the next year. So we got to make sure we beat them this year, absolutely.
President Greg Crawford
So last question, so, what are you most excited about this year with your team? Well, yeah, great season last year.
Coach Travis Steele
Yeah, you know, I get it. Just excited to go on this journey with our guys. I can't tell you guys that words don't do it justice. How good of guys we have. It makes it so fun the journey. And I think we all are all caught up in the result. I love the journey, the day to day grind, the practices, the film, the ups and downs. I get excited for the downs too, even those parts, because that's when you get better. That's when you lean into it. It's what I told our guys after we lost to hacker and the in the Mac tournament game, champion championship game is a tough way to lose. Felt like we deserved to win, but we didn't win. But those moments are what make you who you are, and you have a choice to figure out, how bad do you really want this? And it's allowed us to have a great offseason, kind of moving into the season. And I'm just excited to go on this journey with the guys. The guys make it a lot of fun. They really do. We got a great group.
President Greg Crawford
And your first-years, your freshman coming in, who should we keep our eye on?
Coach Travis Steele
Woo that's a good we got, we got five of them.
President Greg Crawford
Oh, my goodness, I didn't realize you have so many.
Coach Travis Steele
We have five. And I would tell you they all can they're all very good. If I had to say one, I'm gonna say maybe. Tyler Robbins, he's a 610, 611, young man out of Upper St Clair, yeah, in Pittsburgh, really skilled, and he's big and he's long, so he's got a chance to be a really good player.
President Greg Crawford
Well, great. Well, Coach Steele, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great to hear all your thoughts and philosophies on values and leadership, and thank you for doing such a great job with our student athletes and being a part of our campus and then the culture that we cherish so much here of love and honor.
Coach Travis Steele
Thank you for having me on. We appreciate everything you do, President Crawford for Miami.
President Greg Crawford
Well, thank you. That was great.
Coach Travis Steele
Boom.
President Greg Crawford
Oh my gosh. That was awesome.
Coach Travis Steele
Not bad.
President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of in such a place, from Miami University. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found you.
Established in 1809, Miami University is located in Oxford, Ohio, with regional campuses in Hamilton and Middletown, a learning center in West Chester, and a European study center in Luxembourg. Interested in learning more about Miami University Athletics? Visit their website for more information.
