Full Name: Mark Frederick Gottfried
Hometown: Tuscaloosa
Birth Date & City: January 20, 1964; Crestline, Ohio
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Biography As the son of a basketball coach, Mark Gottfried's youth found him living in three different states and attending three different high schools in his four years. But there is only one state he calls home.Alabama.
Today Gottfried is "home", living his dream as the new head men's basketball coach at his Alma Mater, Alabama.
The road that led him to this place in time began several hundred miles and several states away. He was born in Crestline, Ohio where his father, Joe Gottfried, coached high school ball all over the state and at Ashland College. The family moved to Carterville, Illinois in time for Mark's freshman year at Carterville High, but a year later, the Gottfrieds moved to Carbondale, Illinois. They'd remain in Carbondale for two years while Mark rose as a up-and-coming basketball talent at Carbondale High School. But just before his senior season, Joe's success caught up with him again. He was offered the assistant athletics director job (he later became A.D.) at the University of South Alabama in Mobile sending his son to his third different high school, this time Mobile's UMS-Wright prep, for his senior year.
But no matter where he was, Mark Gottfried was always happiest in the gym. "My dad was coaching at Ashland College, a Division III school in Ohio when I was little. They practiced starting at three o'clock. So when I was in elementary school, as soon as school got out at three, I'd ride my bike from school to the gym and just stay in the gym while he was practicing then ride home with him. So that was my after school activity basically all of my elementary school years," says Gottfried. "I just had to make sure I wasn't bouncing the ball while he was talking."
His father, Joe, enjoyed having his son around. And he knew, by the intensity in which his only son paid attention to not only his coaching but that of the high school coaches who'd come into town to instruct at summer camps exactly where Mark's career path would lead. "At eight, he knew what he wanted to do," Joe Gottfried has said.
It's a passion that he knows at least some of his own children-he has four sons and a daughter-will likely share. Already his seven-year-old son, Brandon, is a frequent visitor to the parquet at Coleman Coliseum. "I think it's fun for him, not just to hang around the gym but to be around the Coliseum and find little places to hide. I knew the buildings where my dad's teams practiced better than anybody when I was little. My kids will probably be the same way."
Having a father in the business can only help a son who, even as a kid, studies the game from every angle.
"I think it's a process that continues to help me," said Gottfried whose uncle Mike, now a national game-day announcer for ESPN, was a head football coach at, among other places, Kansas before moving to Mobile. "It helped prepare me, but it's continued to be an additional help for me. He's coached on the high school level. He's had players that were recruited. He coached at a small college level where recruiting and running a program were different than they were when he was at a Division I school at Southern Illinois.
"At the very same time, our family is very close. My father is one of three brothers who are all very close because they sort of raised each other after their father died. Dad was the oldest. He was 16 I think when their dad died. My Uncle Mike was at a Division I AA school at Murray State, and coached at Cincinnati, Kansas and Pittsburgh. All those experiences have helped me. Just to sit and watch them ,how they handled different situations, how they built relationships with their players, those were all great ways to learn the business."
Even a distant cousin, Jack Harbaugh, the head coach at Western Kentucky and father of Raven's player Jim Harbaugh, is in on the business. "You were around it everywhere you turned."
The experience led Mark to develop a great respect for the coaching profession. And it led him to believe that coaching would be his vocation. "I can remember things about my dad's teams, watching them come over to eat ham sandwiches or whatever after a game, watching my uncle's football teams holding hands and singing songs together. All those things helped convince me that I wanted to coach and the things they were doing to bring their teams together made a difference."
His uncle Mike tried to get Mark interested in playing football, but it wasn't in the cards. He played baseball briefly but quit after the ninth grade to concentrate on basketball. "I figured if I had a chance to be good, I needed to concentrate on one sport. Basketball was it."
His strategy worked as his points averaged nearly doubled from his sophomore average (14 ppg) at Carbondale to his senior season at UMS (22 ppg, 5 apg). His best play came in Mobile where he emerged as an all-state player and had a career best game of 30 points, 16 assists and seven steals in a game against Alba High School in December of 1981.
Recruiters came calling. He took a visit to Duke. A visit to Ohio State. Unofficial visits to Alabama and Auburn. In the end, however, he chose Oral Roberts. He liked the Academics and the fact that it was a young team on the rise. But at Christmas of his freshman year, the coach was fired. There was a coaching change, and Gottfried wanted out. He considered staying in Oklahoma and going to Tulsa but decided instead to return to Alabama and play for Wimp Sanderson's Crimson Tide.
He signed the scholarship papers on top of a taxi.
"I'd already made the decision that I was going to transfer to Alabama," says Gottfried, smiling, "and Wimp came out to Oral Roberts. He got a hotel room and called me and said he was going to stay in Tulsa until I signed. At some point, it was freezing cold, and he rode a taxi over to where my dorm was, and I went ahead and signed my scholarship papers on the top of the cab so he could go ahead and get out of there."
That name on the dotted line would later prove to be one of the most important signatures Alabama would ever collect.
Gottfried had to sit out the 1984 season as a transfer. By the time he got to play in 1984-85, he led Alabama in free throw shooting, making 50 of 60 attempted that first year for 83.3%. His 27 points in a home loss to Mississippi State earned him Lorimar "Player of the Game" status by the network that used to carry SEC games on television. He was Alabama's regular shooting guard the following season, he was a full-time starter, averaging 10.3 points and helping lead Alabama to the 1987 SEC regular season and SEC tournament championships. Off the court, he was a leader, earning Academic All-SEC in 1987, the same year he was named the University's Bryant Award Winner as the scholar-athlete of the year.
"The success we had here has a lot to do with even my experience at UCLA or Murray State because you learn what it takes to win. I've told people many times with Coach Sanderson there was a demanding effort level every day. You got used to playing so hard. I think more than anything, that's what's been carried with me."
All three seasons he played, Alabama advanced to the NCAA's Sweet 16. He started alongside some of Alabama basketball's greatest success stories: NBA players Derrick McKey, Keith Askins, Michael Ansley, and his Alabama roommate Jim Farmer who he shared dreams of coaching one day at Alabama while Farmer, who played for the Mavericks, dreamed of playing in the NBA.
"The great story about those players who went on to the NBA was that most of the guys, when they came in, they weren't ready-made players. They became players. I always tell my players, even people we're recruiting, that I attribute that to themselves as hard workers and to Coach Sanderson. They made themselves better. That was a compliment to the program."
The volume of NBA players Gottfried played with or coached would only continue to grow.
The Detroit Pistons drafted him in the seventh round of the 1987 draft. Gottfried went to camp, but decided his heart wasn't in the commitment it would take. Always active in his church and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, he took a playing tour with Athletes in Action. In fact, it was at an FCA meeting when he he was a junior at Alabama that he met his future wife, Birmingham's Elizabeth Kozel.
Sanderson offered him a job as a graduate assistant coach. It was tempting. But Gottfried, even at the young age, realized he would have a healthier coaching perspective if he apprenticed somewhere else where he could check out how another program operated. He picked UCLA, at the invitation of its head coach then, Jim Harrick. Gottfried stayed seven seasons. He began as a graduate assistant and worked his way to full-time assistant coach and recruiter. Nine UCLA players he helped coach would go on to the NBA. And UCLA enjoyed phenomenal success, advancing to the NCAA tournament each season and culminating with the 1995 NCAA Championship.
Harrick became his mentor and he introduced Gottfried to one of the college game's greatest coaches, John Wooden who coached the Bruins to several national championships before retiring.
The success at UCLA and Gottfried's reputation as a recruiter-UCLA's 1994 recruiting class was rated the nation's top class-made Gottfried a hot young commodity on the coaching market. With the 1994 national championship, Gottfried had reached the summit as an assistant. He was ready to make a leap in his career, and Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky was ready.
In the western Kentucky community that was rated the No. 1 place in the United State to retire by Rand McNally, Gottfried did anything but rest. His first Racer team was dominated by seniors. He and his staff, which included two assistants he brought with him to Alabama, Tom Kelsey and Philip Pearson, coached like a seasoned staff. The Racers won the Ohio Valley Conference championship and got a berth in the NIT tournament. That 1995 team finished 19-10.
The 1996 season found him in a re-building phase with only one starter returning. No problem. Gottfried's team went 20-10, tied for the OVC championship giving him a place in MSU history as the first coach to win back-to-back titles in his first two seasons, and the Racers got an NCAA tournament bid, falling just four points of upsetting Duke in the tournament.
The NCAA tournament placed Murray State on the dance card again last season when Gottfried's third Racer team won the OVC championship outright and took a 29-3 record into postseason play where his former UCLA boss, Jim Harrick, eliminated Murray State with his Rhode Island team.
His team ended the season with prominent marks in the NCAA's final stats: third in the nation in field goal percentage (50.1, trailing leader North Carolina's 51.8%), fourth in the nation in scoring offense (86.7 ppg), sixth in scoring margin (16.2), seventh in won-lost percentage (29-4), 17th in 3-point field goal percentage (39.7%) and 23rd in rebound margin (37.5). Gottfried also left Murray with a 30-game home winning streak-second in the nation.
Again he was a hot commodity, and when Alabama announced it was in the market, Tide director of athletics Bob Bockrath and university president Andrew Sorensen looked to Murray, Kentucky for their new coach. Gottfried was introduced as Alabama's head coach on March 25, 1998 in front of a packed house of media.
Winning is foremost on his mind.
"I don't think there's any reason why the goals of this basketball program are anything short of putting a national championship on your finger," he said at that press conference.
And he wants to bring together the men who built the program so that they can share in any future successes.
"I think a lot of our basketball tradition, individuals, have been somewhat neglected. We need for those people to feel good about the program and feel good about coming back. We need to welcome those guys back here. We've tried to make an impression on them by including them in mailings and such. But that's not necessarily because I played here. I think you should do that wherever you are. These are the guys who built your programs."
As Gottfried digs into his role as Alabama's head coach, he doubles in his favorite role, that of father to his five kids, Brandon, 7, Mary Layson, 6, Cameron, 3, Aaron, 2, and Dillon, 1.
"I've got a great wife and she's a great mom. She understands the demands of the job, but I don't ever want my kids to feel like my time that I spend at work is more important than my time that I spend with them. I've come to learn the definition of quality time versus quantity time. When our family is together, the TV's off, the phone's off. My favorite moments with them are the simple ones. Playing with them, rolling around and wrestling with them on the floor. We try to make special time with each one individually before bed. It's a full load. No matter what, at 6:20 every morning, they're waking up. Although we still have three in diapers, we're noticing that it's not as demanding as it was. It's still a challenge," he says laughing. "But it's fun. I love people's reactions when they see all the kids. They always say, 'wow' and want to know if any of them are twins. When we say, 'no', then they want to know if we're Catholic."
