Greg Brown, former student coach under Don Meyer, came back to Lipscomb this year, only this time as a head coach.
Brown was a graduate assistant and then assistant coach under Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee and was then an assistant coach at the University of Central Florida before returning to his alma mater, Lipscomb.
“The environment and the culture are the two biggest draws,” Brown said, talking about his return to Lipscomb. Brown said he strongly believes that Lipscomb and Nashville are a wonderful community that he is thankful to return to. He also mentioned how thankful he is to be able to send his two sons to a Christian school.
Brown coached under Don Meyer, a legend not only to Lipscomb but to the basketball world, as well. Brown talked about the influence Meyer had on other legendary coaches.
“As I went to Tennessee, I got to see his influence with Coach [Pat] Summitt and with Coach [Joi] Williams at UCF,” Brown said.
Brown said he picked up many aspects of his coaching style from Coach Meyer.
“Intensity and the team attitude, and the Greek word arete–that pursuit of excellence–is what I learned then [under Coach Meyer], and it starts to become more and more evident every day,” he said.
One major thing Brown took away from coaching under Coach Summitt is “what it was like to compete at your highest level, individually, and then to compete at the highest level as in National Championships.” Brown said he is thankful for those experiences and said “that is what we are building Lipscomb towards.”
Building the team up to reach those high standards is only part of the job Brown has undertaken. He talked a lot about the players and the team striving to always grow and be better than they were previously.
“We want each player to leave here better because they are part of our program,” Brown said. “Better spiritually, better academically, better prepared for a career and better in their basketball skills, and we want them to try and reach their potential.”
Brown focuses strongly on intensity in everything the team does, and in doing so, he said he hopes to help them “become the best players they can be.”
“If you take care of the process and you take care of the intangibles, the results will take care of themselves,” Brown said. “We don’t put a number out there, and I’ve learned by being a part of the process and following a pretty good blueprint, you’ll see those results at the end.”
Brown said he believes that he’s not really trying to “reach” a goal that is set, but rather he is trying to continually work for the team to grow.
“Even at Tennessee, you won a National Championship, but that doesn’t mean that we reached anything,” Brown said. “It’s just a journey. Every season is a new season, and every player is a new player.”
Brown said he hopes to grow the team in a basketball sense as well as a spiritual sense, and he wants the players to leave Lipscomb, knowing how important their time on campus was to them.
“You want them to leave here, just as with your own kids, knowing that everything is spiritually- and Christ-centered,” Brown said. “That will take us a lot further in life.”
Photo courtesy of Lipscomb Athletics.