It’s all about basketball and family for Gators’ Todd Golden
by Bob Redman
Todd Golden is known for his use of analytics to game plan the basketball games he coaches. The new head coach of the Florida Gators is focused on those tools when making those plans. Likewise, he stays focused on his sport and also his family and doesn’t waiver far from those things at this point in his life.
Golden is in unchartered waters in terms of his career and in his first job as the head coach of a major conference power in basketball. Coming from the University of San Francisco where he had a big year last year and took his team to the NCAA Tournament, Golden will have a lot of work to do at this new level of his profession. But work is really what he knows and it’s easy for him in this job.
“I’m a simple guy. I love my basketball, I love my family,” Golden said in an exclusive with Guide to Greater Gainesville this week and before chuckling about the realization that his life was so simple. “Really there’s not much more to me than that. I like to golf every now and then and haven’t been able to do that much at all since our basketball season started last fall. I keep it pretty simple and since I’ve been able to do that I’m able to focus on what’s important and try and be a good husband, good father, and be a good basketball coach.”
He’s been around the game for a long time having played collegiately at St. Mary’s in 2004. After playing three years of professional basketball in Israel, Golden still worked around the game in promotions and sales for a couple of years but found himself wanting to get more involved. He started his coaching career at Columbia and spent three years there before finding a spot as an assistant on Bruce Pearl’s Auburn team for three seasons. That led to an on-court assistant job with San Francisco for a couple of seasons before he was made the head coach three years ago at the school.
That journey has led him to Florida as the head coach where he understands he has everything he’s wanted in the business and has a good feel for the things that are important in his line of work. It’s really this that drives him as a basketball coach and that also makes him a good one.
“I’m a very competitive person and I love competing on the biggest stage,” he said. “With that being said, I love being a part of a team. I love working with our staff every day and being around the student athletes on a day-to-day basis. Not from a transactional standpoint, you know I love coaching them, but I also love being around them in the locker room, before and after practice, watching film with them, getting meals with them, and just having a better understanding of what’s going on in their lives outside of basketball. I think we were able to do that at a really high level at San Francisco and I think that’s why we were able to have the success that we did. So, we’ll try to emulate a similar blue print here at Florida.”