by KARA SCHWEISS
Kentucky native Chris Crutchfield started at UNO in 1989, playing both basketball and football for the Mavs before earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and corrections. It is not surprising that the men’s basketball head coach since March 2022, who came back to Omaha after a decades-long collegiate basketball coaching career, was a gifted athlete back in the day. What is surprising is that, during his undergraduate years, Crutchfield never envisioned himself as a coach at all.
“I finished my schooling in ‘92 on an internship with Douglas County Juvenile Probation, and it was getting ready to turn into a full-time job,” he said. “But, every day, I would come up to UNO and play noon ball as my lunch break.”
One of the coaches approached him about a graduate assistant position. The offer intrigued him, Crutchfield said, because he wasn’t sold on a career in juvenile justice.
“I wanted to try to do something else. My whole plan was to go to the FBI Academy. I was going to try to be a cop,” he said.
Instead, he gave coaching a try and also pursued a master’s degree in sports administration and recreation.
Crutchfield ultimately served on the coaching staff of many institutions, among them New Mexico State, Texas Christian, Oral Roberts, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Oregon before returning to Omaha.
Although coaching wasn’t Crutchfield’s original aspiration, it proved to be his ideal career, giving him both professional success and personal fulfillment.
“We’re not just coaches — we’re mentors, we’re counselors,” he said. “I think people underestimate that part of coaching; it’s not winning basketball games. We’re guiding young people through a very challenging part of their lives where they’re trying to figure out, one, who they are, two, what direction they want to go in, and three, can they survive at that level? There’s a lot of things are going on in these young peoples’ hearts and in their minds.”
Serving as a role model is a serious responsibility that Crutchfield strives to live up to. It’s become “the most enjoyable part of the business and coaching for me,” he said; not shaping young people into what he thinks they should be but into what they want to become.
Crutchfield served as a role model on the home front, too, as the father of now-adult sons Derrick, Jalen and Josh, and he’s become a grandfather, too. It’s given him and his wife (and fellow UNO graduate) Jodi joy, he said, to see his sons explore their lives and figure out careers, with son Josh joining his father on the UNO sidelines as an assistant coach.
Looking back, Crutchfield expresses gratitude for the career path that started at and circled back to UNO.
“I would not be the person that I am today if I didn’t get the opportunity to come to UNO. They gave me a scholarship to come and play football and basketball, and I was able to play and get my degree, and that led to what I am doing now,” he said. “I wasn’t still sure when I got into coaching, but it ended up being the most rewarding thing that anyone could ever do.”
