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Chris Leazier and Will Voigt probably won’t do that in Rio de Janeiro. Doesn’t mean they don’t have the desire to teach others to try.
The two men began a friendship in the late 1990s when both coached varsity sports at Thetford Academy. An acute interest in basketball served as the glue. Now, nearly 20 years later, they’re working together in Rio as coaches — Voigt as head coach, Leazier as an assistant — with the Nigerian Olympic men’s basketball program.
Voigt has lived a vagabond roundball existence, with a career that has stretched all over the globe. Leazier has also bounced around in a variety of basketball capacities, happiest to merge family life with a coaching life in whatever opportunity arises.
“My takeaway from this 20-year journey of coaching is you can find satisfaction in coaching at any level,” Leazier, 47, said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where Nigeria was going through its final pre-Rio training sessions. “It’s about trying to give the players the best possible experience they can have. I wouldn’t say I’m a nomadic coach, even though with my background it would look like it.”
If nothing else, it proves incorrect that old New England bromide: Maybe you can get there from here after all.
How did two guys in Vermont end up growing into Olympic-level basketball coaches?
Voigt pauses before answering the question: “I guess that would be a long story.”
It begins in 1998. Dave McGinn, Thetford’s then-athletic director, hired Leazier to coach boys basketball and Voigt, a Cabot, Vt., native fresh out of college, to guide boys soccer. Although they didn’t share a sideline, the two shared a passion for basketball and would talk the sport when they could.
“I’m really fortunate to have people give me great opportunities, Dave McGinn being one of them,” Voigt said in a phone interview from Nigeria’s L.A. camp. “I think it comes down to that. There are a lot of people who are qualified and work hard and all of those things, but you need somebody to believe in you and give you a shot. I’ve had many of those fall in my lap.”
Leazier and Voigt approached the profession differently, however. Voigt wanted to make it a full-on career. Leazier would only coach where it fit into what he and his philosophy professor wife, Amy Allen, had in mind for their family of four.
Voigt arrived from California’s Pomona College and a post-graduation trip around Europe, eager to engage in coaching of any sort. Leazier sought an outlet for his basketball coaching interests. McGinn gave them the chance.
“They have a passion for the game,” said McGinn, now the athletic director at St. Johnsbury Academy. “They have a number of characteristics, and they’re very different people. … When they were in Thetford, I don’t know any reason to say you’d know one from the other.”
Leazier’s coaching path followed wherever he and Allen were going with either their educations or vocations. His first coaching job came at a college preparatory school in Chicago; he was a Ph.D. student in philosophy at DePaul University at the time and got to know the head women’s basketball coach, Doug Bruno, through lunchtime basketball encounters. (Still at DePaul, Bruno will assist UConn’s Geno Auriemma with the U.S. women in Rio.)
“I was doing that for three weeks when I said to my wife, ‘I’ll drop out of my college Ph.D. program and try to be a coach,’ ” Leazier recalled. “She laughed and said, ‘Great idea,’ to her everlasting credit.”
As Allen’s teaching career took the family to different postings in the Midwest, Leazier always found coaching outlets. When she joined the philosophy faculty at Dartmouth College and the family moved to Vermont, Leazier sent out letters seeking a coaching job, which led to McGinn and Thetford.
“It doesn’t take long to realize his energy level,” Voigt said of Leazier. “He’s just a very likable person. He made an immediate impression. I kind of knew, throughout the years, that we’d stay in touch. I think most coaches do that.”
Leazier’s work for companies that produce sports scouting and analysis software has also kept him close to the game. Over the years, he’s taken on a variety of coaching roles, including part- and full-time stints assisting the Dartmouth men and women. He became head women’s basketball coach at Manchester’s Saint Anselm College in 2007, but the two parted ways after an unsatisfactory 20-month run.
Knowing Leazier hadn’t enjoyed his Saint Anselm experience, acquaintance Paul “Doc” Donohue encouraged him to try youth coaching, which Leazier did. The two men would also coach together at Vermont Technical College, Donohue as volunteer head coach, Leazier as an assistant.
“He was just an enthusiastic guy who knew the sport,” said Donohue, of Norwich. “I’m drawn to guys like him, young guys who are eager to learn and eager to do the right things. They’re good for the sport and, in his case, good for young people.”
Meanwhile, Voigt’s career followed a professional arc.
After two part-time years at TA interspersed with waiting tables at a Hanover restaurant and working for a Thetford contractor, Voigt accepted a video role with the San Antonio Spurs. (He’d interned with the Los Angeles Clippers while in college and had been aggressive in seeking other opportunities.)
In the two decades since, Voigt has gone from assisting in college (University of Texas, Colorado’s Metro State) to head coaching in Europe and New England (the now-defunct Vermont Frost Heaves) and the international realm (Norway).
In 2009, Voigt moved up the ladder to become head coach of the NBADL’s Bakersfield (Calif.) Jam. It seemed as good a time as any to add Leazier to his staff, and his former Thetford coaching peer joined the team.
They’ve maintained a more direct coaching connection since. Although Leazier eventually chose to remain in the East, he’d answer Voigt’s call again once settled with Nigeria. Although he couldn’t join in person as Voigt’s charges won last season’s Afrobasket championship in Tunisia to qualify for Rio, Leazier did use his technical know-how to do advance scouting via the internet.
“Will said, ‘I know (Afrobasket) didn’t work out and I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try to create a spot for you (in Rio)’ ” Leazier said. “Six or seven or eight weeks ago, it happened. He had a spot on his staff, provided I was interested.”
Making its first Olympic appearance, Nigeria faces a difficult task in Brazil. All of its fellow group nations — Argentina, Spain, Croatia, Lithuania and the hosts — carry significant basketball resumes. The top four teams in each six-team group advance.
As if to symbolize the chore they face, the Nigerians withstood a 110-66 pasting against the gold medal-favorite Americans in Houston on Monday. Nigeria does bring with it nine of the players on last year’s Afrobasket champions.
“Unfortunately, we did draw the toughest group, but it’s not like there’s an easy out in the Olympics,” admitted Voigt, who joined Nigeria after a stint in China. “If your goal is to medal, you’re going to have to beat a good team at some point. Our approach is to just do our best. Hopefully, we’ll surprise some people.”
Leazier idled last winter, and that’s strange for him. With his wife having left Dartmouth to become head of Penn State University’s philosophy department last July, he hadn’t been in State College long enough to know people and, hence, be able to form an AAU team for his 14-year-old daughter, Isabelle, that he could coach. So he didn’t. And that’s OK.
The Leaziers have always understood that their collective passions — his for basketball, his wife’s for academia — wouldn’t necessary guarantee them a place to grow roots, and yet they’ve both succeeded. Allen’s move to Penn State has provided stability, and it’s only a matter of time before her husband finds his next coaching outlet.
After the Olympics, of course.
“I think we have always kind of operated with the idea that we should both be pursuing the opportunities available to us provided we can do it in such a way that prioritizes our family life together,” he said. “It’s been a really interesting path. We both try to pursue something where we’re interested at the most advanced level possible.”
The same applies to Voigt. From Thetford soccer to Olympic men’s basketball, it’s been less about the organization signing the check, more about the teaching of the game.
“I feel fortunate and appreciative of all the people that helped me along the way,” Voigt said. “I think my approach to coaching is not that far different than from when I was a soccer coach at Thetford. You have to be passionate about what you do and passionate about working with players. Sometimes you get lucky, and an opportunity like this presents itself.”
And as for what follows, neither bothers to speculate. Who knows what the view will be around the next corner?
“I’ve joked with my coaching friends that I must be the only person in the world that didn’t know enough people in my hometown of State College to put together a 13-year-old AAU girls basketball team, but I’m going to the Olympic Games,” Leazier said.
“It’s a fitting point on my coaching trajectory, which has been very unique, having coached everything from Norwich recreation sports all the way to the NBADL and everything in between.
“That’s the reality of it. How fitting.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com at 603-727-3226.