Why they coach: Mark Leroux

PM: I'm starting everyone with the same question. Growing up, what sports did you play?

ML: "I played sandlot everything. I'm a little bit older so in the sixties, the neighborhoods, everybody just got together. You played baseball in baseball season, football in football season, basketball in basketball so kind of played sandlot everything. Little league and then in junior high, seventh and eighth grade, got an opportunity to play freshman football. So played football there and was one of the smaller guys and just got hammered. Then hockey, we were of all things, the AHL, the Calder Cup, the (Binghamton) Broome Dusters, the Syracuse Chiefs, Johnstone Jets, this was a big deal. There was an arena in my home town in Binghamton and that was our team. The movie "Slapshot," the whole premise was our league. So I was the kid up in the stands pouring Coke on the visiting players and heckling them and all that. Then I went to camp in the summer, got to skate with those guys in hockey camp. Then right around junior high, high school, I started playing lacrosse and then that was kind of my sport that I played junior varsity and varsity high school lacrosse and then into a community college in my home town. I was really a lacrosse player during that stint. Then when I got to grad school, I ended up in Southern California at a place, and we may regress later, but I ended up in Southern California and at the time Anaheim hadn't come, the Mighty Ducks weren't around yet, so there was like no hockey, no lacrosse being played and so I kind of had to find a new game. My wife was a recreational bowler when we first started dating in Binghamton, New York, got back into our teacher's league with high school teachers that we got to hang out with afterwards. Started bowling then and when we got to Southern California, first thing we did when I got to grad school, newlyweds, we got into a bowling league, so I started bowling one night a week in a mixed league. There, these guys said 'Hey, we have this Friday night golf league. Get into this golf league with us.' So I got into that, got addicted, got into a job at a country club and then into the PGA and then into coaching."

PM: So you didn't play golf in high school or college?

ML: "No. That was for rich people and old men."

PM: That is not the usual path. A lot of people who coach played that sport from the time they were seven years old. Where along the line did you think you wanted to coach, whether it was golf or something else?

ML: "That's a good question and I had kind of rehearsed this too. So I was a lower middle class kid, if anything. These numbers aren't important, but I like Zillowed the house that I grew up in, is worth 70 thousand dollars today. Okay? So pretty meager. I remember being a kid and telling my mother, I was probably seven or eight years old, 'Mom, I'm gonna be a CPA and I'm gonna make X money a year.' And she kind of laughed supportingly. But I could tell that she didn't believe that. It was like how is that ever going to happen, you know? And I was a really terrible student. Really probably a juvenile delinquent. Really was the kid, just the pain in the ass for my coach in high school, my lacrosse coaches. I was like the kid you didn't want on your team. And so then I ended up going to a community college because I didn't have any ACT score and I didn't have the grades to go anywhere else so I went to my local community college. And there I was going to be an accountant because I told my mom I was going to be a CPA. So I enrolled there, did terrible the first semester, like three F's and a D. Got put on probation. And one of my accounting teachers who happened to be the basketball coach at this community college, he kind of got all over me. He was like 'You're either going to be nothing or you need to get it together.' And I don't know. Lo and behold, I started getting A's and B's. It took me three years, I got my associate's degree and then I was applying to the other university in town, Binghamton, which had a very good business school. A lot of people from Long Island or from the city come up and it's a pretty good education there. And I remember they wouldn't let me in because my GPA was still only like a 2.9 or a 3.0 after that dismal start. So the dean of the business department said 'I tell you what: Take four classes. If you get four A's, we'll let you in.' So I was like okay.

At the time, I had already been working at a grocery store in high school and in junior college and so then I started to be the bookkeeper. I had done everything at the grocery store and I started to be the bookkeeper at the grocery store. And just hated every minute of life in the grocery store. I got to count like how many seconds were on my shift. I knew that there were 3,600 seconds in an hour and so I would multiply it by the number of hours left in my shift and I would actually like look at the clock and count down how many thousand seconds I had. Because a thousand seconds goes pretty quick as opposed to hours. And during that time at the grocery store working there, and working full-time now, what I did is I took one (class) in the summer, one in the fall, one in the spring, one in summer. So I made sure I got four A's. And I did. So I was working full time but I hated it. I liked the social interaction of the job and I liked the people I was working with, but I just hated the occupation. So I started thinking of every occupation I could think of and I just kept checking them off, checking them off, checking them off. And one day it came to me. I was like, 'I could be a PE teacher and a coach and I could like play sports with kids the rest of my life. Hey, maybe I work ten months a year, get the summers off, I could do a summer school shift, have part of it off and I was like that's what I'm going to do.' And fortunately for me, just up the road in Cortland, there was a very good teacher education program and very good in PE. 1400 PE majors at the time. Even currently they still have over a thousand physical education majors. So then that's when I decided I would coach."

PM: So how old were you at the time?

ML: "I would have been about 24."

PM: So a little bit later start when you figured out what you wanted to do.

ML: "Yes. And it was like that moment that my life changed. Maybe there was a moment there where that guy at the junior college, the accounting teacher, kind of set me straight. But as soon as I knew that I was going to be a teacher and a coach, like I couldn't be a delinquent. I had to stop smoking. Because none of that fit. And so that was like a transformation, like a 180-degree turn in my life."

PM: So there wasn't necessarily a coach in your life that you thought I want to be like this guy. This was something you came to on your own.

ML: "Right. And you know, in fact, and there's more to the story after that molded me as a coach, but you know, it was really probably I hated my high school lacrosse teachers. I disliked them, not hated, because they never tried to set me straight. I remember being a senior in high school, I was a co-op at IBM. It was a big deal. A senior and all the people from my department were going to come watch me play. We were playing our rival in lacrosse under the lights Friday night and I got benched. Like we got on the bus and when we got there, he was like, 'Leroux, you're not starting.' And I was like, what? You know what I mean? And it was an incident in a drill earlier in the week where we were doing a man-ball drill. Two defensive players go out, one offensive player, they roll the ball, one of the defensive guys hits the offensive guy and the other one picks up the ball. Well we're doing this drill and the same guy, Vinnie Talbot, just keeps going man every time. He's just wanting to hit me every time in the drill. And so we got into a tussle, little fight there, and so then I was benched for the first half of the game. And it was just that he never tried to set me straight. So maybe that was, I didn't want to be like him."

PM: So you get your teacher certification and is that why you move out to California. What was your first job in this field?

ML: "So when you're a teaching major in the public schools in New York, you have to have a Master's degree so you can get your credential but within five years you have to have started your Master's and you have to complete within ten or you lose your teaching certificate. So we do student teaching as everybody does, so I get placed in a rural community around me, Windsor High School, and ended up with this guy, he's phenomenal, he's another Cortland grad, SUNY-Cortland where I went. He's the athletic director there and the basketball coach and he's just got this thing going. I mean this is a school with let's say roughly 600 students and 400 of them are in either athletics or band or something. So it's a great environment and this guy's taking like no talent and beating people. So I get to be his assistant. I'm the assistant varsity basketball coach and I stay on the next year and become the co-head junior varsity football coach. Gary Vail is the guy at Windsor High School who is the AD, who is one of my mentors. He was just great at what he did. Like he knew free throws were going to be important so every year he did a free throw competition like a bracket with anybody that wanted to in the whole school. Principals, vice principals, guys on the team, any individual. You paid, I think it was a dollar or two to get in the pot, and you played through this bracket to see. It was how many you made out of 25 to advance. It was just a great idea because, again, he went back to the basics and he knew that the people that were getting through were going to have all these reps. He was on top of this stuff so I learned a lot from Gary Vail and he was a big motivating thing.

And then more to the question how did I end up in Southern California, I knew I had to get a graduate degree. So at the time, it was an index, there were two books, I forget how they were broken down, but a directory of everybody who had a grad program who had assistantships, research and teaching assistantships and who would give tuition waivers. I knew, I was in New York and had been up and down the East Coast, you know, I said 'I want to go to California, Alaska, Hawaii or Arizona.' So I applied to a few places and when I went to Cortland, because I had made that switch, I was at the top of my class. I mean, I was one of the best GPA wise and, braggingly I guess, in my teacher evaluations and stuff like when there would be teachers come and watch, I was graded high. So I had just taken the national teacher exam too and I didn't want to sit for the Graduate Records Exam, the GRE, so I think San Diego State, Northridge, Cal State-Fullerton all said, 'Yes, come on out.' Baylor, I don't know why I threw them in there, they said they wouldn't do it without the exam and I think New Mexico State balked too so I said okay, I'm going to Fullerton. Then I end up in Fullerton and just stumble into this thing where I call up the chair of the department and she happens to be a SUNY-Brockport grad. Back in the day there was a test, you had to pass a physical ability test for a PE major at Cortland. Well she failed so she had to go to Brockport. So she knew the program that I had come through and the prep I had had. She said, 'Oh yeah, we'll have you mid-year. Start in January.'

So I come out there, first day I walk in like okay all the GA's are working the information desk out front. Here's where to point everybody. So I walk in and this guy comes in, Ken Ravizza, he was an applied sports psychology guy. He's big in baseball. Worked with Augie Garrido, with the Anaheim Angels while I was under his wing, and then the Dodgers. So this guy's a big shot in sports psych and applied sports psych working with athletes. He comes up to the desk and I had a tie-dye shirt on. He's like, 'Oh yeah, smoke a little weed?' And he like tested me, you know what I mean? He'd been through this routine, like here's the new GAs and he walked up and put me on the spot. He wanted to see what my answers were going to be. I ended up being one of his GA's and working with him. He brought everybody. Todd Sands and Natasha, a pair of figure skaters, because he worked with figure skaters and equestrians, they would come to our classes and talk. The Anaheim Angels would come in. Brian Orser, a figure skater from Canada, he came in. So I got the experience of watching Ken one-on-one with all these great athletes doing applied sports psychology working with them all trying to get better. And then Ken put each one of us with a different junior college baseball team in Southern California and we had to do what he did working on the field."

PM: So I assume that mental part is something you still use all the time as a coach?

ML: "Correct. Yes. Just lucked into it."

PM: So where's golf come into this?

ML: "So this recreational league that we start at Dad Miller's in California, it happens to be where Tiger Woods has his junior thing. That didn't exist at the time, Tiger was still in high school. So, again, at Fullerton, I get in there and I start in this league and now I'm addicted to golf. I'm teaching Monday and Wednesday mornings, taking classes Mondays and Wednesdays in the evening and I had like four hours of research. So basically I had a whole lot of free time. So I was golfing. I'm like 'I'm spending more money than I'm making golfing paying for range balls and green fees and club fees.' And so they had shut down the men's golf team and women's golf team at Fullerton, but the old guy that was the coach, he was still around teaching classes part time, teaching PE, golf classes or whatever. He goes, 'That guy, the recreation director at Fullerton (Ron Andrus), he was addicted to golf and he knows everyone and he does nothing.' So I got to be best friends with Ron Andrus. So after a week or two, he's got me a job. My first job was cleaning carts at a daily fee course, a public course. Really busy public course. Most cart fleets are like 44 golf carts; we had 70 or 80 something. All of them would come in at dark. Saturday and Sunday night, all of them would come in and I'd be cleaning carts and be wet until 11 o'clock at night putting them away. Then he was a marshall at the country club. They owned three courses so then he got me out of the dirty work to go be a marshall at the country club, drive around in a golf cart. Then from there, they liked my work ethic, the pro there, so I got from the ranger out there into the golf shop as an assistant and then into the PGA as an assistant professional working there."

PM: How important is the golf part of being a PGA pro?

ML: "Unfortunately a lot of golf professionals don't play very well when they're at a club, but they did at one point. You have to take a player ability test, the PAT. At the time it was six and seven over par for a course that was rated 72, so basically you had to shoot 78-79 or better by the rules of golf in a tournament. That was the player ability test. Then it used to be business school one, business school two when I first got into it and you would go to three days of school and a day of testing, level one, level two and then you had a little workbook, fill out all these activities in a book and then you were a member. So I got into the PGA, I was working through business school one and then I had gone to Myrtle Beach. After I had graduated from Fullerton, I'm like, 'Okay, I'm an assistant golf professional working at a club, I'm going to go to the golf capital of the world Myrtle Beach.' So I moved myself and my wife out there after grad school and took a job at a club there and was substitute teaching. And then the substitute teacher at the high school turned into the golf coach. They put me on full-time because one of the science teachers got pregnant and had to leave so I taught her science class and coached the golf team and still working at the golf course. That was my first golf coaching gig was high school.

Now I'm there and the high school team I had was really good. I really just didn't like the lifestyle in Myrtle Beach. Nor did my wife. And I knew then, when I got there and did that with the high school golf team, I was like, 'Okay, everything together, the PGA has different levels. To be a Class A member, to be a club professional, like I am, you can be the head professional, assistant golf professional, you can be a golf instructor. There's all these different categories.' Well one of them is college golf coach. If you're a full-time college golf coach then you're like an A12 or an A13 and so I said, 'Okay, I can keep my membership in the PGA in the game that I love and I can coach college level golf' and I knew my break was going to come from Ken Ravizza and people I knew at Fullerton or he put me in Citrus College in Glendora near Azusa to work with the baseball team there. Again, another mentor, Skip Claproot, was the AD and the baseball coach at Citrus College. I just knew that my break in college golf was either going to come from Skip or from Ken, or from somebody at the country club, Alta Vista, where I had worked.

PM: So where did it come from?

ML: "So we move back there and I get there and Gary Vail at Citrus College, the AD, I say I'm back in town. He says, 'Great, are you a PGA member?' I said 'I'm still an assistant, I haven't gotten membership yet.' He goes, 'That's good enough. Come on up here tomorrow, bring your resume.' I'm like, okay, the golf coach is old, I'm going to get introduced to the golf coach and he's gonna give me the golf coaching job. I'm like 'Perfect!' So I show up and I meet Marsh, the golf coach, and he says, 'Here, I want to show you something.' So we walk out on to the pool, they've got a natatorium, an outdoor one there at Citrus. So we climb up the bleachers and look over the bleachers out at the football stadium and the practice fields. He goes, 'See that?' I'm like 'What?' He says, "Those survey stakes out there. We're gonna build a driving range on campus that's open to the public and we want you to build it for us.' My heart sunk. I was like, 'Oh really?' I was like, 'Skip, I can't build a driving range.' He's like, 'No, you can. Let's go meet the president.' So they go in there and they just offer me more money than I've ever made in my life so I take this job, I build this driving range for a year, it opens, operate it for a year as a manager there and again, I'm hating it and I'm not a college golf coach. So I'm applying for every job in the country that's open. Applying, applying, applying, getting some phone interviews and such and then finally Austin Peay calls me. Clarksville, Tennessee. They bring me out on an interview and they hire me. So that was my first gig."

PM: About how old are you then?

ML: "This is 1997. So I was 35 years old."

PM: 35 and you finally kind of found what you want to do. Once you were a college golf coach, what kept you in it?

ML: "This is the part that I thought might be different. Most of the answers I think that you're going to get are 'I wanted to help young people.' It was self-serving. Again, go back to the grocery store. I wanted to do something that I could do every single day and not think it was a job. So it was self-serving. Again, I figured out that I wanted to coach college golf and it was self-serving. And I wanted to get there and I wanted to win and I wanted to climb the ladder. Again, pretty self-serving. I was still at 35 and these kids are 18, 19, 20, 21, but I'm still not that far away from them and having been around all the kids in the golf shop and all the junior golfers, through that whole time, and high school kids, I still had a pretty good connection with them. So although I was a disciplinarian and did what my high school lacrosse coach didn't do, it was self-serving. I was doing it for me. And then along the way, it got to be a little more helping others. And that came from some of the older coaches, some Hall of Fame golf coaches that are very old and/or retired Division One college golf coaches. One was Richard Sykes at North Carolina State. I'd probably been in it already for ten years or so and Richard was like 70-something and still coaching and I'm like 'Why are you still coaching?' He's goes, and I might get a little emotional here, he says 'You know those kids in the back of the van talking about playing professionally? If I could do one thing to help one of them, I've done it.' So I was like 'Wow, that's pretty cool.' Somebody else, Billy Brogdon at Tulsa, another Hall of Famer, he said something along the way. If they learn one thing from you, it makes it all worthwhile. And now I'm in my kind of silver years, you know, as a golf coach. And so I hope I can switch again.

PM: So how did you get to Missouri?

ML: "I'm at Austin Peay, things are going great, we're winning. It's a fantastic golf community, the weather's pretty darn good, my wife's got a job she loves at this bank, she just loves the people she's working with. And after being there and being in this golf community there, being part of it and part of the athletic department, I was like, 'This is it. You know? We're just going to be here.' And as soon as, I swear as soon as I had kind of gotten to where I was like, okay, this is it, the phone rang and they called me from Missouri and said 'Hey, would you be interested in this job?' I was like, 'Yeah, sure.' The guy that hired me at Austin Peay, the former golf coach, is a Missourian, both he and his wife from up near Chillicothe so he had a fondness for Missouri too and he was really a mentor to me at Austin Peay. It was my first gig. I had never coached college golf before. The former coach was a marketing professor and the president said 'You can't do both anymore. We need a real coach and we need a real marketing professor.' I went to him with every question that I had. When I told him Missouri had called, he said, 'You gotta go.'

PM: In 20 plus years of coaching, you ever come across anybody that has a story about how they got here quite like yours? This is unconventional.

ML: "It is. Yes. I would say maybe not exactly like that, but there's some odd stories out there. Most were high school student-athlete in that sport then played at that school and that's kind of the trend is to hire one of your former student-athletes once they get some experience, bring them back, be the head coach. There's been some odd ones."

PM: Maybe it's for down the road, but do you ever reflect on the path you took here?

ML: "Just recently. And then you start to question, again, maybe this is a midlife crisis or when you get older, like, 'Did I really do anything? It seems like an awful lot of work and did I really accomplish anything?' I thought at times we were. Conference championships and buying a house. You know what I mean? You thought you'd done a lot, but you look back and you're like, man..."

PM: What's the best part of being a coach?

ML: "The best part of being a coach is being with these guys on the course. Being with them in practice. Traveling with them."

PM: And that's probably not what you thought it was going to be when you started.

ML: "Correct. No. It's changed immensely. Maybe along those same lines too, the things that this has afforded me. Oh my Lord. In a million years, I would have never thought that I would be a member at a country club. There's just no way imaginable. Not braggingly, but to play golf with four-star admirals, have dinner with a four- or five-star general, not in a scramble, but in a friendly format, to tee it up with Whitey Herzog. And again, not in a fundraiser, just him out there with one of his buddies from the Angels and go around with them. I could go on and on. To play with Ozzie Smith. The things it's afforded me. To be in 30 countries, five continents that I've traveled. Not in a million years."

PM: What's the hardest part about this job?

ML: "Okay, the hardest part about this job and I've said this repeatedly, is telling a kid no. Telling him he's not good enough or he's not going to play in this tournament or he's not going to be on this team. That's the hardest part."

PM: Whenever you're done with this, what would you want the people that played for you to remember about you as a coach?

ML: "A knee jerk answer would be that I was fun to be with, that I made it an enjoyable experience and that maybe I helped them with something.