The sticky notes were the idea of Kevin Young’s mother-in-law, Tammy Bailey.
She handed them out a few months ago, and encouraged family members to write “cool thoughts and words of encouragement” for others on them and leave them around the house.
Young’s three children — 12-year-old Jude, 10-year-old Van and 7-year-old Zoey — took their grandmother’s directive to heart.Young’s BYU basketball team was struggling a bit when it hit Big 12 play in January, losing badly at Houston and starting 1-3 in conference games and looking nothing like the NCAA Tournament team it would become.The morning before one important home game, Young got in his car and noticed a sticky note attached to his steering wheel, written by one of his sons.
“Let’s get this win tonight, dad,” the note read, followed by the word “PROvo,” a reminder that Young promised in his introductory news conference last year that he would establish BYU as a pipeline to the NBA.
The Cougars lost that game, Young remembers, but the next morning he woke up to find another note on his bathroom mirror, written by a different son, saying, “Hey dad, it is OK, we will get the next one. We are good.”
Young’s voice caught a bit when he relayed the story last week to the Deseret News in response to a question about some of the greatest joys of fatherhood.
“That was pretty cool,” he said. “It was a ‘you got this’ type of thing, and honestly, I get emotional even talking about it. But those notes were pretty awesome. … They are all-in, man. Fully invested. My oldest one, Jude, is locked in to our success, and his little brother (Van) is right behind him.”
The same can be said of Kevin Young when it comes to fatherhood and family. The 20th men’s basketball coach in BYU history, for all the success he achieved on the hardwoods in his first season in Provo, is just as locked-in as a husband to Melissa and father of Jude, Van and Zoey.The couple’s fourth child, and second daughter, is due in late September — before Young and the Cougars embark on his second season in Provo and the most difficult schedule in BYU basketball history with what is expected to be one of the best teams in school history, led by No. 1 prep recruit AJ Dybantsa and returning all-Big 12 wing Richie Saunders.
“Coaching is just what I do. It is not who I am,” Young said. “Being a dad is definitely who I am. … I love being a dad, man. It is my favorite thing about what I get to do. It really shapes who I am. Where it intersects with my career is it really has driven my career choices. It is the thing that matters most to me.”
Featuring Kevin Young before Father’s Day
Every June, the Deseret News profiles a father in the Utah sports community, a dad who has successfully balanced his professional and family life in an extraordinary manner. We’ve featured former Utah basketball coach Craig Smith, the father of BYU football coach Kalani Sitake (Tom), the father of BYU defensive coordinator Jay Hill (Ferrell) and the father of BYU and NFL quarterback Zach Wilson (Mike Wilson).
Young, 43, is this year’s choice.
He met Melissa Bailey — almost everyone calls her Missy — when she was a student at BYU and he was a volunteer assistant coach at Utah Valley University, and they married in the Salt Lake Temple in 2011. He became a father for the first time in 2013, four months after he was fired as the head coach of the Iowa Energy of the NBA’s D-League (now known as the G-League).
