“It’s really fun what you see and what you do but it’s the people that make it the best.”
Jaime White, the head coach of women’s basketball at Fresno State University, sits down with us in this episode of the 35,000 Feet podcast and gives us insight into her journey as a basketball coach. She talks about the highs and lows of the 2019-2020 season, how she started coaching after playing college ball, her favorite travel experiences - including a foreign tour to Australia, and more!
In this episode, we discuss:
How this past season went for Fresno State Women’s Basketball team (0:18)
How Coach White got into coaching (2:13)
Jaime’s favorite travel experience (5:52)
Jaime’s advice to athletes wanting to play in college (13:51)
One thing that no one knows about Jaime (17:33)
Jaime’s next adventure (19:33)
Highs and Lows of Fresno State’s Women’s Basketball 2019-2020 Season
Morgan: I wanted to ask what have been some of the highs and lows of your current season?
Jaime White: Oh my goodness, you're asking at a really good time. We had five or six new kids, so we had four, no five freshmen and one junior college kid. We really didn't know how our season was going to start, but it started well and our young kids played well. I think we only lost four games in the preseason and then we went on like a 15-0 run and won our Conference. Our Conference, our regular-season championship. Then we went into just this, I mean I'm just getting home. We traveled home yesterday. We've just played in our Mountain West tournament and we were in the championship game and lost in overtime.
Morgan: That must've been an intense game.
Jaime White: Very. It was a team that we'd beaten before. We didn't play our best, but we made it close and gave ourselves a chance to win at the end. It's kind of all you can ask.
Morgan: True. Do you feel like, because you mentioned the season it has been a good one. What do you feel has made the difference?
Jaime White: Well, we've had some really good players. We have the freshman of the year on our team, her name is Haley Cavinder, and we had the player of the year in Maddi Utti. We had some great players, great coaches. My assistant coaches are really good. We've now been to Fresno State for six years. We've been in the championship game three. We've been in post-season five of those six years. Sometimes just patience and hard work pay off.
How Jamie White Started Coaching Basketball
Morgan: Wow. Yes. It's amazing what dedication can do to help a team. That's awesome I'm impressed, and I can tell that you're passionate about the sport, so your team's going to keep going far. How did you even get to becoming a coach?
Jaime White: Well, the funny thing is I actually grew up in Kanab, Utah. Small town. From there, I didn't have a lot of offers. I had a couple division one, but then I actually played at Utah Valley. It was a community college at the time so it was only a two year school for Tom Perkins, who is my all-time favorite coach. Anyway, so we played there, we went to nationals. It was just so much success. After that I went out to Kansas State for a year. That didn't turn out the way I really wanted it and so I finished up at Southern Utah University got my degree in education and right out of college I started coaching at Dixie State as an assistant.
Morgan: No way.
Jaime White: Yep. Then right after that I got the head job at Snow College. At Snow College, I was there for five years. Just recently this year they put me in the hall of fame there. That was really nice and special. I got to go back and see a lot of the kids that I coached. After that, after Snow College, I went to the University of Utah for two years as an assistant. Then shortly after that went to Wyoming for three years as an assistant, and then got my first head division one job at Northern Colorado. I was at Northern Colorado for eight years and again we were very successful. One conference went to post-season play, got to the second round of the NIT, and then I got the job at Fresno State. Then I've been here for six years.
Morgan: Oh my gosh that is such a cool story. I love seeing how you've been everywhere. That's so cool. I played volleyball at Snow College.
Jaime White: You did? What year?
Morgan: 2017. I'll have to go look for your picture in the hall of fame.
Jaime White: Yeah, it's in the hallway. They just put it. I think they put a temporary one up, but then they just put one. Then two of my players, Nicole Paul and Casey Cook are both in the hall of fame there so kind of fun. Did you like your time at Snow?
Morgan: Yes, I loved it. I learned some awesome things there when I was there. That is so cool.
Jaime White: It's a special place. I really liked coaching there too.
Morgan: I know it's such a fun, small town.
Jaime White: Mm-hmm.
Morgan: Was Snow the most different than the other schools that you've been at?
Jaime White: What we did at Snow College was, well one, I played at Utah Valley, so I knew the league and I was very familiar with the junior college. What we did there was we were able to get a lot of kids that maybe wanted to go to BYU or Utah, but weren't good enough or were talented but not tall enough or whatever it was. We were really fortunate to get really good players there, really good hardworking kids. We were very successful. My last year there, so we won the Conference two years in a row. My last year there we were 30 and three. We'd won 30 games and only lost three. We were very successful, had a great president, a great athletic director. Then I was fortunate enough to get a call from Elaine Elliot at Utah, and then went from there.
Coach White’s Most Memorable Travel Experiences
Morgan: Wow, you've been to a bunch of schools around Utah, that's awesome. That's a cool story, I'm going to go look for you in the hall of fame. I'll be like, yep I just talked to her. I feel so cool. That'll be perfect. Going along this since we are a traveling company, what are some of your most memorable travel experiences that you've had?
Jaime White: Well, I've had a lot of travel with teams, whether it was me as a player or basketball-related. When I was at Snow, I used to go to Switzerland every year. Well, the last two years I was at Snow I'd go to Switzerland for three weeks and do a basketball camp there, which was eye-opening. That was my first time out of the country. We would have a week off in between, and during that time I was able to go to Venice and we went to Paris. From Switzerland, you can really get anywhere. That was my first out of the country experience, which was awesome. Then after that, when I was at, well, two of the years that I've been here at Fresno State, the first year we got here, we were able to take these teams on international tours as we talked about earlier.
Our first year right when I got the job, they said, "You got the job. You're now in charge of going to Australia," before I even played a season. It actually worked out well because we were able to have 10 full practices and get to know the team a little bit better, and then we were able to play four games in Australia. But we didn't even know these kids. I didn't even know my coaches, like I'd just hired new coaches. I'd just met the kids and we had to put our system in. It turned out to be the best thing ever. We went to Melbourne and then Sydney and then Cairns. We played two in Melbourne, one in Sydney and one in Cairns. The funny thing is, as a new coach you're trying to put your rules in and everything.
Well in Melbourne we had six kids sneak out of the hotel. I'm sure it was harmless, but one of my assistants caught them in the elevator, she went to inspect rooms, and then she caught them in the elevator at three o'clock in the morning. When we went to Sydney, we were like, "What are we going to do? What are we going to do?" I said, "Well, we're going to run them." When we got to Sydney we ran the Sydney Harbor and we timed them. The funniest thing is now if you ask those kids what their favorite thing was, they would say their favorite thing was the run in Sydney Harbor. Isn't that funny?
Morgan: That is funny.
Jaime White: Anyway, so after that we went from Sydney to Cairns. Let me remind you, and you know this, but when it's summer here it's winter there. We were absolutely freezing in the gyms. I had to borrow two of the girls’ jackets and we had layers on layers. We were so cold. They don't heat the gyms during the winter. It's not snowy winter, but it's cold enough that we were freezing. Then that last trip we had to fly from Sydney to Cairns, and we had to get off the plane and play a game. We got off the plane and we played a game and we played all zone defense. We hadn't the whole time, and that was kind of scary because here we are new coaches and having to do something new on top of new.
Then the next day we went to the Barrier Reef and it was the funniest thing in Australia. They said, "Okay, who would like..." Because we were going snorkeling. They said, "Okay, who's going to snorkel?" Everybody raised their hand, and they said, "Who's going to scuba dive." I went, "Wait, what? You can scuba dive." They're like, "Yeah." Well half of us said, "Well yeah, we want to scuba dive." They showed us this video and in 10 minutes we were certified and we were scuba diving.
Morgan: What? That's so cool.
Jaime White: I know it was fun. We would have to go down with the instructor and he made us lock arms, but we did it twice. On the second time, he let us go a certain amount of ways away from him. At that point it was the most amazing thing that I'd done or seen. We actually found a little Nemo, a clownfish. We all got pictures with the clownfish in this coral stuff. It was the coolest thing. I will never forget that, and neither will our players, our players were amazed. Those are players that would never ever be able to go to another country ever. It was really special.
Morgan: That's such a cool experience. That happened two years ago?
Jaime White: That was when we first got there so that was six years ago. Last year we went on another international tour. The rule in the NCAA is you can only do it every four years. Last year was our fourth year. That time we decided to go to Europe, one because we knew it was going to be warm. We flew into Como, we played in Como, Italy. Then we went to Switzerland and then we went to Paris. Again, so completely opposite of Australia. It was so hot. My coaches were like, "We are wearing shorts. We are not wearing pants, we're wearing shorts and we might even be in tank tops." It was so warm in the gym it was unbelievable. We went from freezing in Australia to hotter than heck in Italy. We stayed at Como. We went up the lake to Bellagio.
Morgan: Beautiful.
Jaime White: If you ask the girls, we got to see George Clooney's house so they were so excited about that.
Morgan: I can't even imagine how hot that was. Italy when it's hot is very hot.
Jaime White: Then after that, we were on a bus. We bused up to Switzerland. Then from Switzerland, we took the train to Paris. I would say most of our players they loved Paris. The Louvre and all the museums, the Eiffel Tower, we got to see the Eiffel Tower at night. We just got to see so many things, and we had the best tour guides. The tour guides made the whole trip. The tour guide in Paris was unbelievable. She gave us so much history and told us the ins and outs of artists and of the culture and all these things. It was really, really fun. How about this? We got to see the Notre-Dame, and then it was only like a month later it burned.
Morgan: What?
Jaime White: Yeah. Remember there was a fire in there.
Morgan: Yes, I do remember.
Jaime White: We had been there just a month before that happened. That was special for our girls to have seen it and been there before.
Morgan: Wow. That was meant to be.
Jaime White: Yeah, I know, that was really fun. I had been there before, so I wanted our kids to see all of those things that I'd already seen. We created our own trip and then we hired somebody to take us everywhere we needed. Then people had to set the games up and stuff, and we won all the games. We got to eat with one of the teams and they didn't know English and we didn't know their language. But the girls still tried to talk it was really fun. Most of the time when you go on a trip it's beautiful what you see and what you do, but it's the people that really make it the best. To have our tour guides and to be able to eat with the teams and meet different people, I just think that's what really makes it special.
Morgan: It's true. I bet your team got closer on those trips too. I feel like that always happens.
Jaime White: We always say it's team bonding on steroids.
Coach White’s Advice to Future Collegiate Athletes
Morgan: Hey, that's a good way to put it. Well, I love that. That's what I love is that with sports comes awesome opportunities to go places and learn new things. I'm glad that your teams had those experiences. Well, speaking of college sports, if you're an athlete wanting to play for a team or university, what would your advice be to them?
Jaime White: Well, first you got to be good. You got to work hard and you've got to be, I would say in high school if you want to be sure that you're going to have an opportunity in college, whatever level, because I've coached at all levels now, junior college, division one. You need to statistically I would say average double, double in something in high school. That's 10 points and 10 rebounds you're going to get seen. 10 assists 10 points, whatever it is average a double, double. Then there's these club teams. I think that's so very important that you get out and you play at a high level where coaches can see you.
I don't think you have to do too much. You just have to make sure that you're on a team where you get to play, and you go to places where there are college coaches that are watching you and evaluating you. Then making sure that you reach out to coaches and let them know that you're interested and go on unofficial visit. Right now in women's basketball, we are recruiting so early. We've had, and I think it's sophomore, junior years are really important that you're playing in front of college coaches and you're taking unofficial visits. I'd probably say we have 25 to 30 unofficial visits a year from kids.
Morgan: Wow.
Jaime White: Those are visits that they pay to get here, but they let us know, and then we take them around, maybe come to a game, maybe do a workout with our kids. Just come and walk around campus, look at the academics. But I've seen that those people whose families are doing that, they are way more prepared. They have better questions. They have seen more so they have better comparisons and it's really more beneficial for everyone when kids do that.
Morgan: Wow. Well, that sounds awesome.
Jaime White: I think it's really, so a couple of things about qualities in players, is that what we look for at Fresno State is somebody that works really hard, and that we don't have to force them to work really hard. For example, we have twins that are freshmen, Haley and Hanna Cavinder. If they aren't in school, they are in the gym or they're sleeping. They get in, now they're in college, they've already won their scholarship and they're actually both starting for us, but it doesn't matter. They are in the gym getting shots up. They are talking to coaches, watching film. They never miss that. That's what's made them good, is their desire to get better and their effort. Then when they play, one coach said, she explained it this way she said, "Man, I love those Cavinder's they play like their hair is on fire."
That's a good point because your talent can only go so far. Without effort and energy, you're not going to make it. You've got to have those things because the college season is so long and so physical, and so demanding that if you aren't in it for all the right reasons, and if you don't love it, it's going to be really hard. Now, most freshmen struggle at some point because it's just different and they have a transition, but for the most part you've got to love it and you got to find a way to get over those bumps during the season. Because then post-season comes and I mean look, we just played in the championship we're going to go to post-season play. Now it's kind of all the hard work pays off at the end of the year.
Morgan: It's true. It's so true. You remind me of the quote that's like, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard."
Jaime White: Mm-hmm absolutely.
A Lesser-Known Fact About Coach White
Morgan: Thank you so much for those insights. What's one thing that no one knows about you that you can share?
Jaime White: Let's see. I have six brothers and sisters.
Morgan: Oh wow.
Jaime White: I'm the second to the oldest, and in my family, I'm the only one that has graduated college. The reason I did was that I had a college scholarship because my family could not afford to send us to college nor my brother and sisters had that opportunity. I knew that basketball was my way to success to be honest, to getting paid more. I didn't know that I was going to be a college coach necessarily. When I was in, I'll tell you this short story. When I was in the seventh grade, I was somewhat of a little bit rebellious. I had a teacher grab me and she said, not grab me, but she stopped me when I was messing around one day.
She said, "Jaime, you got to toe the line. You got to do this, do that." I said, "I am I'm good I'm ready to go." She said, "You don't even know what you want to be when you grow up." I said, "Yeah, I do. I want to be a college coach." She said, "You'll never be that because you have to get your masters degree." I was somewhat crushed, but more mad than I was crushed. I was determined to prove her wrong as far as my master’s degree goes. But it's funny because inevitably I am a college coach with a master’s degree. As much as that maybe seemed negative, that motivated me and helped me to realize there was a lot out there in life that I wasn't really necessarily aware of. I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and asking and questioning and taking up opportunities that would help me attain my goals.
Coach White’s Future Travel Adventures
Morgan: That shows that you get to choose where you go, and if you work hard you can go places. That's amazing thank you for sharing that. What's your next adventure?
Jaime White: Oh goodness. Well, basketball is an adventure every year, so that's something. Since I've been grown, I guess you can say, I've had an interest in, I think everybody has an interest in making money, but I have an interest in investing. Since probably for the last 10 years I have continued to buy rental properties and fixed them up and held them to rent and create a little bit of a bank account or a retirement plan for when I'm done coaching, but it is such a passion. I could stay up all night looking at houses and how much they cost and if they'd be good for rentals. I have multiple properties in multiple states. I've just really been interested in how that works and what the tax benefits are. I think as a coach, coaching is a little bit volatile. I think you do have to make sure you have a backup plan in case it doesn't work out.
Now, my career has been very, very successful and I have been so blessed to be involved with great programs and great mentors and great administrations. I feel comfortable with that. But again, there's going to be a day that you want to retire. In that retirement, you want to make sure you can still travel and go to all the fun places that are on your bucket list right? That's been one passion of mine that I've been doing now since 10, 15 years. It's been very successful for us. It's fun to have other things.
When you're coaching your focus is so much on basketball and winning and it can consume you, and it can really be exhausting. When you're losing and you're winning and you're in championships and you have a bad year, there's so many ups and downs that you really have to take care of yourself. This past year I've just realized you have to have a focus on maybe some other things, hobbies or things that you love, just to get out of your own way a little bit. I've been doing that. It's been helpful. Even though your focus is on your job 110%, you still need a break once in a while. When you have a break that maybe just gets your mind off the stuff you can't control, it's been nice.
Morgan: No, it's true because I think it's easy, especially with being a student athlete to not think beyond your sport. Your sport becomes your life because it is, it's like a full-time job. I think that's awesome that you're saying there's so much to do other than sports too. I think that's awesome.
Jaime White: We try to help our kids see that too and make sure that they're taking appropriate breaks and that they are... For example right now we're waiting to see what we're doing in the post-season. We won't know that for a week. We just gave our kids six days off. You as a student athlete, you know you don't always get six days off between games. We get six days at Christmas, and then when we came back from Christmas this year, we went on like a 15-0 run. We thought, well, let's do it right now, and see if we can come back fresh and ready to make another run in the post-season.
Morgan: Wow. Seriously you're doing great things as a coach and I'm excited for your team and to see where things go. Seriously thank you so much for letting us get a glimpse into your team, and how you coach and how your team's doing. It's been awesome.
Jaime White: Thank you. Thanks for having me I appreciate it. I can talk till the cows come home so no problem.
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Theme Song - I’ll Just Be Me by Gravity Castle