“Once you ascend to those levels, staying there is hard.”
Kia Damon-Olson, the head coach of women’s basketball at Lafayette College, 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 shares her experiences coaching at multiple universities which ultimately led her to Lafayette, her favorite travel experiences, and what’s in store for her and her team!
In this episode, we discuss:
How this past season went for the Lafayette College Women's Basketball team (0:21)
How Coach Damon-Olson got into coaching (1:38)
Kia’s favorite travel experience (6:25)
One thing that no one knows about Kia (7:42)
Kia’s advice to athletes wanting to play in college (8:47)
Kia’s next adventure (10:54)
2019-2020 Season Recap of Lafayette College Women’s Basketball Team
Shianne: I'm excited to dive in about everything and kind of talk about your season and how it's going as you're wrapping it up. You're in almost at the end of your third season. Can you kind of tell us about the highs and lows of your season so far?
Kia: I would say obviously the highs of the season, are what I would characterize as when you're starting to see some fresh and you have this zest of energy from the new players coming in, the returning players refreshed, improved and then you get into the crux of your scrimmages and games and things are kind of treading in a good direction. I would say that those are the highs and maybe getting the team to a point where I think we had a five game win streak in conference and we beat our rival, which is Lehigh University. And they're about 25 minutes from our campus. And I want to say it had been, I don't know, four or five years since we'd beat them. That was a pretty good moment.
And the lows, I would kind of backtrack and say, we've had a season where sometimes you come into practice and the trainers tell you, well, this person's out and this person's out. And so you're constantly having to adjust to players in and out for short periods of time and then in and out for the length of the season.
Shianne: Yeah. Injuries are hard on a season for sure. How did you get into the coaching of basketball?
Kia: Well, it's interesting. I knew when I was in high school that I wanted to be a college basketball coach. I loved basketball. I had a very good high school coach. Her name is Breezy Bishop at Western High School. And I just, I loved the way she mentored us as young girls and got us to believe that really we could do anything with the right preparation and the right hard work and dedication. And I just loved the role that she played in my life in particular, getting me to believe more in myself than I did originally. It was really her belief that carried it for a while. And then I started to see the fruits of the labor. And then that started to become more of my personal belief. But from that moment on, I knew what I wanted to do. And it just about taking the necessary steps to put myself in those, the positions to do it.
How Kia Damon-Olson’s Got Her Start in Coaching
Shianne: Yeah. That's awesome. You kind of always grew up knowing you wanted to be a coach. Can you kind of tell us about your journey of how you became the coach?
Kia: Once I graduated from Millersville, I had at the time it was called a restricted earnings position and that was the equivalent of what people now know today as the go-to brand school. They would just give you the money and you would be a coach in training, so to speak. I did that for two years at Wisconsin Green Bay. And that was an awesome opportunity because it was an established program with an established coach and that had a boatload of success. Not only did I get to travel a lot of the East Coast, but I got a chance to kind of sit at the feet of a pretty accomplished coach and just kind of see how they went about doing things, which was different than my high school experience or my collegiate experience.
From there, I was able to get a full time assistant coaching position at Fairleigh Dickinson University in northern New Jersey. And that was baptismal by fire in the sense that, you don't really get a manual for coaching. It's you learn on the job. And that was a position where you do a little bit of everything. There were no director of basketball operations. There were no video coordinators. The assistant coaches did everything and it was a great learning experience for me because it exposed me to all the different aspects of being a coach. The behind the scenes things that need to get done from an organizational standpoint. Planning for not only for the program in the season, but also long term. From there, I went on to be an assistant coach at UMass Amherst and stepped into a different type of situation as an assistant coach with an established head coach, but new at that institution and just kind of taking over a little troubled situation where there were some with the previous staff, some lawsuits and things of that nature.
Then you started to see a little bit more of the turmoil that can reside in programs when there are coaching changes, when there are internal and external adversity. Going through the process of working through that for five years, then I went on to be an assistant coach at Penn State for nine years. And that was really cool because I got to work with a first-time head coach and then also take a program from the bottom of a conference, push it all the way up to conference champions for multiple years. And then the one part of coaching that no one tells you about is once you ascend to those levels, staying there is hard and just kind of got to experience what that is like on a day to day basis.
And from there, I'd spent a year at the University of Cincinnati helping to move that program forward as well. It was a program at the time that hadn't had a winning season in a number of years and being there for one year and helping to usher in a winning season was really fun with one of my good friends. And then the opportunity at Lafayette sprang open and through some conversations with search firms and the administration I became the coach. That's the long, 20 plus year journey to the position.
Coach Kia Damon-Olson’s Favorite Travel Experiences
Shianne: That's awesome. I always love to hear how coaches become coaches and their journey because everybody has a different path. I'd love to kind of talk more about your favorite travel experience because we are a travel company, I love to hear how travel plays a role as a coach, but also as a player or any of your personal experiences you want to share with us.
Kia: Yeah. I would say obviously in the coaching world, in college athletics, you travel quite a bit. I would say my favorite travel experience would have been going out to Hawaii. You hear a ton about Hawaii and how beautiful it is and any description that you've heard does not do it justice at all. Just number one, the getting there was long. I wasn't quite prepared for how long that trip is, particularly from the Midwest and the way we broke up the trip was, I want to say, we flew from Wisconsin to Seattle and stayed overnight and then continued from Seattle over to Honolulu. But that was just a pretty cool experience. And that wasn't during the time where you could have the personal movies and all that kind of stuff on the airplane. You had to be creative with your Discman and all that stuff to kind of kill the time and games that you'd come up with to play with the kids and the other coaches and the part of your party. No, going into Hawaii kind of ranks up there.
A Lesser-Known Fact About Coach Kia Damon-Olson
Shianne: I love Hawaii. I've only been there one time, but it was so fun. I totally agree with you. And what is one thing that no one knows about you that you could share with us?
Kia: I was thinking about that question because you prefaced it and told me about it on the front end, but I don't know if there's really anything that no one knows about me. I do have a secret hobby of when the weather is nice and I picked this up when I was in Amherst and Massachusetts, kayaking.
Shianne: Oh fun.
Kia: I'm not really, I'm not the adventurous kayaker that'll get in the rough waters and things like that. I like it nice and calm and cool so I can just paddle or just float and just kind of go wherever I want to go. But for a city girl to be into kayaking, that's a little different.
Shianne: Where do you like to go kayaking at?
Kia: Well, I don't necessarily have a set place. It's just more so if I'm on vacation and it's something that they offer and I check out the surroundings just to make sure it's kind of that calm setting that I'm looking for. Then I'll hop in and do it.
Coach Kia Damon-Olson’s Advice to Future Athletes
Shianne: That's awesome. That's super fun. If you're an athlete wanting to play for a university, what would your advice be to them?
Kia: Well, that's a very loaded question. There's tons of advice. Number one, I would just say, let's just assume number one, we're talking about high school-aged prospect. I would just say that it's incredibly important to do two things. One, really fine-tune and hone your offensive and defensive skills because this is true in life as it is in sports, but the more skills and things you have that are strengths, the more likelihood you're going to be on the floor and competing in the real serious moments of the game.
And the other piece of advice I would offer is more team-oriented. And it's just, I feel like today kids have such a specialist mentality in terms of I play X position and I only do this thing. I would say when it comes to the team that having almost a European type game in the sense that you can play a ton of positions and you can defend several positions. I think that's the advice I would give to kids and not be so locked into one particular system that you can play in. But if you truly understand the game, then you can put your game in any system and just to be open and to play for different types of coaches who do different types of things so that when you go to college, it's not such a rude awakening if you've only been exposed to one thing.
Coach Kia Damon-Olson’s Next Adventure
Shianne: Yeah, I think that's great advice because you just never know when you're going to have to step into a different role. Like you said, you have injuries that come up or different players that have different positions so it's always just good to have, I guess, many skills that you can call on and just be like, oh I'm going to play this position. I like that. What's your next adventure? What's coming up next? I know you guys have a big game tonight.
Kia: Well, I'm a little shortsighted in the sense that my next adventure is figuring out how we're going to beat an opponent we haven't conquered yet this season. I got to have, not only do I have to have an answer for that, but my team have to have an answer for that in the next four hours. But beyond that, I have not given much thought to any type of adventure other than living to fight another day.
Shianne: What advice are you giving your team tonight as you're going into this big game where, like you just said you haven't conquered them before?
Kia: Well, the great thing about it is we haven't played our best basketball either. There are lots of learning lessons that we could take from the previous two match ups where we made the mistakes. It wasn't necessarily the other team and then they capitalized on them. Just shoring up some of the more mental mistakes that we made in our execution, or for us, sometimes it's just staying out of foul trouble with some of your key players and just things like that, which is a controllable. But other than that, I'm just going to talk to the team about really doing the things that we've done thus far that's helped us have a successful season. And the final piece of advice that I'll tell them is just to have fun. Just go out there and play as hard as they can. Have fun. Enjoy the moment. I always talk to them when we go on the road, we have an opportunity to convert some fans so let's give them a great show.
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Podcast made in partnership with Acanela Expeditions
Theme Song - I’ll Just Be Me by Gravity Castle