Alaura Sharp, the head coach of women’s basketball at Presbyterian 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 the highs and lows of the past season, how she started coaching, advice for prospective college athletes, and more!

In this episode, we discuss:

• How this past season went for Presbyterian College Women’s Basketball team (0:20)

• How Coach Sharp got into coaching (4:00)

• Alaura’s favorite travel experience (6:33)

• One thing that no one knows about Alaura (11:52)

• Alaura’s advice to athletes wanting to play in college (13:58)

• Alaura’s next adventure (17:37)

Highs and Lows Of The Past Season For Presbyterian College Women’s Basketball Team

Morgan: Hi guys. Welcome back. It's Morgan. Today I'm sitting down with Coach Alaura. Thanks so much for joining us.

Alaura: Thanks for having me Morgan.

Morgan: We're so excited to have you and get to know you better. So, just to get going. One of the first questions I wanted to ask you is can you tell us about the highs and lows of your current season?

Alaura: Yeah, so highs and lows of current season there's been quite a few of them. Our staff this is our second season here so we're in the building stages of our program which honestly this is a dream come true for me. I wanted to be a division one head coach since I got out of college and I've spent my career really working hard to get an opportunity like this. And so going into year two, honestly I didn't really know what the expectations would be. In my first season we had a lot of highs and lows. We finished our first season playing really well at the end but we had seven new players this year, seven returners. And so, there was so much new for everybody as far as learning each other, our coaching staff, learning our new players, our new players learning us and their teammates. And so, there was a whole lot of building in our second year.

And I would say a low and I hate to even call it a low but just a learning experience probably hit in about end of November. And we had started our season off really, really strong and then we hit a patch of injuries and just went through some things as a team that were difficult and it made us better in the end and we were stronger at the end of the season for it but definitely some growing pains with our team chemistry and like I said learning each other.

I would say the high of the season was the very end of the season. What was really fun was our senior night both of our seniors had career nights for themselves and scoring and it was just a really fun environment. And Riley Himm and Casey Hall are two seniors and they've dedicated four years to this program and they're awesome people. Casey's going to go on and be a school teacher and Riley Himm was actually accepted into law school so she's going to go on to law school. So, just super swell people.

And I'll never forget the moment when they subbed out of the game and we won by 36 points. A team that had beat us earlier in the season we just really played well against them at home. And so, we got to sub each one out of the game one at a time and just the crowd went crazy. I hugged them and it was just this awesome moment that I'll never forget. And I don't think anybody that was at that game or any of our players on our team will ever forget that moment because we played so well, we honored our seniors, who the rest of our team loves and will always remember. And so, that was probably the high of our season was just that moment in time was awesome.

Morgan: I love that. I love seeing how you can tell that your team worked so hard and in the end it paid off. Those efforts shine through.

Alaura: There's no doubt about it. And to me that's the only way our program can grow is through the effort and the dedication of our coaching staff and our team and our program. I mean, we have so many things working for us but we also have things working against us. We're the smallest division one in the country. We are located in a really small town. We're just this small school and we're trying to make big things happen. Our program's never been to the NCAA tournament and so that's a vision that I have for our program and everybody that we sign to play here and to come here we ask them to be bought into the vision of let's leave a legacy. Let's do something here in this program that's never been done before. And so, that's our mission and it takes a whole lot of effort to get that done. So, we're excited about the future for sure.

Alaura Sharp’s Start In Coaching

Morgan: I love hearing about how teams can overcome adversity and go places so thank you so much for sharing that and giving us an insight into your team. So, how did you get to be a coach?

Alaura: Well, I finished playing college basketball and I honestly went to college to be an athletic director. So I wanted to be on the administrative side of things and I applied for all these internships and got nothing. So, I was having a hard time figuring out what the heck do you do. And my former college coach actually had gotten a job at a school in Colorado called Adams State College. And you know you're getting old when they've changed the name of the school, now it's Adams State University. And he got a job out there and called me over to his house one day and asked me if I'd be interested in going with him to coach and I said, "Sure, I'd love to." I didn't know the salary. I never had seen the school, never heard this school, had been to Colorado one time. But I took the job site unseen, moved from Minnesota to Colorado, packed my stuff up in my little car and drove out there and got my coaching start as an assistant coach.

I made 3000 bucks and I was literally a volunteer assistant and I waited tables on the side to pay my bills. I line judged home volleyball games to help pay my bills. I ran the football concession stand. So, I basically hustled, I had all these little side jobs. But it was honestly the best decision that I could have ever made because he let me coach. He taught me the game. I didn't have to start as a GA, I didn't have to start as a director of operations, I got to start as a coach and he gave me a ton of responsibility.

I made a million mistakes but I got to grow through those mistakes. And so, I felt really fortunate to be able to do that. And after I worked there for two years I got the opportunity to be the head coach at Lamar Community College in Lamar, Colorado. And that program had just finished our season four in 29. And so I thought, "I have got nothing to lose, everything to gain." And so at 24 I actually got the opportunity to be a head coach there. And yeah, so then that led me to my next opportunity and my career took off from there.

Coach Alaura Sharp’s Most Memorable Travel Experience

Morgan: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I can tell the passion that you have for sports and how you got where you're at. I can tell that your team, a reason why they're successful and working hard is because they're following from the example that they have as a coach. I notice that teams follow the coaches and so you're doing a great job at that. So, what are some of your most memorable travel experiences?

Alaura: Most memorable travel experiences, man I would say there's a lot of them, I would say as a player my most memorable travel experience was my junior year of college. We actually had a really, and I played at Southwest Minnesota State University at a division two school in the NSIEC. And we had the opportunity to go play in Hawaii at a Christmas tournament type of thing and that was awesome. And we played the number one team in the country at the time. And we had set the school record for wins or best start in school history. It was just a really fun season and a really fun trip and playing in Hawaii was awesome. We made a lot of memories as a team.

But I would say in my coaching career one of my memories would probably be this last just a couple of weeks ago when we went to the conference tournament and we won in the first round. And like I said, we had been playing our best basketball at the end of the season and we won our last regular-season game by a lot and we were headed into the tournament and we knocked off the first team. We went on the road because we had to travel to the higher seed and we knocked off the higher seed and played great. And I felt like there was a lot of energy around our team. And most importantly I felt like our team had some series belief that they could make a run in the tournament and when you're playing in March and postseason that's the battle is what teams want to keep playing. Because you're on spring break so it's easy to want your season to end and you get to go about your way and go on spring break. But I just felt this excitement from our team.

And so, we had a ton of fun on that first road trip and then the virus stuff started coming around and people started shutting down and things started happening. And so, we go on the road to Campbell who was the number one seed in the tournament and we just had played them really close a few weeks before and thought we were playing better and we were excited about the matchup. And we go to our practice that night, everything's good, and then they remove the fans from the game and we're thinking, "Okay whatever, it doesn't matter. We'll play anyway." And then we go to shoot around the next day and about 20, 30 minutes after shoot around they ended up canceling the tournament. And so, an unforgettable moment because you're not really ready to tell your seniors bye yet. You know the end is coming but until it actually happens through a loss or your season ending through that way you're not really ready for it.

And so, we called our team into a room and we told them that it was over and our season had ended and that NCAA basketball was literally shutting down because of the virus. It was a moment that I'll always remember. And because as a coach I'm going to coach forever. I'm going to coach as long as I still can coach. But as a college athlete, you only get four chances to get to the NCAA tournament. And so, for our seniors that was their last chance. And so, it was heartbreaking for them but I think it's created motivation for our team moving forward to have that burning desire of unfinished business in this last season.

So, two different ends of the spectrum but that's the cool thing about college athletics is the amount of travel that you get to do not only with your team but recruiting travels and your podcasts probably isn't long enough for me to tell all the crazy recording stories that [inaudible 00:10:43] missed flights, lost luggage. I recruited, an entire week one time they lost my luggage. And it's one thing when you go on vacation and lose your luggage you can just buy whatever types of clothes but when you're recruiting you have to wear your school. So, for a whole week I wore the same recruiting outfit to the Juco national tournament. And I thought, "I wonder if anyone's noticed that I've literally worn the same outfit every day?"

Morgan: I bet no one noticed. That's awesome though. I feel like there's so many experiences that come with that and that's fun that you get to go on those recruiting trips too. And it's true I think sports, they allow us to be able to experience new things like traveling, having a team. There's so much that comes along with being a part of a team especially being a coach.

Alaura: Right. It's definitely a rewarding experience to be a coach and just having the opportunity to impact young people at such an age where they're so impressionable and you can see the trajectory of their life starting to upward trend for some of them. And that's the best part to me is going through the experiences together and even things coming full circle. I have two former players on my staff that coach with me every day and how rewarding that is because I knew them as players and now I know them as coworkers and being able to build a program with them is pretty cool.

A Lesser-Known Fact About Coach Alaura Sharp

Morgan: It shows that everyone's on a process but we're all just working and trying so I like that. What's one thing that no one knows about you that you can share?

Alaura: Oh man. Okay. I'm going to go all the way back. I have so many teeth stories it not even funny. So when I was in eighth grade I was a cheerleader and I was a gymnast. My first sport before I picked up basketball, because I did basketball and track my first years of college and then just basketball my last two years so track and gymnastics were my first loves as sports. And so, because I had that gymnast background I wanted to at least be a cheerleader for one segment of my life. So, in eighth grade I was a football cheerleader. And so in middle school how it worked is the volleyball teams played first and then the football games after.

So, I played volleyball and after volleyball I was eating my sack lunch that I had brought with me. Well, in my sack lunch, I had a frozen mini Snickers bar and I bit into the Snickers bar and my front tooth literally came out. And not that I had gross nasty teeth, I had hit my teeth in a basketball game and so I had a veneer on the front of my tooth and for whatever reason that veneer popped off. And of course that was the one game that we were the halftime performance. So, I cheered the whole game with no front tooth and then I performed in the halftime performance with no front tooth. So, that's pretty embarrassing. When we performed at halftime I actually stuck the veneer on and held it on with my tongue the best that I could but I couldn't really do that when we cheered throughout the game. So, it was pretty embarrassing and I would assume that a lot of people know that.

Morgan: Wow, well I'm excited for people to listen to this podcast and hear about that.

Alaura: I'm not sure where people go with that question but there you go.

Coach Alaura Sharp’s Advice To Future Athletes

Morgan: Hey, I love that direction. That's so funny. I can just see that in my mind so perfectly. Well, that's awesome. Well, I guess the next question. If you're an athlete wanting to play for a team or a university what would your advice be to them?

Alaura: I would say the number one advice is for someone that wants to play I think is work hard. I mean, have dreams, have goals and work really, really hard and hold yourself accountable. And what I mean by holding yourself accountable is take coaching, take correction and learn from it and grow from it. And don't blame other people, don't point the finger, don't make excuses. Because when opportunities come your way you've got to be mentally and physically ready for those opportunities. And the other thing too I like to tell people is to dream really big.

I think that's really important because I grew up in a really small town on a pig farm in Southeast Kansas and not a lot of people went on and played college athletics for my hometown and it's not really the norm to do that and but I dreamed of doing things. I took the avenue of junior college first and then found my way to a four-year university and I dreamed about playing college basketball. And once I finished and started coaching it was my dream to become a division one head coach. And it's one thing to dream and then you've got to back that up with a lot of hard work and putting your head and heart into whatever you want to do and then just put your head down and work.

And I think too, it's really good to have mentors and good people in your life that give you good advice and listen to those people and lean on those people. And I think too, when people are making their decision of where to go it's important to make an informed decision and to find the school that best fits your future and your current needs as an athlete. That would be the best advice I think I could give.

Morgan: No. And that is awesome advice too especially because I like that you showed that dreams can happen with hard work which I feel like that's a lot of people can view this like college sports is not attainable but it's hard work. And anything you want to pursue you can do that with hard work so I love that advice.

Alaura: Right. And I think even for me, I didn't play division one basketball and so the reality of being a division one head coach is difficult because I had no connection. I didn't know athletic directors or anybody like that. But, it's the relationships that you make along the way. The reason why I'm the head coach here is because of a person I met while I was an assistant coach and he worked for a recruiting software and he came to the University of Southern Mississippi and spent a week on campus transforming us to this new recruiting software.

And I was the liaison and worked with him closely as we built the software for our school. And somehow he knew and had a connection to the athletic director here. And so, when they had a job opening he threw my name out there and I literally had not spoke to him since the day we worked together. And so, it's crazy how relationships and the people that you meet along the way. And you never know what kind of impression that you're leaving on people. And so, I feel fortunate and like I told you before just excited for the future and what we've got going here at Presbyterian.

Morgan: I love that. I love the connections you made and how you were able to be led to being a head coach. It worked out perfect.

Alaura: It did.

Alaura Sharp’s Next Adventure

Morgan: So that's awesome. Well, I guess what's your next adventure?

Alaura: I don't know. I feel like with our program here there's things that we are trying to get done. I talked a little bit about the vision of wanting to get to an NCAA tournament. And the other thing too, is we want to sell out our gym. We don't have a very big gym and so we've worked really hard to engage the community and try to get butts in seats of our games. And the other thing too we have really smart kids on our team and we recruit high academic types of individuals and we want to try to get into the top 25 in team GPA. So we the adventures will hopefully lead us to those visions.

And we literally have a vision box that sits in our locker room that has a wooden apple and it has a giant season ticket and a net that's cut down. And we've created this team vision box and so we want that to become our vision and what we're working towards every day. But as far as adventure there's a lot of adventure that comes with this job and like I said with the shenanigans that you can go through recruiting or traveling or anything that you go through with your team. And so, there's a lot of adventures in this profession.

Morgan: It is so true. It's so true. Has your team gotten to travel at all?

Alaura: Our team has been traveling. We have people from all over on our team. And so, we actually have a player from Portugal on our team. Yeah and so she's in the process of trying to decide, "Should I go home to Portugal? Should I stay? What do I do?" So my goal one day, is she has one more year left, my goal one day is to visit her parents in Portugal because I've never had the opportunity to meet them yet. And, but we've got players from Colorado and California and Texas and Ohio. And so, our roster spreads all over the place. And obviously we traveled to most of those places in recruiting those players. But as far as our team goes, I actually submitted this into my athletic director, we want to take a foreign tour and the next couple of years. So we're actually busy fundraising for that. Not really sure where exactly we want to go yet. We are thinking a European tour would be great. And so, we're hoping to do that in the next two years.

Morgan: I love that. I love that. That's why I love sports because you get awesome opportunities like this.

Alaura: I think that our team deserves an experience like that and that's the thing in college athletics now and we want to be a part of that too.

Morgan: Well, I'm excited for your team.

Alaura: Thank you.

Morgan: Yes, I can tell you guys are doing great things and thank you so much for letting us get a glimpse into your team and it was good getting to know you and thanks so much for joining us on our podcast 35,000 Feet.

Alaura: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Presbyterian College Women’s Basketball

• Presbyterian College Team Twitter

• Coach Alaura Sharp Twitter

Podcast made in partnership with Acanela Expeditions

Theme Song - I’ll Just Be Me by Gravity Castle