“I played so long I just pushed it off,” he said. “To try and be a high level player it took so much time from my schedule that I didn’t have time for coaching.”
It was at St. Margaret’s where Kiraly said “I caught the coaching bug.”
“My wife said, ‘You know, you have to help them out a little bit,’” Kiraly said, recalling Kristian’s freshman season. “Let’s see if we can help them have a less than perfectly abysmal season, and so that’s what got me into coaching and I loved it. I loved coaching our boys and that age group and then through a series of somewhat fortunate, somewhat accidental and somewhat planned circumstances I ended up being an assistant coach for these USA women.”
He was at Hugh McCutcheon’s side in London and then took over the head coach position when McCutcheon resigned after the 2012 Games
“I really enjoyed that experience,” Kiraly said. “Huge amounts of learning as the assistant coach under Hugh and this group. A really special group. I really liked working with this group of incredibly intelligent, powerful, talented, hard-working, dedicated women. And so that was an easy decision for me to make once Hugh stepped down.
“First and foremost I’m a teacher and I’m trying to facilitate the highest level team performance possible, but I guess key word there is team. Because we are a team so I’m trying to be a servant leader. Wherever we can based on my experience as a player we’ve tried to I guess hand over a lot of the driving and the guiding we rely on our players who are on the court, in the game, to have a lot of autonomy to take care of that. That’s the way a team performs best.”
But Kiraly the coach, the teacher, is also a work in progress. Many great players failed as coaches because they were unwilling to veer from their long-held beliefs on how their game should be played. Kiraly the teacher is also a student, ever curious.
“One of the biggest things Karchs bring to us as our head coach is that he has been in our shoes,” Dietzen said. “He’s dealt with those pressures, he’s played on the stage that we’re competing on and he’s able to relate that to us through stories, through just knowing what his past has been as a player. Not many great players have become great coaches but Karch is certainly on his way and the number one reason he is, is that he’s such a great learner.”
So has he learned enough to lead Team USA to the ever-elusive Olympic gold medal?
“I don’t know if it’s going to take a hundred years or less than a month for USA women to stand on the top of the podium, but that’s what we’re aspiring to do,” he said. “The more we think about that event the less chance is that it will happen. What we have to think about right now is our training today and how we get better this afternoon at 5 o’clock and then our scouting session tomorrow. We’re a lot about process.”