I graduated with the Trinity Men’s Basketball class of ’09, and I’m already having trouble believing it’s been four years since I was grinding through class and practice, day after day, with my teammates and friends. Anyone who has played team sports understands the bond that is created between teammates. It’s a palpable feeling in the huddle when things are rough, and it feels as though you’re telepathic with your teammates when things are clicking. You learn a lot about each one of your teammates after you’ve just ran your 4th 17 (if you don’t know what a 17 is, let’s just say it involves a lot of running). I’m not the first person to realize that it’s easy to become either best friends or worst enemies with your teammates. At Trinity, you almost always see the group become the closest of friends, which is something us student-athletes take with us for the rest of our lives.
The unfortunate reality of the friendships made in sports is that they often fade after the individuals are done playing. Everyone kind of goes their separate ways. I just recently was able to get together with the other members of my graduating class, which is no easy task since there are six of us and we currently reside in 6 different locations from Austin to Afghanistan. Actually, and quite amazingly, I see each of those other five guys a few times a year. We all stay in touch and try to plan trips to see each other whenever we can. It’s not just us, I hear stories of other Trinity hoops classes doing the same thing, and I frequently see alums from the other classes. I recently spoke with a former Trinity football player who was fascinated by how close of friends our team was a full four years after graduating.
What makes Trinity basketball such a unique situation? Much of it is passed on from generation to generation. I remember being shocked when I got onto to campus as a freshman and all of the seniors asked me what I was doing after one of our first team workouts. I assumed that the seniors thought we were annoying wanted to be left alone by the freshman, but they actually invited us to be a part of their social group. The fellow first-years and I hung out at the senior basketball guys’ house all the time, and it even gave us a little street cred on campus; you can’t put a price on that!
This attitude also starts at the top with Coach Cunningham and his staff. They preach a policy that is simple: buy in to the team concepts, or you won’t play. I’ll use my situation as an example. I was in a career-long position battle with fellow shooting guard Patrick Robinson. We pretty much guarded each other every day in practice for four years, and we knew exactly how to drive each other crazy. We constantly battled for minutes on game day. If Pat played well, I played less. If I played well, Pat played less. Pat and I have joked that we should have hated each other during our college days. However, we always cheered each other on and worked together to get better. Had Pat and I been resentful towards each other, it would have been detrimental to the team, and I’m sure Coach Cunningham would not have put up with it. Pat is one of my best friends today, and we see each other on a consistent basis. I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that we still guard each other when we play basketball together.
Since graduating from Trinity, I’ve lived in Florida, Virginia Beach, and currently live in New York City. My career arc since graduating is a nice exhibition of the value of a Trinity degree. Immediately after graduation, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Florida for mathematical statistics. There were very few American students in the program and most of those came from top tier schools. Needless to say, they must have had a lot of respect for Trinity to accept my application. Either that or I just got lucky and they made a mistake. Who knows, but I’m thankful regardless.
After getting a master’s degree from Florida, I worked for a consulting firm for a year as a statistical analyst. The problem was, I still had that competitive itch that only sports seemed to satisfy. At Trinity, we cared about winning so much, and since most of us knew we would pursue other careers after our college basketball days were over, everyone genuinely seemed to care about winning more than their own personal situation. That sounds cliché and everyone says that, but I really believe our team felt that way about one another, especially the six guys in my class. I quickly found out that this attitude is not near as common in corporate America, and I figured I needed a change. Fittingly, there has been somewhat of a statistical revolution in the sports world in the last decade. Professional sports franchises have figured out that the analytical methods used by the likes of Google and Amazon could be applied to sports in creative ways. I saw this as an opportunity to get into the sports industry.
I decided to do some research and write a paper that I could submit to a sports conference. I had no idea where that would go, but I thought it was worth a shot. The paper involved some pretty simple analysis: I grouped NBA players together based on their individual statistics, then I tried to determine which types of players, and which combinations of player types, were most often found on winning teams. My paper was accepted into the conference and published on the conference website. Representatives from the NBA saw the paper, apparently liked it, and reached out to offer me a job. Basically, I got lucky again. If you’re reading this and wondering how my questionable writing got recognized, that’s a fair thought. I’m sure the NBA was more impressed by my thought process and less by my poetic prose. Perhaps having a degree from Trinity gave me a boost once again.
Nevertheless, I’ve been working in the NBA league office for the last year doing data analysis and analytics for basketball/referee operations. There is a new technology that the NBA is implementing this season that tracks every movement a player makes on the court, and I will be analyzing much of that data. So, although it wasn’t as amazing or direct as it sounds, but I went from Trinity to the NBA.
Dwight Lutz '09
