He was a talented basketball player, and his dad was a prominent coach.

So, when Kip Ioane was in high school and garnering buzz for his play in Montana, a local TV reporter naturally asked him if he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“No, teachers and coaches don’t get paid enough,” Ioane said at the time.

“I was 17 and didn’t know any better and was chasing man-box ideas, specifically tying my career value directly to my salary level,” he added in retrospect.

But after a successful playing career at Willamette University in Oregon, Ioane caught the coaching bug working a camp one summer. He eventually became an assistant at his alma mater, then took over as head coach in 2009.

Four years into his tenure, he founded "Teams of Men" to help coaches further develop their athletes as people and to increase their comfort level with having difficult conversations.

He recently penned the book “Mirror Training,” aimed at helping coaches foster reflection and better grow their male athletes.

The Daily Coach spoke to Ioane about critical coaching advice he received early in his career, why founding “TeamsOfMen” was so important to him, and how leaders can get more comfortable discussing difficult topics.

This interview has been edited and condensed and clarity. It was conducted as part of a sponsored promotion for his book, “Mirror Training.”

Kip, thank you for doing this. Tell us about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

I think growing up in Montana was a perfect mix of the best the world has to offer with exposure to the worst. My dad is an emigrant. He left American-Samoa when he was 10 or 11 for Los Angeles and got recruited to play basketball in Billings, Mont. They didn’t show him the snow. He was a brown-skinned American-Samoan who fell in love with a barrel-racing cowgirl, my mom, who went to high school in Billings.

My dad was an all-American player, and then he was everyone’s coach. Everyone associated me, especially as the oldest, as his kid. Montana is a close-knit community, but it also has its challenges—there's a lack of diversity, and you encounter racist undertones. Culturally, it can feel behind the times.

I think for my brother and me both, we grew up with a community of support, but also, you have to activate that community because you are exposed to the underbelly of life. That balance led us to have some experiences that allowed us as coaches — myself in basketball, my brother in football — to relate to players in ways that an average person from Montana probably couldn’t.

What’d you learn in your early years in coaching that you still apply?

I finished playing and was going to get my Master’s degree in teaching. My college coach asked me to stay on as a graduate assistant. He had an NAIA national championship, 300-plus wins, Hall of Fame. He knew what the hell he was doing.

I remember day one, I was all excited. He said, “I want you to take notes not just on what you like. I want you to write down all of the things you can’t stand. You’re not here to turn into me. You’re here to find yourself as a coach.”

That really freed me from day one to chase curiosity and be hellbent on finding the why behind what we’re doing. I give him a lot of credit for that because it shaped who I am. I’ve never wanted to do things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done. It’s antithetical to what I believe in. Seek the why.

When did the idea to launch TeamsOfMen come to you?

It was three years into my head coaching career. When I was recruiting early on, I could speak the cliches in living rooms or on phone calls with moms and dads. “I’m going to send you the best version of your son back." But I wasn’t living that. I was doing a lot of scoreboard curriculum. If we won, I’d tell them to be humble. If we lost, I’d tell them to stay tenacious and be resilient.

In the spring of my third year as head coach, there was an unfortunate series of gender-violence incidents on our campus. People were calling me. Parents of current players, parents of recruits, alumni, boosters. “What the heck is going on?” A couple of fraternities on campus got labeled as the most dangerous fraternities in the country by a magazine because of sexist and misogynistic Facebook postings. This led me to reflect deeply on the impact of sports programs and the responsibility coaches have beyond the court. It was a pivotal moment that motivated me to build TeamsOfMen, focusing on proactive, character-driven coaching.

When people called me, all I could tell them was, “Well, it’s not my guys," because factually, it wasn’t, but I was having a hard time sleeping at night because I knew the coaches whose players had done these things, and I thought they were great coaches.

I walked across campus one day to the Title IX advocate and said, “I don’t want my guys to do this, but I don’t know what else to do besides make a rule. And I know the other coaches had rules, but those didn’t do anything.”

She really put me on a path toward curiosity and engaging with experts, people who had done the work, books, reading, speeches and building out what’s now a life’s passion of mine.

You discuss a lot of taboo subjects that a lot of coaches don’t necessarily want to address. When did you get comfortable having those conversations?

I had to embrace vulnerability as a connection point, putting myself up there where I did feel awkward, I did feel strange. I did feel like, should I be doing this? It was embracing what we tell our players all the time: Get over yourself.

I also had to remember I don’t always have the answers. I don’t always have to be perfect. I don’t have to avoid any space where my guys see me as looking “less than.” I’m going to embrace going up there and share, “Guys, I don’t know all of this. I know where I want to be. I know where I want you to be, but I don’t know all of it. I’m going to be with you in this process. We’re going to talk about things and dive into things where I’ve messed up in my thinking.”

“Let me talk to you about how I messed up as a dad today. Let me talk to you about how I don’t think I was the best husband or partner today. But I’m going to be with you in this and not just lecture you.”

I think it’s reps. The more you do it, the more you anticipate the questions the audience will have and feel better about some answers. The more I got into it, the more I recognize a lot of the talks are less about the horrific choice outcomes and how do we be proactive before?

I think a lot of coaches want to be proactive and have these difficult discussions, but they don’t want to say the wrong thing or offend anyone. What would you say to a coach who’s a little reluctant?

I honor that and understand that angst and that worry. But also, if you think about that, your players have that whenever you roll out some new gameplan. “I’m not totally sure what we’re doing. I don’t want to mess up.” That freeze or lack of action or decision in the moment gets you to jump their rear end about playing free.

I think we have to live to our own teaching. I’m most likely going to say something that here, in this space, someone is going to have a problem with. But I’ve got to trust myself and trust that I will be able to navigate that as a professional. I’m going to show my guys, “Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I do need to get better with how I phrase that or how I prepare for that or my knowledge level on that.”

I think it’s a good think if you’re a college or high school coach to walk your butt across campus to the experts who do know this terminology. Often times, these are women who have toiled in anonymity and are underpaid and underfunded to do the work. Your coming over there is a platform to activate their expertise.

You speak about the need to cultivate emotional resilience in players. How does a coach do that?

I believe in the power of coaches, not just having been raised by one but being one for so long. We’ve got to start with ourselves and our actual level of emotional literacy first. So much of what we do we think is when our words are activated, but it’s actually what we model with our behavior choices.

If my actions don’t match with my words, they’re not listening to my words anyway. What’s my ability to say and be comfortable naming emotions in general. What’s my ability to say and be comfortable naming emotions in general? Just saying “sad,” “down,” “stressed,” “worried,” “disappointed.” What’s my own emotional agility?

We tell our guys, “When you walk on the field… leave your stuff at the door.”  But we don’t do that. We bring our trauma with us to the practice field and often bleed out in the form of yelling and screaming and cussing at our guys to soothe ourselves. But it’s diving into toolkits to not erase or stifle emotion, but how do I actually flow with it? Saying, “I am experiencing anger” or “I am experiencing doubt,” not “I’m doubtful or “I’m angry.”

The emotion is here with me. I know what it tends to do. But I think by separating those, you take some power back in that situation.

You just wrote “Mirror Training.” What do you most want readers to take from your book?

For it to catch fire, I couldn’t just selfishly hold it as, ‘This thing is mine. Kip does it in his program.” I hope when they do read it, they can find a reigniting of this is why I jumped into this profession in the first place.

At some point, you felt in your soul, “Maybe what I’m supposed to do is help young people through this game get better at a lot of things and embrace positivity and enjoyment.”

People told me a lot through the years, ‘You did TeamsOfMen’ and ‘Mirror Training.’ Do you think that’s cost you victories?” In reality, doing this work allowed me to endure losses and keep my focus on developing well-rounded, emotionally-fluent athletes for over a decade-and-a-half. It’s about building men who thrive both on and off the court.

None of this is, “We’re going to build these better men and tell them ‘Let’s lose the game.’” No, we’re going to build men more capable of getting through the strife of competition.

Hopefully, reading the book will reignite people’s ideas that it’s possible to coach that way — and you can chase competitive greatness with this.

Q&A Resources

Kip Ioane ― Website | Book: Mirror Training | LinkedIn | X | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

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