Assistant women’s basketball coach Mark Youngs is a man who wears his title as a passion and sees it as something that constantly surrounds his life.
Papers with plays and scouting reports fill his desk along with a few cones and basketballs on the side. He has a seat filled with gym shoes that you need to throw on the floor just to find a place to sit.
Basketball is something Youngs had a love for from the beginning. “I grew up having a really nice court in my backyard. I watched highlight films of basketball players all the time and I would always go outside and try to do their moves,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Assistant Sports Information Director Andrew Sauer
Youngs started playing competitively in fifth grade and continued all the way through college. The childhood dream of playing in the NBA didn’t work out, but he would still go on to be involved with basketball at its highest level.
Youngs has coached and trained some of the best men and women in the world, like Skylar Diggins and two-time NBA champion Draymond Green.
“My hands would be bruised from catching (Green’s) passes. He passed so hard that I had to stop and buy water bottles to hold in each hand as I drove home because my hands hurt so bad,” Youngs said.
The work ethic in Draymond Green was something that Youngs truly admired about him. When it comes to players like Green, Youngs said, “They hate resting. They hate any down time. I need to have cones set-up at another basket before the drill before that even started.”
Along with training, Youngs has had quite the journey with coaching before taking the assistant coaching job at North Central.
He had some high school experience, but his biggest accomplishment was his nine-year tenure at Davenport University. He built the program from the ground up and eventually lead them to the NAIA national championship game.
“We didn’t have a gym. We practiced at a YMCA where the tops of the keys touched,” Youngs said as he described the practices he had when he first arrived. “We only bought dark uniforms and we played 26 games on the road.”
Things continued to improve for the team and success came.
“We won our first conference championship in a middle school,” Youngs said. “It’s not always about the bells and whistles about how pretty your gym is. Eventually, we got scholarship money and it became cool to go there (Davenport University).”
Youngs also has similar plans for North Central.
“I think we can be in an NCAA tournament a year from now and be in the final four the following year,” he said. “We want to build a program with the right kids with the right character, and represent what we stand for as coaches when they’re not around us.”
For Mark Youngs, basketball has become a gateway for incredible experiences and an opportunity to mold the youth into not only better players, but better and stronger people.
